More Hilarity from Dale Allison—Chris Keith

I’ve recently had reason to pull my copy of Dale Allison’s Resurrecting Jesus off the shelf and read through it.  I earlier shared some hilarity from one of his comments and feel the need now to collect some more truly funny statements (some funnier than others).  Make no mistake—in my opinion, Dale is the greatest living historical Jesus scholar.  His work is stuffed full of primary and secondary sources and he is as erudite as they come.  Furthermore, he is utterly self-conscious about his commitments as a Christian, his doubts as a historian, and the general limits of scholarly argumentation; so, in addition to his ideas, one often gets insight into how he came to them.  It’s refreshing.  But every once in a while, there’s a hilarious comment and I like to imagine (solely for my own entertainment) that he wrote this particular line after a Scotch too many encouraged him to state his opinions in raw sarcasm rather than polished academic-ese.  Comments like these are what make him so much fun to read, and I wish more scholars did it.

On hell:

“What good is a hell if one’s enemies are not in it?” (88)

On being a historian:

“In my defense, I am, as an historian, the victim of my own curiosity.”  (199)

On being a Christian:

“My own Christian tradition is just as full of similar nonsense.”  (221)

On the historical Bigfoot: 

“Certainly, unknown giant, hairy hominids, even if they exist, can scarcely exist in sufficient numbers to account for the numerous sightings of Bigfoot that people all over the world testify to every year.”  (207)

On rabbinic discussions of subterranean tunnels that will transport the righteous to Jerusalem at the resurrection, as well as rabbinic discussions of whether the resurrected will be clothed: 

“One finds it all but impossible to restrain a condescending smile.”  (221)

On the vexing question that cannibalism presented to early Christians who had to decide whose resurrection body the ingested human would belong to, and Athenagoras’s solution that human flesh cannot be digested:

“Is this not one theological opinion that science has indisputably falsified?”  (221)

Not letting Athenagoras off the hook yet:

“One wonders what, were he alive today, old Athenagoras would make of organ donation.”  (221)

On the theory that Jesus’ followers sometimes did not recognize him post-resurrection because the process had aged him:

“The only response to this can be dumbstruck admiration for human ingenuity, even when it is in the cause of nonsense.”  (228n.118)

And perhaps my favorite, concerning debates over eternal fate in light of multiple biblical statements and his own exegetical prowess:

“Although I have not seen this done, one could invoke relativity theory to show how the wicked will both suffer forever and be annihilated.  At the end of days, Captain Almighty God builds a celestial ark, puts the righteous in it, squishes the wick and some tormenting demons into the center of the earth, takes off at near light speed, circumnavigates the universe in five minutes, surpasses light speed for a few seconds (Captain Almighty, aptly named, can do anything), then decelerates and returns to earth.  According to relativity theory, five minutes and a few seconds of time on the ark are an eternity on earth, so when the ark docks, the wicked have spent forever in hell.  What then?  Having fulfilled the prophecies about eternal torment and still needing to fulfill those about destruction, Captain Almighty retrieves a mysterious box from the ark’s hold, carefully opens the lid, removes the holy hand grenade stored from the foundation of the world, utters a few solemn words, pulls the sacred pin, and tosses the thing out the window.  The wicked and the sin-wracked universe disappear, and now Captain Almighty can make all things new.  Alternatively, the good Captain might rather want, upon returning to earth, to save the wicked and so fulfil those Pauline texts that speak of all being saved, thus resolving a different contradiction.  This is all juvenile nonsense; but it is unclear to me how those who take the biblical statements about hell literally could recognize it as nonsense, or how they could fail to laud this brilliant resolution of a hoary exegetical conundrum.”  (91n.118)