ABSTRACT
Jesus was a madman for his family, on one occasion at least. It is one of the great paradoxes of Christian laughter that it led Christians to emphasize the madness not only of Christians but of Christ. The worldly-wise laugh at Christians; human beings laugh at real or perceived madness; what the worldly-wise laugh at in Jesus - not only as he hung on the Cross - is the sheer lunacy they see in him. A learned theologian such as Johannes Viguerius brings that out well in the rather cramped but learned Latin of his Institutions of Natural and Christian Philosophy. The world admires money, power, self-interest, success: Christians, in so far as they turn their back on values and hold them to be at best indifferent, are turning the world upside down and may indeed seem mad. Christ's mother and brethren, he holds, were doing what the law of the occupying Romans required.
