ABSTRACT
Most Renaissance scholars remained comfortably within the traditional conviction that the Bible is true and self-consistent: for them, nothing in the Old Testament, properly understood, can ever contradict anything whatever in the New, properly understood; for them, all Gospels are in complete agreement in every detail. In the original Greek of the Gospels the laughter is implied rather than specified. It was not so much in the New Testament that Christians found thinly veiled references to mocking laughter directed against Jesus during his trial and Crucifixion: it was in the Old. Indeed they found Christ throughout the Old Testament. In the New Testament Jesus was mocked twice during his trial and Crucifixion. In the New Testament, as then read, and as related by Matthew, the first mocking of Jesus took place in the official Roman residence: Then the soldiers of the Governor took Jesus into the Residence and they gathered unto him the entire battalion.
