Cover -- Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Laughter, the Body and Two Fields of Meaning -- Theories of Laughter -- History of Religions -- Three Cultural Contexts of Religious Laughter -- 1 the Ancient Near East -- Laughter and Trickery -- Creation, Change and Control -- Gods and Human Beings -- Jahweh and the Battle Against Erotic Laughter -- Divine Laughter: Its Channels and Consequences -- 2 Greece -- Cunning Gods/immortal Gods -- Laughing Women -- Between Comedy and Tragedy -- Chaotic Laughter -- 3 Rome -- 'all This Business of Laughter-raising Is Trivial -- Critical Laughter -- On Tour with the Gods -- Animals and Mysteries -- The Divine Man and the Mocking of Christianity -- Farewell to Laughter -- 4 Early Christianity -- Church Fathers and Desert Fathers -- Weeping Virgins -- Did Anyone Laugh? -- The Ludicrous Jahweh and the Laughing Christ -- Gnostic Mythology -- Spiritual Laughter -- 5 Medieval Christianity -- The Feast of Fools -- Deforming the Lord's Supper and Elevating the Ass -- Carnival in Religion -- Corpus Christi -- Embodied Laughter -- From Body to Mind -- 6 Modernity and the Remythologization of Laughter -- Bakhtin and Utopian Laughter -- Postmodern Mythology -- Christ as Clown -- The Laughing Christian -- Jokes of Criticism and Doubt -- Rolling in the Aisles -- 7 Religion of Jokes -- Buddhism Comes Laughing -- The Joking Guru -- A Key Symbol -- Absolute Self/relative World -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.