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Japanese No. The Bible never mentions clowns, and none of the major English translations uses the word “clown.” It speaks often of fools instead, mostly as a warning. Yet Paul called himself and the other apostles “fools for Christ’s sake” (1 Corinthians 4:10), and the Orthodox Church later gave his phrase to its holy fools.
Scripture warns us against becoming fools, and then it turns the word around. Paul tells the proud Corinthians that the apostles have become “a spectacle to the world,” stared at and made sport of, because “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). To be laughed at for Christ is part of following him.
Does the word “clown” appear in any Bible?
Only in a paraphrase. The word does not occur in the King James Version, the New International Version, the English Standard Version or other major translations. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase The Message uses the word twice. Saul admits to David, “I’ve acted the fool—a moral dunce, a real clown” (1 Samuel 26:21), where the English Standard Version has “I have acted foolishly, and have made a great mistake.” In Psalm 69:11 the psalmist says, “When I put on a sad face, They treated me like a clown,” where the English Standard Version has “I became a byword to them.”
Because clowns are not in the Bible, Scripture gives them no symbolic or spiritual meaning. The clown is also much younger than the Bible: the English word, first recorded around 1560, meant a rustic or peasant; it came to mean a professional fool soon after 1600, from the fool characters of Elizabethan plays such as Shakespeare’s. The whiteface makeup of the modern Western clown was created by the English pantomime performer Joseph Grimaldi in the early 1800s.
What does the Bible say about fools?
The Bible’s fools are not entertainers. The Old Testament uses several Hebrew words for them, and the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon defines the commonest, kesil, as “stupid fellow, dullard, fool”; it appears 70 times, almost always in the Wisdom books. Another word, ewil, means a fool who is “always morally bad,” one “who despises wisdom & discipline,” as in Proverbs 1:7: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” A third, nabal, describes someone with “no perception of ethical and religious claims.” It is the word in Psalm 14:1, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” and it is the name of Abigail’s first husband: “Nabal is his name, and folly is with him” (1 Samuel 25:25).
The fool’s joking and laughter are part of the warning. “Doing wrong is like a joke to a fool,” says Proverbs 10:23. The laughter of fools is like “the crackling of thorns under a pot” (Ecclesiastes 7:6). In the New Testament, Ephesians 5:4 rules out “crude joking” (the King James Version has “jesting”). The Greek word there, eutrapelia, can mean “pleasantry, humor,” but Thayer’s Greek lexicon says that in Ephesians 5:4 it has the bad sense of “scurrility, ribaldry, low jesting.”
Did anyone in the Bible play the fool?
A few people acted in ways onlookers found foolish or shameful, though never to entertain. David, afraid of the king of Gath, “pretended to be insane in their hands and made marks on the doors of the gate and let his spittle run down his beard” (1 Samuel 21:13). Later he “danced before the Lord with all his might” as the ark was brought into Jerusalem, and when his wife Michal mocked him, he answered, “I will make myself yet more contemptible than this” (2 Samuel 6:22). Some of the prophets carried out strange public acts as signs: Isaiah walked “naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush” (Isaiah 20:3), and Ezekiel lay on his left side for 390 days to bear the punishment of Israel (Ezekiel 4:4–5).
What did Paul mean by “fools for Christ”?
Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ” (1 Corinthians 4:9–10). The Greek word for “spectacle” is theatron, a theater, which Thayer’s lexicon explains here as “a man who is exhibited to be gazed at and made sport of.” Earlier in the letter he had said that “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” and that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 25).
John Chrysostom, in his homilies on 1 Corinthians, read the passage as irony aimed at the proud Corinthians. “A mighty theatre is set,” he said of verse 9, and of verse 10, “this also he spoke in a way to abash them.” Of the foolishness of God he said that Paul was “speaking of a folly and weakness, not real but apparent.”
Who were the holy fools?
Paul’s phrase gave its name to a tradition of “fools for Christ,” known in Greek as salos and in Russian as yurodivy. The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that holy fools “voluntarily take up the guise of insanity in order to conceal their perfection from the world, and thus avoid praise.” The historian Sergey Ivanov, in Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, describes the holy fool as a person who “feigns insanity, pretends to be foolish, or who provokes shock or outrage by his deliberate unruliness.”
Simeon of Emesa, a sixth-century monk, is venerated as one of the first fools for Christ. The best known in Russia is Basil of Moscow, who once rebuked Tsar Ivan the Terrible and died on August 2, 1557; Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow is named for him. Xenia of Saint Petersburg, who died around 1803, is said to have given away her possessions after her husband’s death; she wandered the city’s streets for 45 years, usually in his military uniform.
Was Jesus ever portrayed as a clown?
Not in the Bible, though he was mocked in costume. Before the crucifixion, the Roman soldiers “put a scarlet robe on him,” set a crown of thorns on his head and a reed in his hand, “and kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’” (Matthew 27:28–29).
The image of Christ as a clown is modern. The Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, in The Feast of Fools (1969), included a chapter called “Christ the Harlequin” that presented Jesus as a wise fool. The musical Godspell, which opened off-Broadway on May 17, 1971, cast Jesus and his followers as clowns; its composer, Stephen Schwartz, wrote that the concept “was derived by John-Michael Tebelak from a book by Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, entitled Feast of Fools.” Near the end of the show, before the Last Supper, the cast removes the clown makeup.
The soldiers who dressed Jesus in a scarlet robe meant it as a joke, and their mock greeting, “Hail, King of the Jews!”, was truer than they knew. Paul had the last word on the laughter: “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).
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