... I wish to countenance a ... view and suggest that there is, in fact, a significant and important connection between [Lewis] Carrollian nonsense and Christian theology on the grounds that both traverse and undercut everyday limitations upon language and reality. And I want to explore this connection by considering the analogous usage of wordplay and puns.
Biblical puns
It is perhaps surprising to discover that there are a variety of puns present in the Bible, although the vast majority of these only work in the original Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic. One of the few that translates to English comes from the book of Judges (10:4). Here, the writer describes thirty sons who "rode around on thirty burros (ayirim) and lived in thirty boroughs (ayarim)." This type of pun, like those used by [Lewis] Carroll, provokes a comic unity between two unrelated terms.
There are several puns throughout the New Testament, probably the most famous being Christ's declaration to Peter, "You are Peter and on this rock shall I build my church" (Matthew 16:18). The paronomasia is clear in the Greek - Petrus (Peter) and petra (rock) - but interestingly it is also obvious in the Aramaic spoken by Christ (Caphas/kepha). Like the wordplay in Genesis, it seems as though the intention of the pun is to reveal a deeper understanding of Petrus by connecting it to petra.
In a different example, Christ's use of punning, like we have seen in Alice, produces a comic effect. Christ chastises the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, exclaiming, "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!" (Matthew 23:24) The pun is revealed in the Aramaic where the word for gnat is galma and the word for camel is gamla. Robert Stein considers the intention of the pun and observes that Jesus could have used another large animal (such as a horse) to illustrate the same point.
... the provocative word-play of Yom Kippurim (Day of Atonement) and yom kepurim (day like Purim). Stein points out how Hasidism uses a pun "to suggest a secret affinity between the holiest day of the Jewish liturgical calendar and the most hilarious day."
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This is pertinent to the discussions around Philo's works and Logos -
Christ, the Pun of Righteousness
... considering Christ as an embodied pun communicates Christ's divine presence and his human status as it acknowledges the tension between Christ's manhood and his divinity in a single word: Logos.
The profound, solemn and yet essentially nonsensical opening to John's Gospel reads: "In the beginning was the word (logos) and the word was with God and the word was God." Here, like a pun, the notion of logos has a dual meaning, John is communicating that the Logos is both identical and non-identical with God. Furthermore, the lexical choice is significant since it brings together the meaning in Greek philosophy of "reason" with the Jewish concept of "the Word of God" from Genesis 1:1, thus fusing Athens with Jerusalem, and reason with revelation.
John's Gospel continues: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." This seems on the surface to be truly nonsensical wordplay - how can a "word" take on physical property? And yet Christians believe Christ is the physical embodiment of a metaphysical being, and so, like a pun, Christ exemplifies two tensions in one unity.
