The main part of this book is intended as an introduction to important findings in Bible research from the angle of psychology, with the emphasis on the work of the Flemish Bible scholar and psychologist Dr. Somers (parts of chapters 3.6 to 3.10 are little more than a re-wording of his original writings).

Dr. Herman H. Somers, born in Antwerp on 3 October 1921, is an accomplished scholar with acclaimed contributions in many fields of learning.  He studied in Leuven and Rome, and is an M.A. in Philosophy, Ph.D. in Classical Philology (i.e. Latin and Greek), Ph.D. in Theology, and Ph.D. in Psychology.  For forty years he was in the Jesuit order.  He had worked as a schoolteacher, journalist for the Jesuit-led paper De Linie, lecturer in Classical Philology and in Psychology, practising psychopathologist in a mental asylum, before he went on to devote 25 years to scientific research.  He has been active in a variety of research projects, from noise ecology and experimental psychology to pioneering work in computer-aided mathematical text analysis of the Bible.

As he studied the Bible more closely, he developed doubts about its divine character.  In the face of unexpected findings inconvenient to the faith, he refused to renounce scientific standards, and drew his conclusions. In what he describes as a painful process, he grew away from the Christian faith, and left the Jesuit order.  Pro-Jesuit sources claim that it is only because of his unwillingness to comply with his vow of poverty (concretely: renouncing the family property in favour of the order after his mother died) that he has left the order.

In 1986, he published the book: Jezus de Messias: was het Christendom een Vergissing? (�Jesus the Messiah: was Christianity a Mistake?�).¹ Written in Dutch, it is an abridged version of a more technical study in French, which he sent to a number of experts and interested parties, among them the Vatican.  It is a ground-breaking exploration of the psychopathological syndromes accurately described in the New Testament, especially of Jesus� mental condition.

In June 1990, he published a more voluminous sequel, this time also dealing with the Old Testament prophets.  It is called: Toen God sliep, schreef de mens de Bijbel.  De Bilbet belicht door een psycholoog (Dutch: �When God slept, man wrote the Bible.  The Bible explained by a psychologist�).² We hope that it will soon be translated into all major languages, and meanwhile we will offer a summary of the book�s most striking points.

Since then, dr.  Somers has also written a history of the Jesuit order, a psychological study of Mohammed, and a study of the Jehovah�s Witnesses.

A psychological investigation of the Bible starts from the premise that the Bible text is based on real events.  Of course, in the centuries of writing and rewriting, distortions may have crept in (deliberately or by mistake), stories from other traditions may have been added, historical facts embellished, blown up to mythical proportions, or on the contrary, concealed.  But nonetheless, the very tradition of which the text is a part, could not have existed if the founders of that tradition, whose life and times are described in the text, had not existed. The core of the actual texts must be function of real words and deeds by real people.

That this premises, evident though it seems, is not automatically accepted, may be seen from two trends in modern Bible studies.  Firstly, there are people who flatly deny that Jesus ever existed.  According to the Marxist-leaning scholar P. Krijbolder, Jesus was merely a character invented as a literary device in the presentation of a new ideology, and the four Gospels were designed to present four aspects of this ideology.³ In that case, if at all there is scope for psychological analysis, it is of the psychological motives and attitudes of the writers, not of the text�s characters, since these are fictional.

Secondly, there are a lot of theologians who follow the German theologian Bultmann in his Entmythologisierung (demythologization) of the Bible stories.  This means that the stories are not to be taken literally, since they are in fact merely myths.  They are stories made up by the community of believers in order to express their faith.  If we want to read the Bible correctly, we have to relinquish the idea that it describes what really happened, and interpret it as a collection of expressions of the faith, moulded in literary genres developed for that very purpose.  This approach does usually not imply that Jesus� existence is doubted, merely that the miracle stories, the virgin birth, the resurrection are �not to be taken literally�.

The skepsis regarding the existence of Biblical characters may be more reasonable in the case of persons situated in the distant past, like Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, but from Moses onward the stories start looking too much like they are essentially historical.  However, the �demythologizing� skepsis regarding the reality of Jesus� divine vocation and miracles may well be extended to characters like Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, and Solomon: while their life and times may have been real enough, the postulated divine intervention in them is considered, by the demythologizers, as just a figure of speech.

There are reasons for giving in only minimally to the extreme skepsis regarding the basis in reality of the Bible narrative, and for sticking to the essentially historical character of the Bible�s stories.  Firstly, there is a logical contradiction in postulating that the core text of a religious tradition is unhistorical, �mere� narrative.  A religious tradition can only be created by people, in fact by people who have managed to attract the loyalty of a number of followers. If the first Christians made myths in order to �express their faith�, then someone must have generated or inspired this new faith among them.  Saying that Jesus never existed, implies that the Gospel-writers did write about someone who did not exist and did not found their religion, but failed to write about the man who did create their religion and therefore must necessarily have existed.  This is not strictly impossible, but it is also like saying that the Shakespeare to whom the famous plays and poems have been attributed, never existed, but that his plays and poems were written by someone else whose name may also have been Shakespeare.

Secondly, there is quite a bit of external evidence.  There are several references to Jesus in non-Christian sources, just like there are external references to the Hebrew migration from Egypt.  Of course, philologists have taken great pains to find forgeries and interpolations in these texts, but by now this explaining-away has been superseded by a willingness to take sources seriously as long as there are no solid independent grounds for suspecting forgery.  For instance, the historical authenticity of the passage on Jesus in Flavius Josephus� work (late first century AD) is now accepted by many scholars: though it has been tampered with, it was not inserted.

Thirdly, there is a lot of internal evidence in the Bible text.  That is to say, there are passages that could not have been there except as references to reality or (often as polemical replies) to historical outside comments on Jesus.  While theologians of theEntmythologisierung school say that many passages are edifying fables, a number of Gospel passages are not edifying at all.  For instance, Jesus cursing an innocent fig tree when, out of season, it isn�t bearing fruit.  Or Jesus not being able to do miracles in some places, and not being believed by his own townsfolk, even being considered insane by his own family.  These things are mentioned because people in the audience of Christian preachers remembered them, and they had to be acknowledged and, if possible, explained in consonance with the preachers� doctrines. If these things hadn�t really happened, there would not have been any reason for Christian writers to mention them.  Other criteria of internal evidence, esp. to separate genuine testimony from made-up stories, are provided by modem methods of forensic psychology to evaluate courtroom testimonies.

Fourthly, the psychological investigation of the Bible comes up with a new internal criterion.  We can safely assume that the Bible writers were not aware of the findings of modem psychopathology, i.e. the study of mental diseases.  They did not know the psychopathological conditions that modem psychologists have studied and organized into categories of coherent syndromes.  Yet, in some places they do give accurate descriptions of such psychopathological syndromes.  The stamp of realness is that in these descriptions, no symptoms of different conditions get mixed up.  Anyone can name a few acts and attitudes that he associates with the term �madness�.  But realistically describing a condition of catatonic schizophrenia, or querulous paranoia, can only be done by someone who knows psychopathology - or by someone who merely describes what he sees in a particular real case of such a condition.

It is not out of place to look for psychopathological conditions in the Bible.  After all, then as now, a certain category of mentally afflicted people would be attracted to religion, and become the most ardent students of Scripture.  Certain mental conditions do not lead to a total personality disintegration, to a loss of intellectual capacities, or to an unbearably antisocial behaviour.  In fact, highly talented and literate people can be afflicted by psychopathological conditions.  In the old days, some of them could set themselves up as teachers and prophets, and their eccentric behaviour would only add to their aura of godmen.  And though many religious madmen would be recognized for what they were, a few would not (at least not by the final editors of the Bible), and it is these few that interest us here.

For a first example of a pathological description, we can take a very clear and simple case from the Gospel.  It does not concern Jesus or another prophet, but a �possessed� child, cured by Jesus according to Luke 9:37-43, Mark 9:14-29, Mathew 17:14-21.  The Gospel relates how a child is brought to Jesus, because it is possessed by a deaf-and-dumb demon which it has had since birth.  When it sees Jesus, it gets a crisis, shakes and with foaming lips falls to the ground.  Jesus raises it up and the crisis is over, �the demon has gone out�.  Remark that the text doesn�t say that henceforth the child can hear and speak.

Even a layman can recognize this as an epileptic crisis which, as is normal, subsides after a few minutes.  But the story gives two important details that complete the syndrome.  Firstly, the child gets the crisis when it is confronted with Jesus.  Typically, these crises erupt after sudden emotions, such as a child may feel when confronted with this strange man with his charismatic airs, probably accompanied by a number of followers.  Here, the story does not say that the child was already having a crisis before Jesus came in.  It was the other way round: apparently, Jesus� entry was causally related to the crisis.

Secondly, the child has been deaf (and therefore it can also not speak) since birth.  Now, one typical physiological cause of epilepsy can be a trombophlebitis occurring around the time of birth, which leaves a scar on the brain, thus indirectly causing epilepsy while directly causing deafness.

This simple story thus gives us important conclusions.  Firstly, this �possessed child� must have existed.  It is so completely improbable that a writer who knew nothing about these subtler points of the epileptic condition, would have invented this story.  It could only be an account of a real case.

Secondly, from the fact that the story is told as a report of a miracle wrought by Jesus, it is clear that the writer did believe that a cure took place, and that Jesus� extraordinary powers had been demonstrated.  In fact, from the details of the story, it seems that Jesus himself believed this.  Yet, both the writer and Jesus were wrong: epileptic crises always subside, and that is no indication of cure at all.  This shows how easily people in those days could be made to believe in the miraculous power of anyone who had the guts to style himself a miracle-worker; and how some people, notably Jesus, could erroneously believe such a thing about themselves.

As Dr. Somers writes: �The features, found in the text, are all coherent with the syndrome of epilepsy and especially with an infantile form: perinatal infection of the ears with inflammatory complications, causing thrombo-phlebitis in the brain with the consequence of epileptic seizures and deaf muteness.  In the text of Mark 9, all symptoms are described with precision: the child is mute, falls in the water and the fire (a loss of consciousness), utters a cry and is agitated, has foam on his mouth, becomes like dead and after a while is �cured�.  Obviously, 2000 years ago nobody was aware of the true nature of epilepsy and the typical features of this illness in young children.  If a witness describes so correctly the phenomena of an epileptic seizure in a child with all concomitant circumstances, this fact has precedence over all philological arguments and constitutes proof of authenticity and historicity.  If moreover, the witness mentions all these features in order to prove his incorrect view on the facts (viz. that Jesus effected a miracle cure), it is clear that the testimony is beyond suspicion. If anything here depends on culture, it is the interpretation, in this case: that it is the devil who causes the seizure.�

Another example is the �exorcism� related in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20.  A man was possessed by a host of demons, and dangerous.  He had broken the chain in which people had put him, and now lived in caves and on burial-grounds, and the people were afraid of him.  Jesus asked the �demon� in this man for his name, as was customary in exorcisms.  The name was �Legion�, since there were many demons at once.  Then he drove the demons out, into a flock of pigs, who became mad, threw themselves into the lake, and drowned.  The man became calm and asked to stay with Jesus, but was not allowed to.  The people of the area asked Jesus to go away.

This man apparently suffered from schizophrenia with catatonic agitation. In a fit of rage, such people can develop an unbelievable strength, enough to break handcuffs.  Even Jesus, after �curing� him, is apprehensive about having him around, and consequently sends him away.  Such people�s personalities totally disintegrate, they eat their own excrement and live worse than animals.  Jesus speaks to the man, and the next thing we read is that the pigs become mad and run away, into the lake.  Unless you believe in miracles, this seems to mean that the man went into a rage and didn�t take on Jesus but went after the pigs.⁴ Seeing the madman in his rage, the pigs naturally ran away, and afraid as pigs can be, some of them even ran into the lake.  But then, as always, the rage subsides and the afflicted man becomes quiet.  Jesus sends the man away, and a proof that this indeed was a lasting cure is not even attempted.

In this story we have a smaller number of elements, so the improbability of the writer just making it up is not as striking as in the first story.  Still, the picture of the sick man here is realistic, as is the impression that mere passers-by, such as Jesus� followers (who don�t get to see his regular crises followed by equally regular periods of calm), would think that after a fit of rage everything has come back to �normal�, and that a cure has been effected.

From these examples a method can be derived:

1. the search in the text for certain symptoms should precede any other consideration;

2. if a well-known syndrome can be identified, all other elements should be coherent with this syndrome (if no syndrome can be identified, then psycho-pathology considers its job finished. it is nobody�s intention to force a psycho-pathological explanation where there is no solid ground for one);

3. the fact that the witness is unaware of the scientific significance of the elements he mentions, will be considered as decisive.

Therefore, this psychopathological control of old texts can decide the questions about the historicity of the facts almost with certainty.  As the syndrome described is culture-neutral and independent, all textual and philological criticism has to take this fact into account.  Some methods of judicial expertise can subsidiarily be applied (such as the criteria of U. Undeutsch)⁵ in order to decide about the truthfulness of a testimony according to internal criteria.

The first to take on Jesus as a psychologist, though not as a medically trained psychopathologist, was the German scholar and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest critics of Christianity (who ended up suffering an irreversible mental breakdown himself).¹ Like many Christians, he thought that the historical Christ was a very different man from the Christ of theology.  Thus, Christ had renounced the law and chosen a life of childlike innocence, whereas the Churches had built an elaborate system of morality on top of his teachings.

However, unlike some softhearted poetic Christians who felt unhappy with dogmatic Christianity and attracted to the �experiential� Christianity of Christ himself, Nietzsche rejected this original religion of Christ.  For him, Christ was a décadent.  This somewhat technical term in Nietzsche�s philosophy means: someone who has given up worldly ambitions, who is tired of the world with its passion and struggle, who wants to retire to some kind of paradisiacal sphere.  Such a prophet may be good for people who are tired of this world, weak and unhappy people, losers.

In Nietzsche�s assessment, Jesus was anti-world, anti-mighty, anti-order, anti-hierarchy, anti-labour, anti-struggle, anti-difference.  Total non-struggle, surrender, softness, love.  That is the Jesus who is still somewhat popular among those few young dreamers attracted to Christianity.  Tolstoy thought this was the real Christ, sharply different from the Church�s Christ created by Saint Paul.  For instance, obedience to the worldly authorities is a duty for Church Christians, not for the original Christ.  Nietzsche, while agreeing with Tolstoy on the contrast between Jesus and the Church teachings, does not follow him in choosing for the original Jesus.  He merely sees two forms of decadence at work, both to be rejected.  But he will agree that Jesus� attitude was his own problem, whereas Saint Paul�s attitude (and theology) has sickened an entire civilization.

While Jesus preached a spontaneous and unconcerned life, his posthumous disciple Paul, �the first Christian�, would build a full-fledged theology out of a few elements of Jesus� career and teaching, an ideological system that has very little to do with the actual Jesus.  For Jesus, the concepts of Sin and of Law had lost all meaning.  He believed in sinlessness, no need to tread any specific path of morality to avoid sin.  But in Christianity, sin becomes the raison d�être of religion: Christ has come, suffered and risen in order to save humanity from sin.

And yet, somehow this Salvation is not complete, because on top of it, man must also go under the yoke of a system of morality, adapted with strong simplification (deritualization) from the Mosaic Law, in order to earn his place in Heaven.  It is this emphasis on dry morality that has made Pauline Christianity so unpopular among the pleasure-seeking section of humanity.  A lot of modern Western literature is about people outgrowing their tense submission to Christian morality.  Some Protestant sects have decided that morality is not instrumental in our Salvation (though for the sake of public order they support morality and explain that one�s degree of morality is asign, but not a factor, of one�s predestination for either Heaven or Hell), but they too stick to the notion of sin as fundamental to the human condition until Jesus saves us.

The question of �salvation� through one�s own �works� or through mere �faith� in Jesus� autonomous act of Salvation is a much-debated one among Christian thinkers including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin etc.  The controversy exists, mutatis mutandis, in some other traditions too, e.g. Shaiva Siddhanta.  Borrowing a Shaiva metaphor, we might say that Christianity too has advocates of �the way of the kitten�, which is grabbed by its mother and �saved� without effort, and of �the way of the baby monkey�, which clings on to its mother and is �saved� through its own effort.  But in Christianity, unlike Shaivism, one is saved not from ignorance about one�s own ever-divine Self (i.e. restored to one�s own intrinsic divinity), but from one�s own ever-sinful self.  No one is a Christian if he does not accept that we human beings are all intrinsically sinful, and that Jesus has come to save us from sin.  But, all according to Nietzsche, Jesus never cared about sin.  Contrary to Jesus, Christianity feeds us an obsession of being profoundly evil and God-alienated.

At this point we must comment that Nietzsche has taken the traditional image of Jesus too much for granted, an image built on those Bible stories that are the most likely to be inserted borrowings from other sects, such as the Sermon on the Mount.  In the more reliable Gospel passages, we find that the historical Jesus was not the exalted, ever-innocent pacifist and passivist he is often made out to be.

One thing that Nietzsche has against the Christianity of the Church still dominant in his time, is that it is not religious enough.  Religion for Jesus was a revolutionary thing, an extreme thing.  And while Jesus� religiosity was bizarre and unintegrated in the world (it was an anticipation of the Kingdom of Heaven expected soon), it has a certain kind of uncomplicatedness and cheerfulness about it which is proper in a healthy religion.  But Pauline moralistic Christianity is drab, unhealthy, worrisome, negatively limiting without offering anything positive and great in return.  Nietzsche�s own religiosity is a longing for the superhuman which transcends human smallness.  It is the antithesis of Pauline Christianity, which to him seems to have nothing great and mentally uplifting to it.

While Christ�s religion is centred on love and surrender, Paul�s Christianity becomes, in Nietzsche�s analysis, the religion of hatred and revenge.  Paul was obsessed with the Law, the central topic for the Pharisees.  He was painfully aware of man�s (esp. his own) incapability to live up to the letter of the Law.  Fortunately, Christ has delivered us from the Law, and replaced it with the �law of love�: a revolution.  So far, Paul is in tune with the spirit of Christ, as Nietzsche understood it.  But in Paul�s vision, this revolution comes hand in hand with another revolution, in one movement: the abrogation of the Law is the ideological starting-point of Christianity�s mission among the Gentiles.  Paul�s life, and with it that of many others, will no longer be burdened with the Law, but will now burden itself with a new task, unprecedented in history.  Paul breaks with Judaism and its oppressive Law observance, and starts to win the rest of humanity for Christ.  His own frustrated desire to live up to the demands of the Law, now gets transformed into a tremendous ambition to spread his new-found religion of Salvation through Christ.

Nietzsche draws the parallel with Luther, who had aspired so earnestly to live an ascetic life and fulfill the commandments imposed by Church teaching, but had ended up hating the Church and the pope and the monastic rules so bitterly that he became their declared enemy, crusading to spread an alternative.  Paul is so tired of the Law, that he turns into a follower of its declared enemy, Jesus, once a psycho-physiological crisis had broken through his resistance.  As Dr. Somers has shown, this crisis, befalling Paul on the road to Damascus, was a sunstroke, of which the effects and sensations were afterwards interpreted as a divine revelation.  Once this liberating decision to break with the Law has its exalting effect on him, he feels that this solution for him, is also the solution for mankind.  He will now become the apostle of the destruction of the Law, which has been replaced by faith in Christ.

Saint Paul was not a prophet, but he was a political genius.  He saw the potential of his new doctrine and of the situation in the Roman empire, especially the provincial towns.  Away from the worldly turmoil of Rome and from the extremist zealotry of Palestine (two places where the Christians would encounter plenty of martyrdom), Paul found the optimum terrain for the onward march of his new religion.  In these towns (in Greece and Asia Minor), he would set up communities that would imitate the social ways of the Jewish communities spread across the Empire, with their honourable inconspicuous lives as craftsmen and traders, with their mutual support and communal solidarity, and with their quiet sense of superiority as the Chosen People.  Instead of the unbearable burden of the Mosaic law, he would give them some petty bourgeois morality, but all the same he would promote among them this communal superiority feeling of being the Saved ones in Christ.

The contrast between Jesus and Pauline Christianity, is treated by Nietzsche as a contrast between two doctrines.  Nietzsche does not really analyse Jesus� personality, self-perception or public image.  He mistrusts the historicity of the Gospels.  At the time, the critical method of investigating the historicity of pieces and layers of text was not as refined, and especially the psychological analysis which 20th century psychologists tried out on Jesus, was not yet at his disposal.  So, his psychological evaluation of Jesus, and of Saint Paul, the creator of Christianity, concerns more the ideology they represent than their historical personalities.  Nietzsche puts their personalities between brackets, and concentrates on the ideologies that their (doubtlessly distorted) Biblical biographies represent.

One might say that Nietzsche�s view of Jesus was very one-sided.  The peaceful apostle of love is a popular image of Jesus based on only a few gospel texts: the Sermon on the Mount; �when you get slapped, offer the other cheek also�; �he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword�; �the lilies of the field don�t toil, yet Solomon in his splendour was not as good-looking as any of them�; �do not judge lest you yourself by judged�.  These passages are of disputed historicity, while many reliably historical passages show us a very different Christ. short-tempered, defiant, and a Doomsday prophet.  The gentle Jesus, who was in Nietzsche�s view the original Jesus whose teaching and example were later deformed by Pauline Christianity, was himself just as much a creation of his second-generation disciples.

While Nietzsche�s evaluation of Christ is somewhat marred by the immaturity of the historical research on Christ, his understanding of the Old Testament already had the benefit of a Biblical scholarship that has, in great outline, been confirmed by the more recent scholarship.  The chronology of the Old Testament had more or less been established, and the political context of the successive stages of editing were already understood.

According to Nietzsche, Yahweh�s support for his people came to be seen as �conditional� and dependent upon the Hebrews� own behaviour, when they had become losers on the international scene.  God was no longer seen to be giving them victory, so they tried to regain control over their destiny by assuming God�s support to be dependent upon their own moral behaviour (observance of the Law).  Nietzsche considered the Bible�s emphasis on morality as a revenge operation of a defeated people: winners are not burdened with morality, which is the weapon of the losers.

Nietzsche has paid little attention to the next stage in Israel�s religion.  During the period of the exile, prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel and deutero-Isaiah had again disconnected God�s sovereign decision from man�s degree of obedience to God�s will.  Man�s morality and law-abidingness no longer make a difference: God�s judgment has already been determined, his final intervention will come anyway, and our Salvation will be brought about not by our own goodness but by the Messiah.  The apocalyptic stage in the doctrinal development in Hebrew religion, which will culminate in the Jewish rebellions of the first and early second centuries AD, was already appearing on the horizon at the time of the exile, when the classical doctrine of the Covenant, the mutual contract between Yahweh and His chosen people, was still being formulated and imposed upon Israel�s history through the final Bible editing.

While Nietzsche�s analysis concerns ideologies or collective mind-sets rather than persons, and while some of his insights have simply become outdated by the newest Bible research, he has the merit of being one of the first to apply human psychology to the supposedly divine revelation embodied in the Bible.  He was instrumental in breaking the spell that had been shielding the Bible from critical inquiry.  Moreover, unlike the radical atheists and skeptics who simply disregarded the Bible or dismissed it as fable, Nietzsche took the more balanced position of �honouring� it as a highly interesting and psychologically revealing human document.

Shortly after Nietzsche made his psychological analysis of what he understood as Christian doctrine, rightly or wrongly attributed to the historical Jesus by the Gospel editors, professional psychologists tried to get at the historical personality of Jesus.  In the beginning and more even at the end of this twentieth century AD, psychology has thrown a mighty new light upon the development of the Abrahamic or prophetic-monotheist lineage of religions.

Since the dawn of modem Western psychology, the Bible has interested psychologists.  Freud, the Austrian-Jewish father of psychoanalysis, gave a lot of attention to the character of Moses.² For example, in Freudian theory, Moses� lack of a normal father relation (according to the Bible, he was a foundling brought up in the Egyptian court) made him an excellent object of study: this circumstance could have accounted for his sternly authoritarian and patriarchal conception of God.  Even more unorthodoxly, Freud claimed that Moses had not been a Jew but a high-placed Egyptian: fearing trouble after committing a murder, he had joined the impending Exodus of the beleaguered Jewish immigrant community.

Freud was very hesitant to publish his work on Moses, because he expected it to shock the Jewish community, and that at a time when Nazi Germany was taking one anti-Jewish measure after another.  Freud�s work is in many ways outdated, but remains of great importance in this context because he did, even while expressing his great scruples and hesitation, what many believing Jews and Christians could not intellectually tolerate: he looked at the founder of his religion through the inexorable eyes of scientific analysis.  Some other older psychological studies of Bible characters include C.G. Jung�s study of job and K. Jaspers� study of Ezekiel.

Probably the first attempt to analyze Jesus was made in the late 19th century by the French neurologist Jules Soury, also known as the secretary of Ernest Renan.  Inspired by remarks by David Friedrich Strauss, who had called Jesus a rabid fanatic, Soury wanted to go beyond scornful rhetoric and apply the budding science of neurology to the case of Jesus.  However, it was the heyday of materialism in the human sciences, and with the conceptual instruments at his disposal, he could hardly do justice to psychic phenomena.  In his diagnosis, he settled for a highly disputable verdict which we would consider more physiological than psychological: �progressive paralysis�.

The first truly psychopathological diagnosis of Jesus was made separately by three psychiatrists, W. Hirsch, Ch.  Binet-Sanglé, and G.L. de Loosten.  After thorough examination of the Gospel narratives, they independently reached the same conclusion: Jesus was mentally ill and suffered from paranoia.³ In E. Kraepelin�s classification of mental diseases, paranoia is defined as �the sneaking development of a persistent and unassailable delusion system, in which clarity of thought, volition and action are nonetheless preserved�.

In his reply, the Christian theologian and famous medical doctor, Albert Schweitzer, admitted: �if it were really to turn out that to a doctor, Jesus� world-view must in some way count as morbid, then this must not - regardless of any implications or the shock to many - remain unspoken, because one must put respect for the truth above all else.� But he rejected the psychiatrists� conclusions.⁴

Schweitzer alleged that from a historical point of view, most texts were dubious or certainly not historical, e.g. the quotations from the Gospel of St John, the most theologically polished and least historical of the four Gospels; and that from a medical point of view, the alleged symptoms were misunderstood.  Three objections seemed essential:

1. there is no certainty about the historical truth of the texts;

2. what seems to us to be a symptom, was possibly a normal trait, a cultural feature in that civilization;

3. there are not enough fully reliable elements in order to base a safe judgment on them; even the pathological symptoms claimed, viz. pathological Ego-delusion and hallucinations, are insufficient to conclude a definite diagnosis.

These objections can be met, as we shall see in subsequent chapters.  The last of the three can be met right away: if a psychiatrist notices both hallucinatory crises and an Ego-delusion in a patient, he will most certainly conclude that these are symptoms of a mental affliction, and this all the more certainly if they can be identified as a known syndrome, and are accompanied by a number of coherent typical behavioral features.

Dr. Schweitzer was not a psychiatrist, but his Doctor�s title was already enough to put all doubts to rest.  After his reply the Churches felt reassured, and few outsiders made new attempts to psycho-analyze Jesus.

An exception is Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, with the chapter �The problem of Jesus� in his book Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm (German: �Genius, Madness and Fame�), of which we have excerpts from the third edition at our disposal: it was still prepared by the author himself in 1942, while the fourth edition of 1956 has been seriously tampered with by outsiders, esp. in this chapter.⁵

Dr. Lange-Eichbaum writes: �The personality during the psychosis (we only know Jesus during this life stage) is characterized by quick-tempered soreness and a remarkable egocentrism.  What is not with him, is cursed.  He loves everything that is below him and does not diminish his Ego: the simple followers, the children, the weak, the poor in spirit, the sick, the publicans and sinners, the murderers and the prostitutes.  By contrast, he utters threats against everyone who is established, powerful and rich, which points to a condition of resentment. In this, all is puerile-autistic, naive, dreamy.  In this basic picture of his personality, there is one more trait that is clearly distinguishable: Jesus was a sexually abnormal man.  Apart from his entire life-story, what speaks for this is the quotations of Mt. 19:12 (the eunuch ideal), Mk. 12:25 (no sex in heaven, asexuality as ideal) and also Mt. 5:29 (removing the body parts that cause sin: intended are certainly not hand and eye).  The cause may have been a certain weakness of libido, as is common among paranoia sufferers�

�There is a lack of joy in reality, extreme seriousness, lack of humour, a predominantly depressed, disturbed, tense condition; coldness towards others insofar as they don�t flatter his ego, towards his mother and siblings, lack of balance: now weak and fearful, now with violent outbursts of anger and affective lack of proportion� According to both modern and ancient standards, he was intellectually undeveloped, as Binet has extensively proven; but he had a good memory and was, as is apparent from the parables, a visual type.  Binet also emphasizes the lack of creativity.  A certain giftedness in imagination, eloquence and imaginative-symbolic thought and expression cannot be denied.  He was certainly not a �genius� in the strict modem sense.  The later psychosis is however in no way in contradiction with his original giftedness which was above average: in paranoia this is quite common�

�The entry in Jerusalem is doubtlessly the result of increased excitement: psychically, Jesus is on fire.  For laymen as well as for theologians, there is something painful and absurd about this entry. Isn�t the psychotic streak all too obvious here?  Hirsch calls the parade on the donkey �absurd and ridiculous� and Schweitzer too finds it painful.  It is only enacted to fulfill the Messiah prophecy, secretively and for the eye of his followers.  It may be sad or tragic-comical that the buffoon-king is making his entry this way.  Nowhere is the purposeless nature of psychotic activity more in evidence than in the entry in Jerusalem: his acts lack any logic.  What does Jesus want?  He is tossed this way and then that way.  Worldly power?  Yes and no.  Messiah claim?  Yes and no.  Defiance and death wish?  Yes and no�

From the Gospel it is amply clear that Jesus was first of all known to his contemporaries and to the audiences of later Christian preachers as a miracle-worker, a magician.  He must have had an aura of intensity about him.  He impressed the ordinary people with his charismatic airs, and he believed in his own miracle-working act. The role he fulfilled in the eyes of his followers, was that of theexorcist, a well-known type in those days (though the characters filling this role must have been of diverse kinds and dispositions).⁸

The softness and harmlessness which peaceniks have sought in Jesus, was an image possibly based on some historical events in Jesus� life, but certainly not the dominant traits of his character or public image.  He would never have become such a public and controversial figure had he been such a simple dove.

In popular preaching and counter-polemic, miracles were the most important topic.  As late as the third century, the Pagan polemist Porphyry tried to counter Jesus with the story of Apollonius of Tyana, who was also depicted as a miracle-worker.  Jesus was accused by audiences and rival preachers of having an evil spirit himself, thought to be the cause of all kinds of ailments with which people came to miracle-workers.  Much in the miracle reports in the Gospels is polemic against such allegations.

While some miracle stories are simply unbelievable, there is a historical core in quite a few of them.  Thus, the procedure of demanding that the evil spirit declare its name accurately fits the exorcism procedures then in use.

Moreover, some of the miracle stories convey information which was not useful to the early preachers, much less to the later theologians.  For instance, Jesus chasing the evil spirits of the possessed man of Gerasa into the swine, is, in spite of what theologians may say, not very edifying.  Those swine who lost their lives had done no harm to anyone; their owner, who lost a source of income, had not done any wrong to anyone.  Certainly this story cannot be meant as a symbol for �Jesus defeating the forces of evil�, as some theologians claim.  In fact it is quite an authentic report of what was believed to be a miracle (which interested the common people a lot more than the defeat of Evil).  But as we have seen in ch.2.2, its details suggest precisely that both Jesus and his followers deluded themselves, mistaking the end of the acute crisis for the end of the chronic disease, and mistaking an ordinary symptom for a miraculous cure.  Like the crowds, Jesus saw Jesus as a man of miracles.  Like many Pagans, he believed that a divine being could walk on the earth; but unlike them, he (and Paul and the theologians after him) also gave this an interpretation of a unique and exclusive divine status.

If miracles are the only argument for the supposed divinity of Jesus, one must take into account that a number of these are certainly pseudo-miracles.  The other miracles, which are unverifiable either way, become equally suspect, if one considers the fact that not Jesus, nor the disciples were able to see the difference between the end of a crisis and the end of a disease.  With regard to the exorcisms it is very dear that Jesus, as the Gospel attests, cannot prevent the devil from coming back (Mt 12: 43-45).

We should also study the cases where Jesus refuses to do a miracle: e.g. in Nazareth (where everybody knows him); before the Syro-Phoenician woman; when the Pharisees ask for one.  One should understand the difficult position of somebody who has to do miracles and to heal the sick in a village where everybody knows everybody.  If there are true recoveries, anybody will know; but pseudo-recoveries will soon be seen for what they are.  So Jesus refuses to do miracles before his home community.  One could also wonder why the Pharisees had to ask for a sign, if it was true that so many miracles were taking place already.  Further, one can suppose that some miracles were simply declarations of Jesus that somebody was healed.  Thus, from the ten leper-patients declared cured, only one came back.  The nine others, sent to the priests for verification, had obviously not been declared cured.  So, the miracles of Jesus cannot seriously be considered as a proof of divinity.

Suppose the Son of God really appeared on earth, would he need miracles of disputable quality to prove his identity?  Surely he could do something unmistakably supernatural like, say, actually moving a mountain (which he declares possible for those who have faith)?  The whole story of these shaky miracles supports the hypothesis of an ego-delusion which made Jesus really believe in his supernatural powers, combined with a willingness on the part of a gullible and uneducated community of fishermen to be over-awed by the divine airs which Jesus gave himself.

We know by now that the Gospel is not a 100% authentic report about Jesus� doings and sayings.  But it is possible to more or less sift out the authentic core from the theological additions.  Some of the recognizable additions are the following.

According to the Gospels, Jesus is tried and sentenced by the Jews, with Pilate a mild and innocent bystander.  In reality, Pilate was a cruel governor, and even the central rulers in Rome ended up removing him from office for causing too much trouble by his harshness.  As for the �Jews�, it was the priests who tried Jesus, but the crowds (at least in the province) who supported him.  But after the defeat of the Jewish rebels at the hands of Titus in 70 AD, it became more rewarding for the Christian missionary strategy to move closer to the Romans and emphasize their separateness from the Jews.  These could now be blamed for everything, while an early sympathy for Christ on the part of the Roman governor was also suggested.

That is why Pilate is made to say: �I see no guilt in this man� I wash my hands in innocence.� On the other hand, the Jewish crowd is reported in the Gospel as clamouring for Jesus� death: �His blood may come over us and our descendents�, so that they become morally guilty of �deicide�, god-murder.  On the basis of this Gospel story, the Church has considered the Jews as the murderers of Jesus, a stigma it has only removed (and that only on condition that they dis-identify with the Jewish generation contemporary with Jesus) in 1962.

It is possible that Pilate had sympathy for everyone who was a troublemaker to the Jews, whom he hated, but the depiction of his personality is certainly the product of missionary editing.  The allotment of guilt in the story of Jesus� trial is in very large measure responsible for centuries of Christian anti-semitism, culminating in Auschwitz.  This allotment of guilt, with its far-reaching consequences, was the product of conscious history distortion by the early Christian missionaries, who considered it opportune to identify with the Romans and blame the Jews.

A similar political turn is probably the key to the story of Jesus saying: �Give unto Caesar what is Caesar�s, and unto God what is God�s.� At first the Christians were very uncompromising and they refused to pay taxes: they expected the Second Coming and the destruction of the Empire.  When that changed (around 55, probably because at first the new emperor Nero had raised high expectations among the Christians, or because Claudius� persecutions had forced them into compromise), they justified this change to some of their more radical followers, and at the same time assured Roman or pro-Roman listeners about the genuineness of this new policy by invoking Jesus� own authority.  So, possibly this well-known episode is not historical, but a motivated insertion.

A lot of the parables and sermons attributed to Jesus may well be common proverbs and insights of the contemporary religio-cultural scene.  For instance, the dictum: �To him who hath, shall be given, but from him who doeth not have, even what he hath shall be taken�, may well have been a commonly known observation on life.  Most people will feel compelled to give bigger presents to rich friends than to poor friends on a similar occasion: it is the kind of common knowledge that ends up crystallizing into a proverb.  Jesus himself may have applied this dictum to a religious topic (the Kingdom of Heaven), but even in its application to a religious context, it may have been borrowed from the Pharisees or from one of the proliferating sects of the time.

It is very common that the miracles of one saint are attributed to another saint by the latter�s followers.  In Communist books, I have found Voltaire�s witticisms being attributed to Karl Marx.  The pranks attributed to the Turkic wit Mollah Nasruddin (now popular in the People�s Republic as A-fan-ti, i.e. Effendi) have been appropriated in Indian sources for the Indian wit Birbal, and vice versa.  So, it is only normal that wise and saintly statements that carried an aura of respected profundity, were put in Jesus� mouth by followers.

An important statement of Christian doctrine that was probably borrowed from sectarian sources, either by Jesus or by the Gospel editors, is the Sermon on the Mount.  Another Christian classic, the injunction to �love thy neighbour as thyself�, is typically pharisaic, and in tune with traditional morality expressed here and there in the Old Testament.  It can readily be linked with pharisee Hillel�s famous statement that the Jewish law can essentially be summed up as: �What ye do not want done unto you, do not do that unto others�,- the Golden Rule which Hillel had in common with Confucius, among others.

A different type of addition by the Gospel editors is the hardening of miracle stories into fully attested reports.  In the Gospel of John, written as the last of the four, we read that the apostle Thomas refused to believe that the man before him was the resurrected Jesus, so he asked to touch his wounds.  And yes, they were real, it was the crucified and resurrected Jesus.  This detail of the checking of Jesus� wounds is not present in the other Gospels.  What happened was that Christian preachers used to relate the story of the resurrected Jesus� meeting with the apostles, and people in the audience would ask: �Did it really happen?  Do you know this for sure-?� And so, to anticipate these questions, John fabricated a certificate of empirical proof.

Similarly, in the successive Gospels, the report on the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan becomes ever more �realistic�.  Mark reports it as a subjective impression: �Jesus saw the heavens open and a dove descend on Him�. In Matthew this becomes: �And lo!  The heavens opened and He saw God�s Spirit descend on Him in the shape of a dove.� The seeing of the dove is still a matter of Jesus� own subjective perception, but the interpretation that it was God�s Spirit has been added.  According to Luke, �it happened that the Heavens opened and the Holy Spirit, in the physical shape of a dove, descended on Him�.  Now, the whole episode has become an objective fact.  Finally, John goes another step further: �And John [the Baptist] gave testimony and said: �I have seen that the Spirit descended as a dove from heaven� I have seen it myself and attested: this is the son of the Lord.�� This time, there is even a witness willing to testify.

What has started as a report of Jesus� subjective experience, recorded from Jesus� own report, has become an objective and even a well-attested fact.  A theology as well as a polemical fortification is increasingly being imposed on the original innocent report.  Now, all such insertions, suspected omissions, and reworked versions, can more or less be traced and mapped.  After that, a solidly historical core remains.  Among the reliably historical elements are those which go against the intentions of the Christian preachers, or those which are beyond their capacity of invention.

Therefore, a solidly historical element in the Gospel narrative is the psychopathological syndrome which is clearly present in Jesus� personality.  The Gospel writers could not have invented such a coherent description of a well-defined syndrome even if they had wanted to, and secondly they certainly didn�t want to pass on such information about their Saviour.  The syndrome so well illustrated in the Gospel is called paraphrenia.

Paraphrenia is a fairly rare mental affliction in which the patient develops a delusion (mostly genetic, i.e. concerning his parents or ancestry), which is triggered and fed by only rarely occurring hallucinatory crises. Starting from this delusion, he builds up an entire system complete with interpretative delusions (misreading events to make them fit, rather than disturb, the basic delusion).  Otherwise he remains well-integrated in his environment.⁹ Paraphernia is sometimes classified in the larger category of �paranoia� and opposed to schizophrenia.  In contrast to the schizophrenic, the paraphrenic remains adapted to his milieu, has a coherent thinking and a well-organized behaviour.  Generally hallucinations are rare, but initiate a delusional state, often with a grandiose genetic theme.  The paraphrenic is very sensitive to opposition to his ideas; he is therefore somewhat secretive, and often full of resentment and hate.  This is exactly the image the Gospel has painted of Jesus.

If we assume this diagnosis, which is suggested by several striking events in Jesus� life, and extend it to understand his whole life story, the Gospel narrative becomes coherent.  One hypothesis will suffice to explain diverse elements for which the exegetes now need a whole string of hypotheses: methodologically, that is a very strong point.

Today, the theologians have caught themselves in a construction of difficult and contradictory hypotheses that is convincing no one.  The fundamentalists who refuse to think and therefore just take the whole Bible as God�s own word, ridicule the theologians with all their difficult terminology invented to create a conceptual framework in which the diverse and contradictory Bible narratives might make sense.  The real scientist is equally unimpressed by the patchwork of hypotheses to which the theologians resort in order to make sense of the Gospel narrative.  The paraphrenia hypothesis takes care of the entire Gospel narrative at once.

Jesus had, on all hands, a problem with the identity of his father.  In the apocrypha, he is called �son of a whore�.  According to the Jewish tradition, he was the son of the Roman soldier Pandera and the local girl Miriam (Mary), the hairdresser.  The existence of a Roman soldier with that name has actually been verified.  A few years after the start of the Christian Era, he was transferred to the legion in Germany, where a grave bearing his name has been found: perhaps the only left-over of the Holy Family.  At any rate, the Gospel narrative is explicit enough that Jesus� conception was a matter of scandal: his social father Joseph wanted to break off his engagement with Mary when he found she was pregnant. In a village, such a circumstance could not possibly be kept secret from the child Jesus.  In the playground he must have been reminded often enough of being an illegitimate child.

The first sign that Jesus is trying to work out his inner problem with his parentage, and at the same time that people think there is mentally something wrong with him, is his visit to the temple at age 12.  For lack of a physical father, the only father that was left to him was the Creator, Yahweh.  Like many boys of his age, he wanted to know more about his origins, and he looked for information in the Scriptures.  When he went to the temple, he went to the house of his Father.  There, he expected to learn more from the Scribes.  The questions he asked them must have sounded strange to them.  Jesus was hanging around for three days, without telling his parents anything.  And when he returned home and his family got angry for his causing them so much worry, he replied: �Don�t you know I belong in my Father�s house?� He claimed the right to solve his own identity problem, even if that implied insensitivity to others� feelings.  At that age, this behaviour is not abnormal, except that few youngsters would have taken Scriptural imagery so literally as to believe that their personal fatherhood problems could be solved by identifying God as the missing father.

The little bit of information about this childhood episode indicates a prodrome of the later crisis.  By itself, the temple episode need not be pathological, it could have been a fairly ordinary event in the difficult puberty process of self-discovery.  But it does betray a psychological setting in which a deeper mental disease can develop.

The first real crisis we hear of, is the baptism in the river Jordan.  There, Jesus sees a bird coming from the opened sky, and hears a voice bringing an enormous message: �You are my son, in whom I take pleasure.� Seeing light, perceiving a bird (zooscopy), hearing a voice with a short message in the second person and which is absolute and takes away all doubts: that is the description of a typical sensorial hallucination.

The famous Flemish theologian Edward Schillebeeckx sees in the baptism episode �Jesus� vocation meaningfully surrounded by interpretative visions�.  This implies that the visions were literary embellishment, meaningful but nonetheless unhistorical and invented by human beings.  Progressive theologians like Schillebeeckx abhor the traditionalist more literal interpretation.  They dislike supernatural things like �visions� and voices from the sky.  But with that, they fail to give a coherent explanation of why this imagery is being created (and why, as we have seen, John tries to make his audience believe that the events were very real).  In this case, the literal interpretation is the more scientific one: the bird did appear, the voice did speak from the sky - but only as a subjective experience of the mental patient Jesus, rather than as an objective cosmic revelation directly from God the Creator.

In the Bible numerous texts mention the hearing of voices, especially the voice of God.  Current exegesis interprets these texts as metaphorical: �hearing the voice of God� is simply the expression for a vocation by God.  Sometimes, this metaphorical interpretation is justified: to take an example from outside the Biblical tradition, when the Greek philosopher Parmenides says that �a god has revealed� his philosophy of Being to him, it is just a manner of speaking, not an actual auditory hallucination.  In psychopathology however, �hearing a voice� is a common expression for an auditory hallucination, often accompanied by other sensorial hallucinations, esp. visions (other phenomena include feeling of heat or of being pierced by needles).  That the voices heard by Jesus were hallucinatory, is even admitted by Albert Schweitzer.

Important supportive information for the paraphrenia thesis is furnished by the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews.  It relates that Jesus� family thinks he is possessed by a demon, and that they want him to try this baptism as a possible way of exorcising the demon; he is at first unwilling (all accounts mention a preliminary discussion between Jesus and John the Baptist).  It seems that Jesus� behaviour had been strange for some time already, and now that there is an exorcist in the neighbourhood, the remedy should be tried: if it doesn�t help, it doesn�t harm either.  But the emotionally charged baptism experience triggers a �revelation� that will plunge Jesus completely into a distorted self-image.

Typical for the delusion that gets articulated in such a sensorial hallucination, is the absolute certainty with which the patient believes in it.  Jesus will doubt no more: he is the son of the heavenly Father.  Later, when a Church theology was developed, this notion of God as the personal Father was made into a central theme in Christianity, setting it apart from the Mosaic �Old Covenant�.  In the latter, God was a vengeful ruler, who only stood by His chosen people on condition of its total obedience.  Now, God became a loving Father.  What this interpretation of the baptism revelation overlooked, is that the vengefulness of Yahweh was now transferred to His Son.  Jesus did not have an army, like Mohammed, but he was very intolerant of skepsis and full of hatred against the indifferent world.  In his own hallucinations, he himself would be the avenger on the Day of Judgment.

After the baptism crisis, Jesus retires to the desert, where he doesn�t eat for forty days, and gets visions of angels serving him and the devil tempting him.  This period of extreme introversion after the shocking hallucination, as if to digest his new self-understanding, is again very typical.  He is offered nothing less than the power over the whole world, but he turns down the offer.  This is a typical rationalized delusion, with a reasoning which we can imagine along these lines: �To me the power over the world has been given.  Then why do I not effectively have the power?  Because I spurned it, though it is rightfully mine and I could have taken it.� Still, the subsequent episodes show that he has started ascribing extra-ordinary powers to himself.

Dr. Somers makes the diagnosis: �Psychopathological investigation discovers in Mark, Luke and Matthew, regardless of the fact that Luke especially adapted the original version, a number of well-known symptoms of a hallucinatory state: hearing the voice of the devil, seeing wild beasts (zoopsy), having the desire to fly (vestibular hallucinations, having visions of the �whole world�, suffering from anorexia (fasting).  In this light, the vision of the baptism episode is also certainly another manifestation of this hallucinatory state: a well-localized (heavenly) vision, the seeing of light (opening of heaven), of a bird, the hearing of a voice speaking in the second person and communicating a grandiose genetic message (�you are my beloved son�).  The whole picture is coherent with regard to the psychopathological symptoms.  In the text therefore, one finds the correct description of a delusional hallucinatory state.  Moreover, the Gospel also mentions circumstances which are coherent with this pathology.�

After this bewildering revelation, Jesus starts to live up to his new self-image.  He becomes a wandering god-man, doing miracles.

The next hallucinatory crisis is on Mount Tabor.  He goes up on the mountain with his disciples Peter, James and John.  There, in a sea of white light, he meets with Elijah and Moses.  Again, a voice from the clouds speaks: �This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to Him.� According to Luke (9:28-36), Jesus spoke with Moses and Elijah about �his going-out which he would perform in Jerusalem.  Then, the scene stops and Jesus is alone with his disciples, who have not seen Moses and Elijah: they merely wake up when they hear Jesus talk to somebody.  In the testimony of Mark (9:2-10) there is the same revealing contradiction: while it is contended that Elijah and Moses appeared, only Jesus is described and it is said that finally the apostles saw nobody but Jesus.

This crisis marks the beginning of the predictions of Jesus� suffering and death, which had been the topic of his conversation with Moses and Elijah.  Taking inspiration from a description of the �Servant of Yahweh� in Isaiah (53:7), he understands he will be led unto his slaughter like a lamb.  He reads into Scripture the indication that the Son of Man will go into his glory through suffering and meek submission to this expiatory sacrifice.  According to the logic of the delusion, he must now go to Jerusalem and provoke his death by entering as king.  He predicts he will rise on the third day and thus enter his Kingdom.

A third report of a hallucinatory crisis is only given by John (12:20-36).  During the entry in Jerusalem he hears the voice of the Father saying: �I have glorified him and will glorify him again.� The people said it had thundered, some said an angel had spoken to him, i.e. to Jesus.  So it was only Jesus who had heard the words.

Contemporary theologians like E. Schillebeeckx ascribe these stories to the imagination of the primitive Church, which wanted to glorify Jesus.  But, asks Dr. Somers: �Why should the Church invent a number of stories which caused nothing but difficulties?  Why should the son of God be baptized?  Why should he be tempted by the devil, and that with such extravagant temptations?  Why should he fast during 40 days?  Why should he see wild beasts?  It is quite inconceivable that the primitive Church invented these strange stories for the glorification of Jesus.  On the contrary, the primitive Church leaders tried to interpret and to adapt the existing story in order to demonstrate the divine origin of these phenomena.  Of a hallucinatory visionary state, they made objective supernatural events.  But they were sufficiently ignorant so that they could not mask the pathological background of the events they recounted.�

These hallucinations, few in number but elaborating the same theme, together with the testimonies of people thinking he is �possessed� or mentally disturbed, point to the paraphrenia syndrome.  What confirms this tentative diagnosis and makes it into the first coherent explanation of the entire Jesus narrative, is Jesus� behaviour.

The paraphrenic patient has some marked characteristics, other than the rare hallucinations and the delusional state, e.g.: a great hostility against those who contradict him, often also a familial rage, as the family usually contradicts him; autistic behaviour, in the sense that the criterion for judgment and action is not reality, but his subjective will; an interpretative delirium, i.e. interpreting events and utterances as pointing to him and to his delusion; concealing his conviction and temporizing as long as circumstances seem unfriendly.  All these typical features can be found in the Gospel.

Jesus threatens Bethsaida, Kapharnaum, Jerusalem, because they did not believe him.  If the Son of Man comes with heavenly power, all those who did not believe will be killed, along with all kings and mighty men.  Jesus insults the Pharisees, because they disbelieve and criticize him.  Jesus is especially angry with his family which tried to prevent his preaching.  A number of logia (= sayings of Jesus) are directed against the family, and in the Gospel one cannot find any friendly word to the family and especially to his mother.  Spurning his mother and brothers who are waiting at the door, he points to his disciples: �These are my mother and my brothers, who accomplish the will of God� (Mk 3:35).  The disciples of Jesus should hate their fathers and their mothers (Lk 14:26) because the true enemies of man are his family members (Mt 10:35; see also Mk 11:30; Mt 10:35; Mk 13:11).

A highly irrational act is Jesus� cursing of the fig tree when, out of season, it is not bearing fruit (Mk 16:20-25; Mt 21:18-22).  The tree is behaving normally, but Jesus punishes it: never again will it bear fruit.

Jesus is also violently sensitive to things relating to his supposed Father.  The violent scene he makes against the traders in the temple (Mk 11:15-17; Mt 21:12-13; Lk 19:45-46), where he objects against the transportation of any object, is motivated by what he perceives as their dishonouring his Father�s house.  Modem preachers say that Jesus was protesting against materialism, that he was making an important ethical and religious statement.  But in fact, Jesus� behaviour vis-a-vis the traders in the temple premises was highly unadapted to reality.  Those traders were not doing anything unethical or irreligious.  They had an important function in temple life, where sacrifices were the normal and statutory practice.  Even if their activities had been misplaced, so was Jesus� tirade that they were making �his Father�s house� into a �robbers� den�: traders are not necessarily robbers, theirs is an honourable profession, and eventhough God may be our Father, we shouldn�t take disrespect for God�s house so personally.

Another, more specific detail is that he attempts to keep his status as Son of Man secret: �Do not talk about this with anyone�, he says several times.  Only when his disciples, and later the priests during his trial, ask him straight if he is God�s son, he consents, saying that they have said it.  But to theologians, it has always remained a riddle why Jesus should be so secretive about his glorious mission.  Paraphrenia patients are very aware of the attitude (and possible lack of understanding) of their fellow men.  That is why Jesus temporizes, in expectation of more auspicious circumstances.

A final symptom is the anti-sexual attitude.  As the studies of Bultmann have shown, the primitive church has cleansed, adapted a number of logia.  A relevant example is provided by the logia about the children and the reign of God: unless you become like children, you cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.  In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, some logia have been preserved which explain the periscopes of the Gospels: to be a child is to be asexual and free of sexual shame (log. 12, 21; cfr. also log. 37, 114: if you make masculine and feminine one).  In the canonical Gospels it is also said that in heaven there is no marriage, and virginity is exalted, as it is in the Apocalypse.  The theme is constant: virginity, inhibition of sexual activity, as well in the canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas as in the Apocalypse.

Jesus� behaviour during his trial is in conformity with the diagnosis.  We should keep in mind that from the vision on Mount Tabor onwards, Jesus has been mentally preparing himself for death.  The priests accuse him of blasphemy: he has insulted Yahweh by calling himself His son.  Normally, they have to produce witnesses to prove this extremely serious allegation.  But Jesus saves them the trouble: he commits an even greater sacrilege right on the spot, by pronouncing God�s name aloud.  Strictly following the prescribed procedure, the high priest tears his mantle into two.  Jesus stands convicted of sacrilege.  The Gospels make no secret about Jesus� guilt of this sacrilege, which was well known to be a capital offence.

He commits what is blasphemy before the priests, with a straight face, because he is fully prepared to die.  For months he has been mentally readying himself for it, announcing that this would be the road to his glorification.  When you think death is the end, the prospect of dying may be a bit horrifying.  But when you think it is the way to the glory, it is alright: �Death, where is thy sting?� His frankness in the face of a certain death penalty must certainly have added to his superhuman aura.

The Gospel of Infancy, i.e. the Gospel narrative of Jesus� conception, birth and early childhood, is not so much a source of psychopathologically relevant information.  It is less reliable and more open to speculative interpretations.  Yet, it also provides material for some interesting psychological observations.  In this respect it is important to see the essential difference between the Gospel of Infancy and the visions during the Baptism and Tabor episodes.  Most Bible students see the Gospel of Infancy as a entirely mythical corpus in the New Testament and they mention numerous reasons.

1. The chronological indications are contradictory.  According to Matthew, Jesus should be born between 6 and 4 BC, during the reign of the great Herod, who died in 4 BC; but the census which according to Luke, obliged the parents of Jesus to travel to Bethlehem, was organized by Quirinius, who according to the precise indications of Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian, became procurator of Syria in 6-7 AD, i.e. 11 to 12 years later.  Furthermore, the beginning of Jesus� public life, when he was about 30 years old, is traced by Luke (3:1) to the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius (27 AD).  According to that indication, Jesus should have been born in 4-3 BC.  These difficulties were never solved by the historians. 

2. The divergence between Matthew and Luke is striking.  According to Matthew, an angel appears to Joseph, not to Mary; but for Luke an angel appears to Mary and to Zachariah.  According to Matthew, each event is predicted in the Old Testament; but Luke replaces the quotations of the Old Testament with occasional prophecies by Hannah and Simeon.  Matthew writes that a star appears, Magi come, there is a flight to Egypt and a slaughter of innocents by the Great Herod.  For Luke there are only shepherds, angels and music, the circumcision in the Temple, and a simple return to Nazareth.  He does not mention Egypt, nor the slaughter of the innocents.

In the Protevangelium of James another series of divergent elements can be found.  Herod kills Zachariah, while John is sought for; there is no star, no Magi, no prophecies, only the angels and their message to Mary and Elisabeth.

3. The only elements which all witnesses have in common are: 1) the exceptional pregnancy of Mary; 2) the hesitation of Joseph; 3) the birth of Jesus; 4) the exceptional atmosphere of wonders.  Each witness surrounds these historical events with a scenery of marvellous elements of his own.

4. Whoever the witness, the given details are typically feminine notwithstanding a masculine elaboration.  Typically feminine are: the attention to what people say, to gifts, visits, the emotional reactions of the fiancé and the niece.  Typically masculine is Matthew�s elaboration: the narration of each event is rigorously closed with a quotation from the Old Testament.  Typically masculine is also Luke�s elaboration: he omits a number of marvellous elements (the star, Herod, the visit of the Magi, the appearance of the angel to Joseph); he replaces them by the more credible visit of shepherds; while he omits the Biblical quotation, he replaces it with the occasional prophecies of Hannah and Simeon.  Typical for both is the atmosphere of wonders (signs in heaven versus heavenly music, angels), a great historical context (a Roman census versus Herod and a flight to Egypt) and the glorious role for the mother to give birth to a future king of Israel.

If we submit the texts to a psychological examination, to get at its historical core, we find that there is a common source for all stories and particularly a feminine one, and secondly that the majority of events are due to imaginative �loose� construction (e.g. the �prophecies� are not even exact allusions).

It is common opinion among exegetes that this mythic scenery can be dated to after Jesus� Resurrection, when in the primitive Church questions arose about Jesus� origin.  As it was due, all signs had to be present that Jesus was the future Messiah.  As there was a Hellenistic Church (Paul) and a Jewish Church dames), so there was a Jewish version (Matthew) and a Hellenistic version (Luke).  For the Jews, Jesus had to be predicted by the prophets; for the Hellenistic people the credibility was to be ensured by a more common course of events.

Even in this mythical context some fundamental data may appear which are based on real facts.  As the indications about the census of Quirinius, about Herod, about the descent from David, about the journey to Bethlehem (according to James� Protevangelium, Joseph and Mary live in Jerusalem, not Nazareth) may be false, it is not impossible that Jesus was born in the period that Herodes Archelaos succeeded his father in 4 BC.  Ibis was a period of revolutionary agitation and consequent repression in Jerusalem.  Is it unthinkable that the murder of the innocents goes back to this period, and that Joseph and Mary, like probably a lot of people, escaped from Jerusalem to safer surroundings, such as Bethlehem? In that context and in accordance with the most probable chronology, Jesus was born in 3 BC during the flight from Jerusalem.  But that he was born in Bethlehem, is certainly not more than an invention of the Gospel editors, to declare the apparent prophecy about the birthplace of the Messiah fulfilled in Jesus.

According to the Jewish tradition Mary was a whore and Jesus� father was the Roman soldier Panthera.  There are, however, some unsolved questions: how is it possible that from the beginning there is the supposition that Jesus could become king in Israel?  This seems quite unrealistic, if Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier.  Things may change if on hypothesizes that actually his father was a prince, named Herodes Archelaos (a name which evokes the word Archangelos), who in 4 BC became the successor of the great Herod, and who was known for his unrestrained sexual behaviour.  Is it unthinkable that a prince said to a girl that her son could become a king?

As it had to be shown to the many new adepts of the primitive Church, who became curious about Jesus� origins, that he was really born as the Messiah, the inferior conditions of his birth had to be overcompensated.  The scenario of conceiving outside marriage and giving birth to an illegitimate child in bad conditions (flight to Bethlehem) had to be changed to a direct divine intervention, a virginal conception, the birth of a future king with the presence of royal Magi, shepherds, angels, heavenly signs and prophecies.

About the mythical character of this Gospel of Infancy, there is a consensus among exegetes: a fantastic scenery was elaborated in order to mask the inferior conditions of Jesus birth. It is impossible to understand these fantastic stories, if one does not reduce them to their historical origin: a woman, the mother of Jesus, who had to play her glorious role as the mother of the Messiah to the community of disciples that had gathered around her son.  It is a fair guess that after Jesus� resurrection and departure, Mary was questioned about the circumstances of Jesus� birth, and told the apostles the story that became the Gospel of Infancy.  Some of the miracle-mongering may have been her own doing, as may the variations: she must have told the story on more than one occasion, with less concern for consistency than regular preachers would have.

We find Jesus� mother back in another episode: the Pentecost (Acts 2).  This story is also full of commonplaces.  There was a great wind, sounds from heaven, tongues of fire appeared, and the apostles spoke several languages.  In the text it is said quite realistically that the people thought it was the language of drunkards.  But Luke adds that they all understood the preaching in their own language, which seems rather contradictory.

This contradiction, together with the commonplace nature of several features and the phenomenon of excited and unclear speech (therefore described as �foreign language�), casts doubt upon the authenticity of the event.  It appears as a show which had to overcompensate the subjective uncertainty of the apostles.  Of course they were anxious: would the people believe that Jesus was resurrected?  Could it become a success?

The story of the Ascension is even worse.  The Gospel editors who mention it (not all even do) relate the whole event in only one sentence and they are not unanimous about the precise location. Luke mentions two different ones: Bethany and Jerusalem.  Nobody describes clearly the place, the event, the circumstances.

Is it credible that a witness of such a wonderful and glorious event could say nothing more than �he disappeared�?  It sounds like a very simple goodbye.  Why did they not invite a number of witnesses to this ultimate glorification?  Even the high priest?  For this instance let us recapitulate the arguments:

1. The Apostles are witnesses who try to defend the thesis that Jesus now returned to heaven.

2. According to the criteria of courtroom evaluation of witnesses these are clearly false with regard to the way of disappearance of Jesus.

3. The only historical fact is that about Jesus nothing is said any more: he disappears definitively from among the Apostles in Jerusalem.

It should be noted that angels appear at all difficult moments: the conception, the birth of Jesus, the resurrection, the ascension.  The Holy Ghost explains both the conception of Jesus and the conception of the Church.  The structural analysis reveals a systematic trend, a thematic thinking: when there is a difficult situation, a myth with angels or Holy Ghost is masking the truth.  So there is a constant �mythologic� activity, why not say �mythomanic� (not in a truly pathological, but in a larger sense).

Exegetes use the term: �post-Paschal glorification�, indicating by that terminology that all these mythical stories were �invented� by the Church and are to be classified as devoid of historical foundation, as purely literary products, only intended to promote the faith in Jesus.  But this theory is unable to specify which were the true historical events, masked by this mythology.

So the distinction should be made between two aspects of the Gospel.  The first one is the mythological: a myth is built, a fantastic scenery in order to show the divine nature of Jesus.  The second aspect is the transparency of the factual pathological trend, which could not be masked because of ignorance of psychopathology (baptism, Tabor, etc.). The first has been adequately recognized by the exegetes, the second has been ignored.

Jesus calls himself the Son of Man.  But according to the voices he heard, he was the Son of God; they never called him Son of Man.  In order to understand this complex psychological situation, one has to be familiar with the cultural background, as well as with the psychopathological one.

The theme of the �Son of God� is essential in the story of his conception, of his birth, of the temple-episodes (as a 12-year-old, and with the merchants), in the baptismal and the Tabor visions.  While some kings in divergent cultures have been called Son of God (or Son of Heaven, etc.), they never pretended to be the physical Sons of God, conceived without a human father�s intervention, as Jesus did.  Where followers have ascribed magical non-human conception to their leader (e.g. the Buddha conceived on his mother by an elephant), at least the leader or prophet himself did not call himself Son of God.

The �Son of God� theme is clearly the fundamental one: the voices confirm that tide.  The contents of this status is the problem which preoccupies Jesus in the desert.  Could he become a Roman Emperor?  Could he transform stones into bread?  Could he precipitate himself in the air?  Jesus of course had to consult the Bible about his condition.  There he found the roles of the King, the Messiah and the Son of Man.  Never was it predicted that the Son of God would come, so if he himself was the Son of God, he had to appropriate to himself the tide of the Son of Man as well.  And this Son of Man was dearly described by Henoch.  Once he was convinced, it became clear to him that now his reign was coming, because soon he would come on the clouds of Heaven.

And then he announced the reign of God, implicitly his own.  He kept his secret, because it was impossible to declare to the people that soon he would be the Master of the whole world for eternity.  After a while it became a problem to him how he should attain his glory.  On Mount Tabor he heard the voices that convinced him that he was also the Servant of Yahweh, who had to suffer and die before attaining his glory.  Moses and Elijah clarified to Jesus that he was going to die in Jerusalem.

Jesus is convinced that all texts of the Bible point to him, because he is the Son of God.  In Jerusalem he has to make his entrance on an ass �as Zechariah predicted�.  Before his judges Jesus was silent because he enacted the Lamb of Isaiah, except when he was asked who he was: then he affirmed that he was the Son of God, the Son of Man, the King of the Jews, the Messiah.

The starting-point of this development was the genetic theme: who is my father?  The purely pathological elements are the progressive Ego-inflation, the specific elaboration of the delusion, the interpretative delirium (all texts point to him) and the hallucinatory state.  So, against Schweitzer, it has been shown that although the content of the delusion is partly indebted to the cultural background (Jewish Scripture), the specific pathological elements are culture-neutral.