Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Solo · 07-20-2006, 02:41 PM

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Originally Posted by Gamera

Great post Jiri.

Of course the psychohistory of early Christians has been used as an attack on the historicy of the gospels. I'm thinking of Crossan in particular, who interpreted the gospels in terms of a repression by the apostles of the trauma of seeing Jesus crucified (and in his alternate history) eaten by dogs.

Thanks, Gamera. If I knew how to pray, i.e. was trained to wish upon the Omnipotent, I would pray daily not overinterpret. :angel:

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But I think you adumbrate an interesting potential, especially as regards to Paul. He has been "analyzed" as a typical true believer, who switched sides, so to speak and brought the same fanatism to Christianity that he once brought to its persecution.

I prefer to see Paul as an enthusiast, not a fanatic. I do not believe he as Saul was "persecuting" the Church quite the way the Acts portrayed it.
It would have been unlikely for Saul to take part in the plunder of the church in Jerusalem, enter into every house, and play a role in the death of the church’s first martyr if in fact his face was not known to the churches in Judea (Gal 1:22). So, even if Paul obviously was talking about the miracle of his conversion, and probably encouraged its oversizing, I cannot see he would have gotten far in his adopted environment if he was perceived as a violent man. Quite the contrary, as I mentioned elsewhere, he often plays "the vulnerability" card in his appeals for support. That's not what tough guys do !

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But all this may suggest real underlying events relating to Christianity. If Paul's particular psychology is discernable in his writings, perhaps so are the historical events that put his remarkable energy into motion. It seems very unlikely that Paul's particular fanatism (and I use that in a neutral sense as something he brought to his writings) was responding to a mythic Jesus.

I am not sure that I follow. But I can tell you this: until someone shows me where I misread Paul, Christ as the God we know him originated in his head.
There are few things that I have doubted less.

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He seems to be a type that was given to personal confrontation and action, not a philosophical personality that sat in a study speculating about theology. Indeed, his writings aren't theological in the traditional sense at all, in my opinion, but really are a handbook for christian living provided to a population that had no experience of what it meant to be a Christian.

With the reservation I made previously, I would say, yes Paul was a man of great and restless energy, and very much a socialite. On the point of theology, I think he had great theological imagination, and evidently pioneered the efforts to interpret his inner states by cross-referencing the ideational torrents he experienced as "revelations" with the scripture. But you are right, he was not a conventional theologian in any of the Judaic traditions of his time.

Clivedurdle · 07-20-2006, 11:53 PM

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Originally Posted by WishboneDawn

Holy friggin' Christ Clive!!!

I can't agree with you more.

Only don't let atheists off the hook. There are a LOT of christians AND atheists who think myth equals lie. There's a real inability to 'get' myth these days. If Jesus didn't really live or didn't really get crucified, they ask, what's the point in valueing those myths? But I just think if we could talk about the bible as a source of christian and cultural myths...The fun we'd have and the places we'd go.

Thank you!

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The author is not only a Jungian analyst, but a storyteller. She is steeped in the traditions of storytelling from both the Latin and the Hungarian sides of her family, and I very much enjoyed the ways in which she uses this legacy of the storyteller as healer to make her points. I never thought of storytelling in this way before, but reading this book I found it to be true. (I feel that her stories have helped heal me.) I am a storyteller myself, of a sort, so for me the book was a kind of homecoming. If you have ever wondered why fairy tales seem so cruel and peculiar, you will find the answers in this book. Fairy tales have been mangled in the translation, but this author shows you where they came from and what they are really about.

Women Who Run with the Wolves (or via: amazon.co.uk)

This book is a good introduction to what I am talking about - the debates illustrate the different views.

Clivedurdle · 07-21-2006, 12:45 AM

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I agree with the reviewer who said the book lacks practical advice, real applications to everyday life. I find Estes' connection of fairytales to the psyche intriguing and powerful, but something is lacking.
An example: There is the story of the seal woman who skin is "captured" by a man, who is forced to marry him, and then eventually escapes back to the sea.

Estes connects this story to loss of one's true self, and equates this with clients she's had who have experienced a major sense of theft in their lives, as in theft of opportunity, for example. She talks about visiting a prison and finding that nearly every woman she worked with had experienced a soul theft and was in the processing of reclaiming her true self. Powerful stuff.

She promises through the subsequent tales to show how a woman can "come home". I eagerly read through, but was disappointed to find that the advice boiled down to: read a favorite poem, sit in a favorite rocking chair. Advice that would work for healing everyday stress, but not for the kinds of "soul-thefts" she originally discussed. In other words, no meat.

There is another problem as well, and that is the lack of feminist analysis of fairytales, which were often coded stories of oppression. The seal woman's marriage is a good example. She interprets this as the marriage of the soul to the practical everyday world. However, it also obviously speaks to another, more painful reality of women's lives: forced and/or abusive marriage. And the child who results, the "soul-child" is also the child who helps his mother escape and return to freedom. This consciousness is entirely lacking in her analysis, and helps crystalize what I feel is lacking in the book.

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You too can write a book. Take half a dozen folk tales and surround each one with endless (and I do mean endless) psychobabble.

Save your time and money. Skip this book.

Is too much being expected of myth and the author and also it is being rejected out of hand? That is a double whammy that misses the point!

Solo · 07-21-2006, 07:55 AM

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Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

I do wonder if Paul's energy came from the eureka moment he describes on the road to damascus, combined with he thought he had discovered the philosophers stone - the alchemic reenactment of Christ's death through the Eucharist. Paul really believed he had ( through Christ Jesus) conquered death! No wonder he lost his sight if it all came together in his mind on a hot dusty road where the steady rhythms and noises, the heat and thirst were guaranteed to put him in an altered state of consciousness!

First, Clive, it is not Paul who describes what happened on the road to Damascus, but "Luke" who by legend was Paul's physician.

Analyzed, cognitively the Acts 9 story has Jesus in an ethereal form, intercepting Saul on a journey to do further harm to his believers, blinding and paralyzing Saul, while asking why Saul 'persecutes' him. Saul immediately recognizes the event as issuing from 'the Lord', but asks the presence to identify itself. He is told he has to deal with 'Jesus' and that his predicament relates Saul's persecution of the Church. Further, he is ordered to continue on his journey to the city and await further instructions. This story may appear is a total fable but if told by Paul to a trained therapist today, he would recognize it as articulation of either a complex partial seizure in the temporal lobe, with some lingering disturbance of the optical nerve, or an effect of a seizure. It also has a characteristic form of cognitive pattern of "dissociation" which attributes internal physical and psychic events to an external agency. But, that Saul, in this scenario, was "pressed into service" under extreme internal duress which had no identifiable external agent, goes, I think, without saying.

If we compare the legend of Acts to 2 Cor 12, which I believe describes the real Paul's inaugural Jesus epiphany, we see that the internal duress he experienced and ascribed to "Satan", occured only after an euphoric ascent in which Paul describes himself as uncertain of having a body, and hearing things that cannot be told, which it is forbidden to utter. He interprets the stress in his body (skolops th sarki) as an angel of Satan - itself an interesting proposition - which has the function to keeping him from being 'hyper-elated'. (hina mh huperaromai) This articulation, i.e. Paul's cognitive awareness that the highs and the persecutory feelings he experiences are inter-related are evidence of a bipolar disorder.

Also, by comparing Paul's description and Luke's, it is hardly credible that the Acts story was derived from Paul's narration.

Jiri

Clivedurdle · 07-21-2006, 11:33 AM

My bad for confusing stories!

Paul's is very interesting and might be psycho - somatic. He was thinking thoughts he should not - possibly blasphemous (to a Jew) - ones that god had a son who died for us.

His description of his internal fight is more than enough to get him running around the med.

I think we can work out what his thoughts were - it is about death and resurrection, human sacrifice to save us, wine into blood and bread into flesh - all utterly blasphemous.

Has anyone stated unambiguously that Paul is the creator of xianity, and Jesus was his imaginary friend?

The description above might also be of a bad trip.

Celine · 07-21-2006, 01:16 PM

Solo,
As an aside here, I find it astonishing how few of my colleagues have ever hear of, or read Julian Jaynes. Esp. considering how controversial his book was at the time.
I'm intrigued that you know/knew him, and wonder if you could share any of his thinking over the years since the book was first published.

Thanks

aa5874 · 07-21-2006, 01:52 PM

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Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

I do wonder if, possibly in reaction to the blasphemy that Jesus is classically mythological, a reaction has been, how dare you compare Christ to nursery tales.

But that completely misses the purpose of myth - it is all about struggle, psychology, defining the meaning of life, love, death, war, grief.

I see saying Jesus is a mythological character as in fact enabling xianised cultures to reclaim a central part of their meaning that has got lost in religiosity. I wonder if many problems of the twentiethand twenty first centuries - our basic clumsiness that leads to poor design, pollution, mess and lack of appreciation of excellence, is down to tawdry xians completely misunderstanding and literalising myth, resulting in terrible psychologies and societies.

The replacement you mention is in fact authenticity and the ability to appreciate the power and splendour of some of these stories, that have inspired cathedrals and singing and abolition of slavery. Note carefully - the institution xianity did none of this - people working with these myths did.

I recommend Cristopher Hill English Bible in 17th Century.

The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (or via: amazon.co.uk)

It's the myth, stupid.

I appreciate your contribution.

Solo · 07-21-2006, 02:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

My bad for confusing stories!

Paul's is very interesting and might be psycho - somatic. He was thinking thoughts he should not - possibly blasphemous (to a Jew) - ones that god had a son who died for us.

His description of his internal fight is more than enough to get him running around the med.

I think you are onto something. The classical mid-life manic episode has two phases: a euphoric one, which is a phantasy trip to paradise, or heaven that sometimes culminates in an OBE (out of body experiance), and a psychotic hell of a "hangover", marked by horrendous panic attacks and internal persecutions.

During the period of birth of Christianity, there were Jewish mystics who thought they had a technique that got them to see God in heaven (after Ezekiel's vision of God as majestic chariot, their secret books were called "hekaloth") and get them safely back. The Essenes also practiced ecstatic techniques with the same aim.

To an ordinary, respectable Jew this was all foolish blasphemy. Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise by an angry God when they ate the "gnosis" of good and evil. Even if it was possible to go see the garden (or God's kingdom) while alive it was taboo. The gnostics were mad ! God gave Moses the law for the Jews to keep ! When Saul heard what Jesus was doing, and after him his followers, it upset him and he was militating against them.

But then, lo and behold, Saul was struck by the same phenomena, since he himself had the "profile" of those "unto them that it was given to know the secrets of Jesus' kingdom". We went up to heaven and then through the terror of the angry Lord. When he came down he tried to figure out why God did it to him, and what the big scare was about.......and the rest is Christian history.

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I think we can work out what his thoughts were - it is about death and resurrection, human sacrifice to save us, wine into blood and bread into flesh - all utterly blasphemous.

Has anyone stated unambiguously that Paul is the creator of xianity, and Jesus was his imaginary friend?

The description above might also be of a bad trip.

The Eucharist probably originated after Paul - the passage where it occurs in Paul looks like a gloss.

Most learned people take Paul as the real creator of the creed; Peter's confession is important to the faith but largely symbolic.

Jiri

WishboneDawn · 07-21-2006, 02:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Has anyone stated unambiguously that Paul is the creator of xianity, and Jesus was his imaginary friend?
.

I had accepted that we christians wouldn't be here without Paul but never thought about Jesus being manufactured by him. Neat thought, thanks Clive.

Solo · 07-21-2006, 02:39 PM

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Originally Posted by Celine

Solo,
As an aside here, I find it astonishing how few of my colleagues have ever hear of, or read Julian Jaynes. Esp. considering how controversial his book was at the time.
I'm intrigued that you know/knew him, and wonder if you could share any of his thinking over the years since the book was first published.

Thanks

Celine,
my contact and correspondence with Julian was in late 80's and early 90's. As I no longer have his letters, I feel it would be unfair to be refering to them and making representations of his ideas about Christianity. As you perhaps know Julian passed away in 1997.

All I think I can tell you to set your mind at ease, is that Julian was not all that interested in the "conscious" mind, and that he associated Christianity with a fully developed consciousness. He professed to be intrigued by the sudden transition from the old Jewish eschatology into the bi-polar, heaven vs. hell complex in the Apocalyptic period, but resisted my entreaties to look into that.

As for his other research, I am not much versed.

Regards,
Jiri

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07-21-2006, 11:33 AM	#15
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	My bad for confusing stories! Paul's is very interesting and might be psycho - somatic. He was thinking thoughts he should not - possibly blasphemous (to a Jew) - ones that god had a son who died for us. His description of his internal fight is more than enough to get him running around the med. I think we can work out what his thoughts were - it is about death and resurrection, human sacrifice to save us, wine into blood and bread into flesh - all utterly blasphemous. Has anyone stated unambiguously that Paul is the creator of xianity, and Jesus was his imaginary friend? The description above might also be of a bad trip.

07-21-2006, 01:16 PM	#16
Celine Senior Member Join Date: May 2003 Location: Ames, IA Posts: 543	Solo, As an aside here, I find it astonishing how few of my colleagues have ever hear of, or read Julian Jaynes. Esp. considering how controversial his book was at the time. I'm intrigued that you know/knew him, and wonder if you could share any of his thinking over the years since the book was first published. Thanks

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