TimBowe

Is it possible that Paul considered himself to be the Messiah and that he seen the preaching of Jesus as a lie sent to deceive? Did he really have a genuine experience on Damascus and did he view himself as the living image of Christ?

dogsgod

The three asterisks in the red box beside your name looks real cool. Where can I get one of those?

Toto

Paul didn't write anything about an experience on the Road to Damascus. It was a fictional event created by the anonymous author of Acts, probably based on some Greco-Roman play.

gurugeorge

However, we do know from "Paul"'s own writing, if it is to be believed, that he received his gospel from no man but from Christ himself. Since (if the commonly-accepted dates are correct) he can't have personally known a human Jesus, that means he did indeed have some sort of visionary experience (i.e. he had some sort of experience in which a seeming-Jesus spoke to him and told him a "gospel" of some sort). So by his own words he had some sort of Jesus hallucination.

It's possible that the "Road to Damascus" thing is a garbled version of Paul's own claim of visionary experience, a dim "folk memory", or a dressed-up version of the truth.

As to whether he was mentally ill, that can't be said from his having visionary experience alone: it's possible to have such experiences (hallucinations) and be otherwise sane and rational (e.g. under certain conditions, such as repetitive prayer, unusual breathing patterns, long-term concentration on, and/or analysis of texts, disrupted sleep patterns, or insufficient sleep, certain kinds of sleep paralysis experience, or some combination of these, plus also maybe even deliberately trying to have visionary experiences - all these can trigger this kind of hallucination of being spoken to by some real-seeming "other"). Religion was (and occasionally still is) rife with that sort of thing (people claiming to be shown things by god(s) in dreams, in waking visions, etc.).

And in fact Corinthians supports this - "Paul"'s grokking of Jesus comes at the end of a list in which its type is not demarcated from those before. We know (from his own words) that his type of "seeing" was visionary. Therefore, the implication is that the Jerusalem people (with the "500" prob spurious and possibly some other interpolation in that passage?) "saw" Jesus in the same way that he did - i.e. in visionary experience. (But also "saw" the Anointed One's sub rosa advent and crucifixion, etc., foretold or foreshadowed in scripture - since it says "according to scripture".)

Furthermore, not only does "Paul" seem to have had a visionary experience, the general tenor of his writing indicates that the experience was also mystical - was one of identification and/or union.

Now of course "Paul" could have had these kinds of experiences in response to a human being Jesus living just prior to him, but the REAL argument from silence (the absence of any indication that the people he's talking about, the Jerusalem people, knew a human Jesus personally) mitigates against such a human Jesus and suggests myth all the way down (i.e. visionary experiences and scripture-poring as the source of the Jesus biography) - and this, too, is a plausible kind of religious startup.

DCHindley

Naw, but Paul did think he was destined by God even before he was born to reveal the "good news" to the non-Jewish nations (Gal 1:15). There are hints in his letters that he was not always open to this idea, and that he came to this realization by means of revelations from God that Gal 1:15-17 suggests took place in Damascus (because, after God revealed his mission to Paul, he "returned again to Damascus" after living in Arabia for a bit).

Now what that "good news" was is usually taken to be the saving grace of Jesus' vicarious sacrifice for the sins of anyone who will believe that it can happen. That is what the text as we have received it says, anyways ... well kinda. If anyone wants to really question Paul's sanity, it is in the way he seems to have two opposed and competing schemes of salvation in his mind at the same time, all without any consciousness of this discordance.

But Paul definitely did not think Jesus was some sort of deceiver, or that HE was the Christ/Messiah, or a living image of Christ. I don't think even the later gnostics thought such a thing of Paul. Now maybe Simon Magus thought HE was the Image of God (or at least the early Christian heresy hunters thought he did), and the later fictional romances called the Recognitions and Homilies of Clement (of Rome) speak of Simon Magus almost as if a stand-in for Paul.

Read up, man.

DCH

TimBowe

I just got done reading The Jew of Tarsus an unorthodox portrait of Paul By Hugh Joseph Schonfield and that's what he's proposing.

Solo

I am one who believes that Paul had a pronounced challenge of bi-polar disorder (manic depression) and that much of his Christ lore relates directly to ecstatic states (manic episodes) and their faithful companion, depression. There are many indications that Paul was a bipolar with a late onset. But the strongest one, that would make an impression not only of Paul's condition but his insight into it would be the passage of 2 Cor 12:2-11


In this passage Paul describes both polarities and understands there is a relation between them. He receives 'a thorn in the flesh' to keep him from being too elated (i.e. in the state of manic euphoria). This, I believe, would be the most decisive element in assessing Paul if Paul was seen by a mental health professional today.

As to whether Paul considered himself the Messiah, and therefore rejected the teachings of Jesus. There is something to this, although Paul certainly did not see himself as 'da' man'. He did not count himself a Jewish messianist in the traditional sense, as he did not consider God's kingdom on earth possible (1 Cr 15:50). This undoubtedly was a point of contention between him and the Jerusalem messianists. Paul considered Christ a phenomenon, into which he, Paul, received the greatest insight and for which he was, by God, the sole arbiter (Gal 5:10). This type of thinking is clearly delusional and inside the paranoid type of schema. Doubtless, Paul's demeanor and ideas would have struck most people of his time as bizzare.

On the other hand, Paul was highly intelligent and had an uncanny insight into not only the bipolar process but also into how he appeared to other people when he was out of control. This frankness - "I know I look like a madman when I am under the power of the Spirit ", made some people convinced that Paul really was sent by God. Psychologically, his ability to account for his madness would made a large impact in convincing people that this appearance of being mad / possessed was part of God's wisdom and a way to disguise Paul's apostolic greatness. Nowhere this theory of Paul would have been more popular than among the manics who, like Paul thought themselves God's elect, were like Paul conservative in outlook and, like him or following him, able or willing to control their behaviour when not in the throes of the Spirit. Paul's delusional schema (and it was delusional because parousia did not happen) would have been one of those that Emil Kraepelin, the psychiatrist who defined diagnostically the bipolar disorder (,or manic-depression, as he coined it) saw as intriguing or "finely spun".

I personally don't think the question of whether Paul was 'mentall ill' is of overriding importance. Like Paul Tillich, who urged theologians to accept the psychological 'abnormality' of religious experience I think Paul's courage, and (mostly) grace under pressure were far more important in shaping the new religion. Also, I am not only convinced that his experiences and his account of them were genuine, but that his testimony - because it is frank and insightful - is invaluable in assessing the whole early Jesus movement.

Jiri

aa5874

But, it has to be ASSUMED that Paul was a figure of history and then use the ASSUMPTION as an historical fact.

It can be seen that Saul/Paul bright light conversion in Acts is non-historical and that the Pauline writer appeared to be clueless about his own conversion, only God knows.

This is found in 2 Cor 12.2-3 It was not necessary for Saul/Paul to be mentally ill, just a liar would have done the trick.

TimBowe

Nietzsche On Paul

DCHindley

Ahh, Hugh! I always liked him, and have most of his books (except that one and I think Those Incredible Christians), but I thought he just wrote about Jesus & James.

DCH