Solo

Many historians of Christianity are convinced that along with the preaching of the kingdom, the historical figure of Jesus functioned as a talented healer. Most believe this implicitly as the figures of famous travelling physicians abounded in all ages and in most places on the planet. Schweitzer saw his mission in Lambarene as Christ’s calling, i.e. central to his view of Jesus as not just a preacher but an activist par excellence for a benevolent God. The late Morton Smith argued fervently (Jesus the Magician (or via: amazon.co.uk)) that Jesus’ fame as an healing magician was that which assured him of his post-mortem following. Steven Davies (Jesus the Healer (or via: amazon.co.uk)), went a step further, portraying Jesus as essentially a pre-modern psychotherapist, utilizing his own experience of the Spirit possession as a tool of his trade.

I do not believe that the historical Jesus was a healer. In my understanding of the Christian origins, the obscure figure of a Galilean apocalyptic preacher with a common name was probably summarily executed in Jerusalem under Pilate, and his small following absorbed into the congregation of James the Just. In James’ church of the ‘poor’ Jesus was adopted as a martyr of the last days, who was rehabilitated in heaven, and appointed to act as the church intercessor for the coming messiah. Jesus’ one time companions sent out on missions to proclaim him as the prophet of the last days and collect money for the church. On their journeys they crossed path with Paul of Tarsus who initially opposed them without reservation, but later, after his own ‘revelations’, changed his stance and vied with them for converts offering his own version of a heavenly Jesus as a universal redeemer. As his overtures to the James’ church failed, Paul’s churches in the diaspora operated independently from, and as a rival to, the Jerusalem-based Nazarenes, until the first Jewish War. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, and as the Nazarenes were exiled, they began a dialogue with the Paulines, and in stages merged with them into the proto-orthodox Christian church. The gospel of Mark is an important document for this process. It was written by a committed Pauline sage, as an overture to the Petrine earthly Jesus traditions, to join with Paul’s churches in worshipping the messiah of the cross.

Mark’s gospel is a complex allegory. It is designed to fool the uninitiated reader into thinking that the Jesus as portrayed by the script, was the historical person that “the pillars” and the travelling group around him experienced as a leader and the proclaimer of the coming son of man. But that Jesus was retrofitted in Mark as the personified Holy Spirit, i.e. as the Pauline heavenly arbiter who knows everything. Mark invests the earthly Jesus with this faculty, but paradoxically, that makes the prophet Jesus know his own earthly fate and the resurrectional scheme by which it is redeemed. This of course inverts the original Jesus’ preaching of God’s kingdom on earth, to preaching his own messiahship of the cross. The disciples in Mark don’t believe what Paul’s Christ tells them because they were led by ‘another Jesus, and another spirit’ to the bitter disappointment of seeing, first, their dear leader executed like a criminal, second, the protector church of James decline after its leader’s death, and finally, the dreams of the messianic age in Israel dashed in the carnage and defeat by the invading Kittim. The disciples are dumb; they are blind; they run away from the truth that their Jesus was destroyed in the flesh by a horrible ordeal (just as Paul insisted on reminding them).

One thing that we should remember is that the two founding groups (and the Gnostics, which permeated both from the start), were ecstatics who believed that the auto-suggested ideas which visited them in the protracted periods of high excitement was actually discrete knowledge sent by God to them as his elect. The enabling agent, the Holy Spirit sponsored the experience of the kingdom of heaven, an engulfing sense of euphoria and wisdom de profundis. As I have repeatedly asserted here, the ecstatic phenomena are best understood as a form of manic excitation.

I believe that in Mark’s idiom, the cures Jesus performs are allegories of the known beneficial health effects of mood conversion (from depression to manic states), ones we may safely assume were observable in antiquity. The idea actually struck me suddenly in the early stages of my research, as I read of Jesus curing the paralytic at Capernaum. I was skeptical of Jesus as a healer figure already. Paul’s address to the Corinthians identified ‘the gifts of healing’ (charismata iamatwn) as a manifestation of the Spirit, but his writing seems innocent of knowledge about cures performed in Jesus’ name and in his memory. The description of an early Jesus cure by Mark left few doubts in my mind:
When I contemplated this, I recalled the bizarre courtroom scene where Kafka’s hero, K. is to receive his hearing in The Trial. People there were packed right up to the ceiling. And like the paralytic in Mark, K. also reaches his destination by a mind-boggling point of entry, in a dogged determination to receive the attention of the authority. K. does not know where in the building the court of inquiry sits, and is embarrassed to admit he is to appear before the judges. So he invents a name of a person who supposedly lives in the house and goes knocking on doors, hoping to peek in and see if it is a courtroom. Finally, a woman – who mysteriously reads the ploy – invites K. to step into her laundry room and then points him to an open door to an adjoining hall which – against all expectations – is where the court sits. I said to myself, no, Mark does not present this as an actual event. He actually advertises it , through an outrageously flagrant exaggeration, as a symbolic proposition. But a symbolic proposition of what ?

The scene easily fit with my reading of Mark as the allegory of the trajectory of the Spirit. The paralytic was not paralysed but suffered deep depression, in which he could not (or would not) move. And then he was allegorically brought to the Spirit (i.e. into a state of manic exhilaration) which quickly restored him back to a mobile self. Similar symbolism is present in the cures of the haemorrhaging woman and Jairus’ daughter. The woman with the issue of blood felt in her body that she was healed of her disease after she touched Jesus’ garment and the bleeding stopped. The phrasing is important as it indicates both an objective effect and subjective feeling but it is again the crowd pressing around Jesus which provides the context of her cure. The disciples are made incredulous of the effect of the touching, which is a patent Markan pre-emptive ruse, by means of which he suggests the reality of the scene (Recall, e.g. the fear of the disciples of seeing ‘a ghost’ when Jesus hopped to them across the stormy lake.) The fear of the woman symbolizes the negative effects of the Spirit (familiar to all manics) but her faith in the Spirit earns her promise that her physical ailment will not return. The Jairus daughter is not dead, but like the paralytic, appears lifeless in the throes of catatonic depression. The Spirit (as Jesus) cures her and Jesus commands that she be fed, meaning she has passed into a state of euphoria and might forget to eat, as those milling around Jesus are notoriously known to do (3:20, 6:31, 8:1). (BTW, in the reckoning of the disciples Jairus’ daughter was not really dead. This becomes apparent in the confusion of Peter, John and James coming down the mountain in 9:10, trying to figure out what the rising from the dead could mean.)

My theory assumes that the psychological touchpoints of the manic-depressive challenge have not changed in history. Most manics are both, genuinely convinced that they belong to an elite favoured by God or gods (or are simply superior if they are atheists), and in the same measure, accursed and abandoned by them, when they are low (or simply done for or emptied of purpose if atheists). The other thing to understand about this fairly common condition is that unlike other mental disorders, e.g. schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s, this one is not degenerative. When the manic excitement subsides, most often in a few weeks, the subject’s rational faculty returns, even if deeply affected by the experience of altered mentation. The subjects will realize as a rule after the first episode that they went off the deep end, and most will feel profoundly embarrassed about the way they carried on. At the same time, they are hooked on the intensity of the ecstatic highs and they are willing to pay any price to stay in the cycle. Many would go into any length to justify their excess and rhapsodize on it. This is as common an observation now as it would have been two thousand years ago. (Paul’s mysterious 1 Cr 13:3 testifies to this : If I deliver my body to be burned but have not love, I gain nothing. The majority of people who do not “peak” (Maslow (or via: amazon.co.uk)) would quickly ask here, ‘what’s the point of delivering one’s body to be burned in the first place ? And hell, what does that mean, anyway ?’ )

The faith in the Spirit was unconditional for the Paulines. They believed that the phenomena they experienced were from God, and their ability to recover from the debilitating effects of the manic fevers bespoke of their election. Escaping the judgment of fire, and recovering their sound mind after tripping in the phantasy world of miraculous happenings, and later fighting off the devil who suggested them as ‘reality’, was the proof they were ready for the coming wrath of God – which was going to consume the ungodly types but save them as the true believers. This faith in ‘what doesn’t kill you’ made them stronger. Why do you call me good ?, asks Mark’s demon, no one is good but God alone.

The “cures” of “Jesus” were then observations that with the arrival of the mighty Spirit , diseases and ailments were either promptly forgotten or actually did show remission. Anyone who has observed florid manics is immediately struck by the enormous amount of physical energy they are capable of generating. The body really seems “healed” by the strange excitement. Eczemas and other skin conditions (which were conflated as leprosy (lepra) in antiquity) disappear on short order, as many of them are physical manifestations of depression. The revved up cardio-vascular output takes care of many ailments, even serious medical conditions which may have been present for years. There is also a tendency in manics to wander around (so called fugues), which takes them out of environments which may have caused, or contributed, to their poor health. Another well-known effect of manic excitement, is that the experience of a greatly elevated threshold of pain. People who read the gospels do not realize the ‘power to tread on serpents and scorpions’ that Jesus confers is actually based on the manic experience of the sudden absence of pain and discomfort. This was a well-known fact in antiquity, which among other things, made authorities go into extremes in trying to make a furiosus (a raving madman) come to his senses. Josephus recounts the bloody scourging of Jesus ben Ananus by Albinus (Wars 6.5.3), in which the prisoner’s bones were laid bare. And, yet he did not make any supplication for himself or shed any tears but,…at every stroke of the whip his answer was, ‘Woe, woe to Jerusalem’. So naturally, in a place where the wise authorities would attempt to save a man for sanity by shredding his flesh, the idea that the wise God would plot saving the world by having his own son killed after a similar torture, would not seem all that outrageous.

I will not be delving here into the cures of deaf and dumb (7:37) and the blind (eg. Bartimaeus). They are, I trust, improvisations on “hearing” (the Word) , “seeing” (the gospel correctly) and the power of “utterance” which the Spirit delivers. The hyperbolic, symbolic nature of these cures should be readily apparent by people willing to give my idea some thought.
But let me say a few words about Jesus’ exorcisms. There is a certain high probability that Mark’s Pauline church was exorcising the demon possessed, and had some success with it. The early exorcists no doubt used the experience of their own possession by the Spirit, and managing the chaotic interior of such visits. It is from the fighting like-with-like that the charges of expelling the demons by their prince, Beelzebub, were evidently levelled against the church healers who resented such petards because they were – unlike the garden variety of street psychotics whom they treated – determined, organized, self-disciplined and as a rule much brighter than their accusers. By the looks of it, Mark had no qualms about portraying Jesus being seen in some quarters, even among those closest to him, as plainly mad. Drawing on Paul’s “charter” (1 Cor 1:18-31), God made his elect look foolish to shame the wise. If in Mark’s hyperbole, Jesus, as the exorcist was known by the demons, it was for no other reason than that he knew them. Unfortunately, this franc parler was soon suppressed in the gospel. Neither Matthew nor Luke thought it prudent to let this hang out. John’s Jews perceive Jesus as mad because they are hostile to him.

Let me know what you think : does this make sense to you ?

Jiri

Toto

It's a lot to digest.

Do you see the early Christians as a group of people, all with mania? How widespread do you think this condition was?

The most familiar case study is that of Sabbatai Zvi (spelled variously), but he was one bipolar person who, in his manic phases, attracted a following of non-manic people. Many modern corporations seem to be headed by people who are diagnosed at a distance as bipolar or manic; there are even management theories that see some utility in this.

spamandham

Why do you believe that Jesus' followers were absorbed into the James' cult?

Solo

I have done some reading on the patterns of bipolarity. Statistics are available since WWII and show a surprising degree of uniformity accross populations, and sex (women somewhat overrepresented), and a consistently higher than average IQ. Urban vs rural settings seem although the latter seems skewed, because bi-polars have fairly higher mobility than average, which tends from rural to urban settings. (This may be the function of higher IQ but may not be). Cultural factors are not well understood but as I showed here recently religious themes are prevalent. The population of bipolars (with clinical or close-to symptoms) draws on a base of about 10% of population with unipolar and 5% with bipolar mood fluctuations. The clinical base would be between 1%-2% of population.
It is reasonable to expect that the statistical profiles in antiquity would have been similar because the psycho-physiological profiles of bi-polarity are markedly hereditary. The 'natural' ecstatic would be still rarer, and gThomas' estimate of 0.1-0.02% of population seems reasonably close. (gT(23) - I shall choose you, one of a thousand, two out of ten thousand, and they shall stand as one).

One explanation for the rise of bipolar apocalypticism (and its offshoot, gnosticism) would be the growth of urban centers and the wider migratory patterns of cosmopolitanism created by a large empire. People with similar ideas, predispositions, problems if you will, would find each other more easily in large cities. And look where Christianity is first reported.

OTOH, I do not believe that all, or even the majority of the early seeding communities (such as the one Paul was addressing) were frank manics. Many were, but likely there were some wanna-be tongue speakers and some had what I call the "obsessive-compulsive", or "ritual" attraction to religion (so hateful to Matthew) which in time stabilized the new confession into proto-orthodoxy. Christianity would be family religion from the start because, as I said, bipolarity runs in families. The "hating one's mother/father" would also be very strong because the manifestations of the disorder tend to create conflicts. Manics in a rationally organized society - which the Greco-Roman antiquity was an early model - are perceived as 'abnormal' and threaten the family's good name - if it has one.

The way I picture it is that the apostles - and most of the real ones were probably as self-created as Paul - were working on a target population of hardcore bipolars, who could attest to the 'weird things that were happening to the world' and would find great relief in the communalization and affirmation of their experience. There were also the less pronounced bipolar types (or cyclothymics) who would be attracted as they had a faint sense of knowing what the end of the world was about and had intellectual curiosity. There would be the crazies and sybarites (whom Paul hated) who were attracted by the promise of freedom before the coming deluge. And finally, not in the least there were folks who wanted to help these fine 'God tested' men, who believed in them, and wanted to help them.

Well, yes, but do not I think in terms of communities with a highly centralized form of setup and a strong leader, like Sabbatai Zvi, or David Koresh, or Shoko Asahara. It would be more like the outbreaks of milleniarism in Middle Ages, the Bogomils, the Cathars, the Taborites, the Anabaptists. These were highly volatile egalitarian communities which burned out or became transformed into something else.

Jiri

Solo

I work with the traditional timetable. If the first Jesus professing comes from Paul cca 35-37 CE from outside of Palestine, then the mother community in Jerusalem would have had to be well-established and accepted in the city some time before it would send missions to the outside.

Also, if there was a historical apocalyptic figure executed in Jerusalem, the apocalyptics in the city would not have liked it. How would they have reacted to the perceived injustice of the temple establishment ?

Finally, it is clear that James the Just does not fit anywhere in the legends of the Acts. And yet he was the undisputed leader of the congregation where Jesus was proclaimed. Hegesippus (in Eusebius) more or less lets the cat out of the bag when he has the temple priests suggest to James, that he stop proclaiming Jesus. Well, how probable is that they did not know after ~30 years of the church existence that James was Jesus' brother and the church was specifically established to proclaim nothing else ?!

Jiri

spamandham

This time table seems a bit earlier than the traditional timetable. Doesn't tradition state Paul converted in the mid 40s and wrote his letters in the mid 50s?

But ok. I guess I wouldn't agree with your conclusion based on the evidence, but I can at least see why you might arrive at it based on your assumptions.

Solo

The traditional table places Paul's conversion into mid-thirties, based on Gal 2:1, and his mention of King Aretas in 2 Cor 11:32-33.

Jiri