Solo

The problem here - I think - is the way people view mental illness, even today. They see it as totally debilitating and irreversible. I even joke - and it is only a half-joke- that if manics did not recover their functioning selves to a degree, Jesus' name would have been Legion. Yet, there are very strong indicators that the gospel 'reality' offers a particularly challenged view of the world, that it was not some trivial challenge, but one which found its own forms of socialization and shared expression.

No doubt that most of the hallucinatory/delusional material referenced by the NT lies within the normal human experience. Most of us who have had high fever had hallucinations, most of us walked while hypnagogic. None of us is a stranger to a strong feeling of deja-vu. Except for a very small minority, we all get very intensely happy and want to embrace the world in that feeling, making it a permanent state of material or spiritual perfection. And most of us also know the other "pole" of mood, the hellish feeling of frustration, emptiness, purposeless crawling through life to nothingness.

There can also be no argument that cultures everywhere seek bliss altered mental states through mind-altering substances and dysregulation of all sorts (i.e. deprivation of sleep, sex, food, or general sensory).

Nonetheless, I am not persuaded that the fleeting brushes with the uncanny and supernatural can account for the "creative impulse" of religion. I have had this discussion over a decade with a friend who is trying to convince me that the descent of the Holy Ghost during Pentecost in Acts 2 is just a naive rendering of your regular Pentecontalist babblefest available on any given Saturday night in Iowa or Tennessee today.

But it is just not the same thing: the devotees in Des Moines or Nashville get their kicks, jump in their cars and go home to watch television. By Monday daybreak it's back to the office, with no visible upset or need to speak in tongues with customers on the phone.

By contrast, the typical psychotic experiencing the descent of the Spirit in Jerusalem two thousand years back had no weekly exercises in tongue-twisting or Weib und Kind to go back home to. He hated his family and himself. He was getting overwhelmed by these uncanny states of mind for weeks on end, in which we would lose sleep, start wandering around, seeing things noone else could see and making all sorts of predictions of earth-shattering catastrophies that would never come. In his peaks of excitement he would talk gibberish and look drunk even though he did not drink an ounce of alcohol. He would talk aloud with prophets long dead. If he was lucky, he fought off the devil who prompted him to hurl himslef off high cliffs to prove his levitational power was for real. If he was lucky he realized the devil deluded him with vistas of grandeur, and magical prowess. But it would take years of Jesus healing, if not some exceptional luck, for him to it make back home to Dad as a prodigal son cured of mania. More likely than not he would end up overthrown in wilderness.

Jiri

lpetrich

Paul's Christ barely has any biography. Q and Thomas are both collections of sayings, and also have hardly any biography. So I'll try a calculation that sorts out the various Gospels.

1. The hero's mother is a royal virgin, while
She's not called the Virgin Mary for nothing, though only Matthew and Luke mention the virgin-birth story. Mark stars with a full-grown JC, while John goes from a metaphysical origin to something much like Mark.
Matthew: 1/2
Mark: 0
Luke: 1/2
John: 0

2. his father is a king, and
Though Joseph lives as a commoner, he is described as being descended from King David.
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 1
John: 0

3. the father is related to the mother.
All: 0

4. The hero's conception is unusual or miraculous; hence
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 1
John: 1

5. he is reputed to be a son of a god.
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 1
John: 1

6. Evil forces attempt to kill the infant or boy hero, but
King Herod orders the killing of the Bethlehem baby boys.
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 0
John: 0

7. he is spirited away to safety and
Joseph and Mary flee with him to Egypt.
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 0
John: 0

8. reared by foster parents in a foreign land. Besides this,
They stay in Egypt for a while, though they eventually return.
Matthew: 1/2
Mark: 0
Luke: 0
John: 0

9. we learn no details of his childhood until
A little bit. His being a child prodigy in the Temple.
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 1/2
John: 0

10. he journeys to his future kingdom, where
He leaves is family and goes into the desert.
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 1
John: 0

11. he triumphs over the reigning king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast, and
He successfully resists the Devil's temptations and the Devil goes away defeated.
Matthew: 1
Mark: 0
Luke: 1
John: 0

12. marries a princess, often his predecessor's daughter, and
No. His extracanonically-rumored girlfriend, Mary Magdalene, was a commoner.
All: 0

13. becomes king himself.
He becomes not only a religious leader, but also a self-styled messiah and "king of the Jews".
All: 1

14. For a while he reigns uneventfully,
Yes. He mainly wanders around, preaching and working miracles.
All: 1

15. promulgating laws. But
Yes. Many of his teachings can easily be interpreted as laws.
All: 1

16. he later loses favor with his subjects or with the gods and
The leaders and people of Jerusalem turn against him and his followers flee.
All: 1

17. is driven from the throne and the city and
He is put on trial for blasphemy.
All: 1

18. meets with a mysterious death,
He takes a few hours to die on that cross, a very fast death for a young man in good health.
All: 1

19. often atop a hill.
Golgotha: Skull Hill.
All: 1

20. If he has children, they do not succeed him.
He is childless.
All: 1

21. His body is not buried, yet
He rises from the dead and leaves his tomb.
All: 1

22. he has one or more holy sepulchers.
Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, which is traditionally supposed to be in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
All: 1

Totals:
Matthew: 19
Mark: 10
Luke: 16
John: 12

Matthew fits Lord Raglan's profile the best, being close to the maximum of 22 with 19.

Luke does not fit as well, because he mentions that child-prodigy incident and because he does makes no mention of King Herod vs. the Bethlehem baby boys.

Mark gets a low score because he has hardly any biography of Jesus Christ before his baptism by John the Baptist, which started his career as a religious prophet.

John is like Mark, except for adding a rather metaphysical origin of JC, which pushes his score up a bit.

Zeichman

Giving half of a point would be generous. There's no way you can get away with a full point.

John is certainly "0," nothing at all is said about his conception. Luke's divine impregnation is somewhat dubious, too.

You lost me with this one. How is this his kingdom in any way?

No way. This is not a "reign" at all. When is he crowned "king"? Only in his last hours in each of the gospels in a totally ironic way. Luke goes out of his/her way to portray Jesus as a non-messianic pretender. Jesus' execution has nothing to do with any claims of this sort in that gospel.

During his ostensible "reign"?

again, during a "reign"?

Driven from what throne?

John doesn't say this.

I think "childless" means a "0."

You realize that you said the exact opposite of what the criterion is, no? There is no way this ISN'T a "0."

Here are my generous totals. I would probably give them much less if I were posting anywhere else.

Totals:
Matthew: 10
Mark: 5
Luke: 6
John: 5

lpetrich

Check on the Messianic prophecies that Jesus Christ was described as fulfilling. You have to be a male-line descendant of King David to be worthy of the position of Messiah, and Joseph also satisfied that criterion, making him and his male ancestors uncrowned kings.

I will concede that the appropriate score for John here is a bit iffy.

But Luke plainly states that the Holy Spirit made Mary pregnant with Jesus Christ, despite her being a virgin: "The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God."" (Luke 1:13) Poor lady, raped by a ghost.

That was part of his "journey" into religious prophethood.

You have to be a bit flexible in interpreting Lord Raglan's profile. Jesus Christ was "crowned" by John the Baptist, and he "reigned" as a religious leader and prophet.

John is less explicit about the timing than the other Gospels, but the timing suggested by John's account is consistent with the timing that the others give. It's not like John had described JC surviving 2 or 3 days on that cross.

Not at all. The important thing here is not being succeeded by children, and if one is childless, one automatically satisfies that condition.

The point is that he does not stay buried. A few days after he is laid to rest, he wakes up and walks out of his tomb.

Why would location make much of a difference?

dog-on

I believe we are speaking past each other...

Mysticism, astral projection, etc, are simply names for different spiritual delusions men have conjured for themselves. Regardless of what people may believe about such an experience, the fact simply remains that there are, in my honest opinion, no such animals as "spirit", "spirit world", "astral plane", etc., in any real sense of the words. This leaves, in reality, only scripture and man's vivid imagination.

gurugeorge

I think we can sort of meet in the middle on this actually. There are all sorts of levels and degrees of intensity in these kinds of experiences - perhaps we could say that there are two "scales". One is the scale from "self induced" to "unwonted", the other scale from "weak" to "intense" (we might also add in your "trauma induced" and the wild card of "accidental" as separate factors). I'd say that what you're looking at in the founders of religion is intense experience that's either unwonted or self-induced, but probably unwonted most of the time, and self-induced by the first followers' (who try to emulate the founder, and find it fairly easy to do so, given bodily proximity, and the body's ability to unconsciously learn knacks from others' bodily cues). Then as the followers' proximity (in space and time) to the founder fades, the followers' effects get weaker, except for the occasional unwonted charismatic who perhaps reawakens the stream. At that stage you have people who try to induce it in themselves, but fail, and are jealous of the ones who can "do it", and in the manner of the brushless fox, try to sanitize the religion of the charismatic element, making it more of a purely philosophical, or purely memetic (moral, psychological) affair.

Within this paradigm I think it's also important to bear in mind the distinction between visionary experiences and mystical experiences. What I'm calling visionary experiences all involve conversation or some kind of communication with apparently discarnate intelligences ("ascension", travel, flight, "ladders" meditations, or in the other "shamanic" direction, burrowing, tunnelling, "underworld", etc. on the one hand; or on the other hand, those types of experiences where the world/discarnate intelligence comes to the person rather than the person to the world/entity, such as "clairvoyance", crystal or mirror gazing, divination, oracles, etc.). Mystical experience on the other hand is a simpler affair (although it too has "grades" or levels of some kind) which generally involves loss of the ordinary self sense, and a concomitant sense that one is the world, universe, God, the Absolute, whatever.

These two sometimes go together (e.g. probably in the case of Gnosticism, certainly in the case of systems like Tibetan Buddhism, which is probably the closest Eastern analogue in terms of combining the two elements); but one class of experience can definitely be had quite without the other being involved.

We can take the visionary type of experience as being in some sense linked to schizoid, paranoid, manic-depressive or other kinds of experience, but because of its lack of "phenomena" (so to speak) the mystical experience requires a slightly difference "illness" analogue.

There's a psychologist, can't remember his name, who thinks that the classical "loss of self" type of mystical experience found from East to West is actually the same thing as we in the West call "depersonalization" (DP). IOW what is longed for, prepared for, in the East, is a kind of experience that's viewed by people brought up in the West with horror when it's chanced upon - loss of the sense of self, of knowing "who" you are.

With that rough equivalence, the broad outline is complete, I think.

I think the virtue of this approach to religion is it ditches the arrogance you often see in the way rationalists treat religious people. These kinds of experiences are not necessarily debilitating or dysfunctional, they can be trained, they are interesting in themselves, etc. And it's easy to see how people can have strong beliefs about the entities encountered, so that you can see a different approach would have to be taken to "arguing them out of" their beliefs (if that's even necessary, once this is understood).

Really, it's not THESE aspects of religion that are the problem, it's the memetic aspects of what happens to philosophies that devolve from these experiences, when those philosophies are (through the mixture of politics and religion) uncritically imposed en masse, on people who don't have them and aren't interested in them, and whose lives are subsequently ruled by people using them as tools of control, browbeating, etc.

gurugeorge

Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "delusions men have conjured up for themselves". I don't know what's added by calling them "delusions". They are more appropriately called illusions, not delusions. Delusions has a pejorative element that doesn't really fit the situation.

These are very real experiences of seeming reality. They can be explained scientifically (there are outlines of explanation by scientists like Susan Blackmore, who herself has had OOBEs). They lead people who have them to believe in the entities they perceive, and because of the strength of the seeming reality, they really believe in them. They are simply the most obvious candidate for a strong "thing" at the root of religion. These experiences are where the texts come from.

The experience of meeting god comes first (e.g. the prophet's conversation with god), the text comes after.

Vague speculations about the world aren't the sorts of things that induce sane people to endure hardship and travail; an experience of meeting and talking to God does. Objectively, there's no god there, but because it sure damn seems to the person who has these kinds of experiences that the god is there, just as real to them as you or I, it's quite understandable that this experience of meeting god will induce a strongly held belief that you are never going to be able to talk them out of - unless you are able to show them the "wizard behind the curtain", show them, in the way certain optical illusions show us the flimsiness of our ordinary consciousness constructs, the flimsiness and brain-induced nature of the god they are so vividly perceiving.

What you are talking about is something further down the line, what happens when a religion gets spread to people as a public meme, to people who aren't even basically religious, or capable of, or interested in, actually "meeting god", but may be clever, imaginative, good social organisers, etc. But what we need to look at at the origin of a religion is this type of direct experience of "god." (i.e. this class of brain phenomena)

dog-on

True, but man "met" God long before Christianity. I just don't see such experiences as being necessary to explain the origins of this religion. Everything was already laid out, (at least when mining between the lines), in the pocket edition...

Zeichman

I still doesn't satisfy what it literally says. Oedipus = 1, Jesus = (at best) 1/2. And I think I'm being generous. The criterion doesn't say he has to be "of the line" of a king, but his father must be a king.


Except if you reread it, you'll see that the virginal conception is nowhere clearly stated, even in the quote you offer. I suspect if Matthew had not survived, it is somewhat doubtful that this would be read as referring to a virginal conception.


I think the point of emphasis was kingdom, not some random journey.


I'm not biting on that one. That's far closer to the prophetic call narrative than to a crowning. Again, the gospel writers only associate metaphorical kingship with his last hours.

The purpose of this exercise is to note what they say, not what they are consistent with. You could harmonize almost anything in the gospels, but this is precisely what I am contensting.

Again, I think you're missing the point.


The criterion is not whether he stayed buried, but whether he was buried.

Because I know people in this forum are far more fond of comparative religion than people elsewhere are.

gurugeorge

But he's "meeting" God all the time - right now, there are people all over the world - Daoists, Buddhists, Hindus of numerous kinds, Sufis, Native Americans, South American natives, Californian hippies, who are having all sorts of meetings-with and talkings-to entities that seem to them to be very real. Some keep quiet about it, but others proclaim their encounters to the world, give out their messages, etc. Some find their revelations conform to the religious tradition they were born into, others feel they are saying something new and revolutionary, and feel impelled to spread their message.

This is the rule. Why should the Pillars, Paul, the Gnostics, etc., have been an exception?

I think you are focussing too much on religions as developed belief systems. Religion in its origin isn't about belief it's about direct perceptual knowledge knowing God, seeing god, talking to God. Now of course as we rationalists would say, that knowledge is only seeming knowledge, just like the lines aren't bent in the Muller-Lyer illusion, they only seem bent, so to the religious founder they really seem to be talking to an independent living entity, but they actually aren't. However, that kind of direct experience is of an entirely different character from second hand, third hand, umpteenth hand belief in propositions held as true, howsoever fervently those beliefs may be held, either by nutcases or by sincere, well meaning people.

Another way of looking at it: just take seriously what those religious founders said: the Prophets, Paul, etc. They said they talked to God, spoke to God, and God said this or that. It's not necessary, in order to preserve the integrity of one's disbelief in the entity, to disbelieve in their experiences of entities (they were lying, deluded, hallucinating, con-artists, etc., though of course some probably were). The third route is to take seriously their reports, but find some way of showing that what they sincerely thought they saw and talked to didnt' exist as such, and show how it could seem to exist, even though it didn't. Religious heterophenomenology.

As it happens, we do have a handle on just the sort of mechanism that might produce these kinds of visions. (As Susan Blackmore has it, it's some combination of the proprioceptive faculty, combined with the internal world-modelling mechanism, combined with the symbol/story creating function that creates dreams, all together creating a sophisticated, coherent kind of hallucination.)