Solo

Here is an excerpt from http://positiveatheism.org//hist/maccoby.htm; the late professor Maccoby writes:

The strong influence of the prophesy of Zechariah on Jesus is shown by his mode of entrance into Jerusalem riding on an ass's colt. Such deliberate fulfillment of Zechariah ix. 9 suggests that Jesus also had the rest of Zechariah's prophesies in mind.

"The people that have fought against Jerusalem" were none other than the Romans, the heathen barbarians who had united "the nations" in a great empire and had set their faces against God. He himself, Jesus of Nazareth, was the person to whom the prophet was addressing his instructions; the Messiah who would arrive in Jerusalem on an ass's colt, and would stand in "the valley of the mountains" together with a company of "saints" to witness the appearance of the glory of God on the Mount of Olives. He would see the Romans stricken by a plague, and would lead "Judah" in fighting against them. Then, after a great victory, he would reign as King-Messiah in Jerusalem, where every year on the anniversary of his victory he would welcome representatives of every nation on earth, coming to pay homage to the Lord of Hosts in his Temple.

It may be objected that this account makes Jesus appear insane. Could he really have expected the prophesies of Zechariah to be fulfilled so literally that night on the Mount of Olives? How could he have been so sure he knew the exact hour of the prophesies, and that it was through him that they would be fulfilled? As a person, Jesus was what would today be described as a "manic" character, i.e., one capable of remaining for long periods at a high pitch of enthusiasm and euphoria. This enabled him to impress his associates to the extent that they could not let his memory die. He was not Judas of Galilee, or Bar Kochba, who were Messiahs of essentially ordinary or normal temperament, men who made their bid for power, failed, and that was that. It was no accident that Jesus gave rise to a new world religion. Christianity was a falsification of everything that Jesus stood for, yet every detail of this falsification was built on something that existed in his temperament and outlook. It was only a step for the Hellenistic Gentiles to transform Jesus's soaring conviction of his universal mission into a dogma of his divinity; or to transform his confidence of victory by the hand of God, rather than by guerilla methods, into a pacifist other-worldly doctrine which transferred the concept of victory on to a "spiritual" plane. Jesus's "manic" temperament was the mainspring of the early Christian Church, with its ecstatic mood, its universal ambition, and its confidence in ultimate victory.

Any ideas on this ? I noted that my suggestion in one of the threads that there was something to the uncanny bunching of miracles at night or daybreak in the synoptics, was met with a single derisive comment. But could it be that Jesus "disciples" and "witnesses" were people with predisposition to mood swings ? No ? How about Lk 6:21 ? How about "body full of light" ? Anyone here had a body full of light ?

Haran

Yeah. It's stupid.

Toto

Maccoby has some insights, but in this passage he assumes that Jesus acted to fulfill scritpture, where most interpreters assume that the authors of the gospels invented the scene to portray Jesus as fulfilling the scriptures.

The idea that Jesus was manic seems to me to be derived from a need to explain the rise of Christianity. It is assumed that the religion was founded by someone, and modern studies that show leaders of new religious movements are often charismatic but a bit psycho, ergo it is assumed that Jesus was charismatic or manic or whatever the current fashionable psychological designation happens to be.

gstafleu

As Toto says, usually it is assumed that it is the author (be it one who actually wrote the story or the group that created the folklore) who had the prophesies in mind. Trying to use that to psychoanalyze a character as evanescent as the historical Jesus can no doubt lead to some interesting hypotheses.

Helpmabob

I think the manic tag is perfectly applicable to christians, or at least how christians should in part be, given the awesome magnitude of the promises made and the grace of the Lord Jesus in whom their faith rests. I have met christians, so I can speak with experience. I never met Jesus in the flesh, (obviously) but I would be surprised if 'manic' was the first word that would spring to mind in describing Him. He was certainly recognised as 'not being like the other lads' (Luke 2:39-52).

Javaman

Agreed.

Toto

Mania

Solo

No I don't think so. This idea that I have been toying with for some eighteen years (on the side, I keep my day job of a computer engineer) has really no big compulsion behind it, nor am I trying to trash the religion (or religion in general) by tagging it with psychiatric labels. Nor I think was Maccoby. There is simply something uncanny about many of the NT "events" which is more easily accessible to the bipolar temperament than to people who have been "spared" the "gnosis" of polarized emotions and finally a brain gone haywire.

When I, early on in my research, suggested to a learned exeget that all the nature miracles in the synoptics (including the annunciation) had some connection to the night setting, disturbed sleep, or transparently hypnagogic "events" that usually happen in early morning, he paused and said that this was the most interesting observation about the texts he heard in a long time. "But yes, of course, the Greeks had a word for the faculty of access to the supernatural - "horama", a special kind of vision which occured in lieu of sleep. Later, I found a study of the frequency of complex partial seizures (characteristic of temporal lobe epilepsy and some states of manic excitement) which stated they occur most frequently between 2am - 4am in the morning, and over 80% between sunset and daybreak. Now consider the richness of the night life of the synoptics, at a time of history where nearly everyone - including the Sanhedrin -was asleep at night. So much were the scribes bewitched by the magic a sleepless (and excited) brain could produce in the dark, they inverted a common Greek idiom. So when Paul lectures to the church elders at Ephesus in Acts 20, Luke writes, he pleaded with his flock for three years, night and day (nukta kai hemeran). The expression also occurs in Mark and the two letters to Timothy.

I think that the "manic Jesus" thesis can shed many interesting insights into the meanings of the texts. Bernard Shaw immediately seized on the incident of the fig tree in which Jesus went looking for fruit which was out of season, as a proof of his teetering on the edge. I don't think the story was "a mystery" to him, as it was not a mystery to Maslow, or any bright bipolar student of the texts.

gstafleu

Following Schumaker, the mechanism underlying religion is the same as the one underlying various disorders. Hence seeing a relation between religious expression and disorders is not unexpected. I'm sure more than one disorder can qualify, obsessive compulsive disorder comes to mind.

However, the big problem here is ascribing such a disorder to a character, Jesus, of whom it is quite certain that, whatever his historical avatar may or may not have been, it wasn't the one in the bible. See Price (Deconstructing Jesus, or The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man) for details on how everything Jesus "said" or "did" is derived from something else. That means that, irrespective if there was a histiorical Jesus behind the character portrayed in the Bible, you are ascribing a disorder to an invented figure, or at least you are basing your diagnosis on things he didn't say or do, rather they were put in his mouth/hands.

Furthermore, disorders are very culture bound. What passes for a disorder here and now may have been normal then and there. For example, the medieval intense experience of religion would be seen as a disorder in the modern world (self mutilation would result in a compulsory commitment to a mental institution, for example).

For a good expose of the relation between mental disorders and religion, see John Schumaker's book The Corruption of Reality.

Solo

These are fair comments and quite a familiar critique: if two psychiatrists cannot agree on a diagnosis of a patient who stands in front of them today, how could I possibly slap such a label on someone who lived, had he lived, two millenia ago, and about whose acts, pronouncements, and general behaviour we have nothing that we can even remotely consider factual.

Fair.

I would respond that I am not in the least concerned with diagnosing Jesus. What initially whetted my curiousity is an uncanny, and as yet generally overlooked, bunching of phenomena in the texts about Jesus and his disciples . Those phenomena are also familiar to psychologists and psychiatrists. As I have myself been described medically by the label I'm am using here, I naturally do not have much interest in stressing the disorder part. Quite the contrary: I decided that though my medical profile was valid, my original intuition - i.e. that the sudden, subjectively "revelatory" experience, was related to the similar experiences which gave and still give origin to different religions and mystical cults, was far more productive, satisfying and hence therapeutic. Now obviously, the medical label is helpful, as it checks the proclivities of what A.Maslow so aptly described as the "messianic" view of oneself. But it has no "monopoly" over me. When I refused to be medicated, twenty two years ago, I said to the shrink that the idea that I could keep my sense of self while he fiddled chemically with my brain struck me as more preposterous than the idea that some important secrets of an impending nuclear holocaust were imparted on me by God himself.

There are number of reasons why the "bipolar" profile fits the best, and even within the manic culture there is one subvariety (Bell's mania) which seems to fit even tighter as the physiological context in which the mystical ecstatic experiences happen. This BTW, is not just the root of Christianity, but all the major religions. Indeed, I agree with the Oxford Dictionary of Religions which claims that the inaugural revelations of all the religions follow basically the same pattern, allowing for the cultural differences. Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Paul and Mohammed, all get into a mid-life crisis that drives them into solitude, they finally get ecstatic and meet God, his archangel or receive illumination, then struggle with the Evil One, and having overcome they become the revered ones. Extraordinary overlap, would you not say ? Again, I am not a bit worried if stories of Moses, Buddha and Jesus represent the mystical experience of the community, rather than a historically vouched-for individual.

Granted. However, the external view of the community toward Jesus and/or his disciples as "demon possessed" is well represented in the texts. Now, for my purposes, that Mark says his own family saw him gone off the deep end, is not a proof of (H) Jesus' mental imbalance or even that Jesus existed. The story could have been invented by the later community to preempt the perception of them as delusional.