PSYCHOLOGY OF PROPHETISM

A Secular Look at the Bible

KOENRAAD ELST

Voice of India, New Delhi

INTRODUCTION
This book will deal with items of faith central to the Christian tradition. It
may therefore be in order to clarify where I stand vis-a-vis this tradition. Fo
r most practical purposes, I belong to the Catholic community in my country: sch
ooling, membership of cultural organizations, trade-union etc. I confess (therew
ith upholding a Christian ritual) that several times, I have voted for the Chris
tian-Democratic Party, a non-confessional party that vaguely adheres to values uph
eld by the Christian tradition.
Moreover, in my youth I was a genuine believer, more than most of my class-mates
and my generation as a whole. My father was one of the last polemizing Catholi
cs in Belgium, and a sharp critic of the degenerative secularizing tendencies wi
thin the modem Church. I have always respected this wholehearted acceptance of
the authentic doctrine and tradition more than the wishy-washy approach currentl
y taken by our bishops and taught in our Theology faculty.
All this may be worth mentioning to clarify that I do not belong to that categor
y of people, fairly widespread in my country, who have a deep-seated hatred agai
nst the Catholic Church and traditions, either because they were brought up as m
ilitant atheists or because they slammed the church door behind them during adol
escence, never to look back again except to pour contempt. There is quite a lit
erature by writers who in adult life continue to react against the frustrations,
mostly sexual, which they associate with their years in the Jesuit college. To
day, it is no exaggeration to say that the anti-Christian people in countries li
ke mine are more fanatical and intolerant than the dwindling number of churchgoe
rs. My motive in writing this book has nothing to do with that type of anti-Chr
istian reaction.
The point is simply that we, European Christians of many generations, have outgr
own Christianity. Most people who left the Church have found that they are not
missing anything, and that the beliefs which once provided a framework for inter
preting and shaping life, were but a bizarre and unnecessary construction after
all. We now know that Jesus was not God s Only-begotten Son, that he did not save
humanity from eternal sin, and that our happiness in this world or the next doe
s not depend on believing these or any other dogmas.
When staying in India, I find it sad and sometimes comical to see how these outd
ated beliefs are being foisted upon backward sections of the Indian population b
y fanatical missionaries. In their aggressive campaign to sell their product, t
he missionaries are helped a lot by sentimental expressions of admiration for Ch
ristianity on the part of leading Hindus. Many Hindus project their own religio
us categories on the few Jesus episodes they have heard, and they base their who
le attitude to Christianity on what I know to be a selective, incoherent and unh
istorical version of the available information on Jesus life and teachings. That
 is why I have written the present introduction to one of the most revealing lin
es of proper scientific research into the origins of Christianity, viz. the psyc
hological analysis of Jesus and of several other Biblical characters.
As Jawaharlal Nehru said, we do injustice to the Vedas by treating them as divin
e revelations rather than as milestones of human understanding. Glad that for o
nce I can agree with Nehru, I affirm that we should take a secular, historicizin
g look at the factual human basis of religious scriptures. In the case of relig
ions, which describe their own basis as God-given, directly revealed by God s word
, such a secular approach will imply an analysis of the consciousness, which cla
ims to receive direct revelations from God. That is the line of research to whi
ch this book offers a brief introduction.
Delhi, 24 January 1993
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CHAPTER ONE
BRINGING SCRIPTURE DOWN TO EARTH
1.1. Vanishing of the supernatural
Anyone who cares to look, can see that Christianity is in steep decline. This i
s especially the case in Europe, where church attendance levels in many countrie
s have fallen below 10% or even below 5%. In most Christian countries (i.e. wit
h the exception of some frontier areas of the missions), the trend is the same,
even if less dramatic.
Even more ominous for the survival of Christianity is the decline in priestly vo
cations. Many parishes that used to have two or three parish priests now have n
one, so that the Sunday Service has to be conducted by a visiting priest, who ha
s an ever fuller agenda as his colleagues keep on dying, retiring or abandoning
priesthood without being replaced. The average age of Catholic priests in the w
orld is now 55. In the Netherlands it is even 62, and increasing. This is only
partly due to the strenuous obligation of celibacy, for in Protestant Churches,
where priests do get married, and in those countries where Catholic priests ign
ore the celibacy rules, the decline in priestly vocations is also in evidence.
The fact is that modern people just aren t very interested anymore in practising C
hristianity.
Outside observers may join the Church leadership in asking why this decline is t
aking place. As a participant observer of the emptying of the churches in Europ
e, I will argue that certain circumstances and tactical mistakes may have accele
rated the process, but that the fundamental reason for the decline is intrinsic
to the nature of the Christian faith. Modem consumerism is one factor - but to
an extent also a consequence - of the decline of the faith. The Aggiornamento ( a
daptation to the new times ) policy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatica
n Council (1962-65) and similar developments in the mainstream Protestant Church
es have been a clumsy and unconvincing way of proving that Christianity could ke
ep pace with modem times. Any attempt to bridge the gap between modernity and t
he Christian faith has only underlined their incompatibility.
Nothing can be done about it, except transforming Christianity till it is no lon
ger Christianity. The central, defining element in Christianity that cannot pos
sibly be saved, is the composite doctrine of prophetic monotheism. The notion t
hat there is a single God, Creator of the universe, who is interfering with His
Creation by sending messages to privileged spokespersons called prophets, flies
in the face of rationality. People will accept that reason isn t everything, but
not that your central belief system is so militantly opposed to reason. When th
ey also look at the actual contents of the utterances of the Biblical prophets a
nd of Jesus, they find much of it incomprehensible, or undesirable, or irrelevan
t to our times, or at best good but not requiring divine intervention.
The decline of Christianity started when Christian intellectuals committed to re
ligion tried to conceive religion in a rational way. Some of the founders of mo
dern science, including Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Johann Kepler and René Desc
artes, explored nature in order to discover therein the greatness and glory of G
od. It is often said that science has destroyed religiosity and nurtured atheis
m, but fact is that the founders of science were passionately religious people.
However, their conception of religiosity was radically different from the teach
ings of the Church.
These founding fathers of modern science did not immediately discard the Church
teaching that God had revealed Himself through Scripture and through His Only-be
gotten Son, but they juxtaposed this traditional revelation with a second God-re
vealing scripture : nature. This was known as the Liber Mundi, the Book of the Worl
d , the laws of nature conceived as God s own handwriting on the paper of matter. G
alilei said that this Liber Mundi was more reliable than revealed Scripture: it
could not be tampered with, and it was always available right here for everyone
to investigate.
The Church could claim no God-invested monopoly over this universalist religiosi
ty, which gained ground with the dawn of modem science. And since the Liber Mun
di was there for everyone, the exclusivist claims on Salvation for the baptized
Christians became repulsive to the new spirit. Knowledge instead of rituals and
beliefs became the new key to salvation. New religious movements like the Free
masons and the Rosicrucians, while still using some Biblical parlance, in fact u
ndermined Christianity s exclusive claims. For them, Christ became a symbol, an on
tological concept of the divine presence in the world, rather than a historical
character who saved humanity from eternal sin by his crucifixion. Religious phi
losophers like Spinoza developed a universalist and rational conception of the d
ivine.1
Church teaching had overruled reason, and declared its own dogmas, inspired dire
ctly by the Holy Spirit, to be above anything the human mind could think up or e
nvision. In the words of Tertullian, the third-century Church Father: Credo qui
a absurdum, I believe because it is absurd . The idea that humanity s intrinsic impe
rfection or sinfulness had been remedied by Christ s crucifixion, was so absurd, a
nd so contrary to experience (the level of sinfulness, whatever that may be, has
not changed much since before Christ), that it could only be upheld as Christia
nity s basic dogma by declaring reason incompetent.
On the issue of the relation between reason and religion, a popular quote is Sai
nt Thomas Aquinas s dictum that philosophia ancilla theologiae , rational inquiry is t
he handmaid of theology (the term philosophia used to mean both philosophy and sc
ience). From a certain viewpoint, that statement still makes perfect sense. Th
at intellectual knowledge (philosophies) is subservient to knowledge of God (theol
ogia), is something which the founding-fathers of modern science would have read
ily accepted: their aim indeed was to grasp something of God s fullness through ph
ysics and geometry, to use science as a stepping-stone to cosmic vision. It is
an age-old and pre-Christian tradition: we all know the case of Pythagoras, who
used mathematics as the basis of his mystical teachings, and we know that Pythag
oras himself merely continued a tradition with roots in Egypt and Mesopotamia (p
erhaps also in India: the similarities between his school and Mahavira Jina a are
striking). So, if we understand theologia in the broader, literal sense of God-k
nowledge , keeping in mind that Thomas Aquinas himself was also a mystic, then the
re is nothing wrong with the dictum philosophia ancilla theologiae .
However, the Church has definitely used the term theology in the ordinary sense of
knowledge of Church dogma . In that case, Thomas s aphorism does mean the subordina
tion of intellectual insights to the non-rational revealed truths of Church dogma.
The advent of Protestantism has not bettered Christianity s intrinsic opposition t
o reason, on the contrary. Protestantism was a political movement against the P
ope s power, and that had some merit, but religiously it was a fundamentalist move
ment that reinforced the hold of the Bible over the minds of the faithful. The
Catholic populace knew little of the Bible s contents, only some selected stories
which the priest would read out and authoritatively interpret in his weekly serm
on. What they knew were Church-made teachings, starting with the Creed (the sta
tement of Catholic Belief formulated at the Council of Nicea), and a lot of devo
tional practices to the Sacred Heart, the Saints and the Virgin Mary, which had
little to do with specifically Christian teachings. In fact, the Protestants co
rrectly saw them as heathen practices in disguise. Protestantism made much of E
urope thoroughly read the Bible with all its contradictions and tales of cruelty
, and accept it as God s own word, extolled above human criticism. But it was thi
s very Bible that would be the great casualty of the scientific revolution and t
he age of Enlightenment.
If one used reason, the same one with which to study the solar system s mechanics,
to critically investigate the contents of the Bible, its status as God s own word
could not hold out for long. But more fundamentally, if one accepted that reas
on was to guide man, then the Bible, even regardless of its actual contents, wou
ld have to be rejected in principle as the source containing the ultimate truth.
The eighteenth century saw the rise of a non-scriptural God-affirmation, called
deism. Whereas theism postulates a personal god who can intervene in the world
by His own free will, e.g. in response to someone s prayer, deism postulates a div
ine creator who has set the world in motion, who has laid down his own laws for
his creation, and now lets the machine roll on by itself. There is no question
of God intervening in His own creation, by fulfilling someone s prayer, by reveali
ng Himself through a unique Scripture, or by sending and sacrificing His only be
gotten son. This conception of God is known as le Dieu horlogier (the clockwork
er-God), and Voltaire, sometimes wrongly thought to be an atheist, was its best-
known exponent.
This kind of God, who takes leave after having set creation in motion, and who d
oesn t give any sign of His existence except the world itself, could be thought of
as non-active and non-verifiable, and so, for all practical purposes, non-exist
ent. One could postulate that the laws of nature were God s handwriting, or one c
ould not: it didn t make any difference for the laws of nature themselves. Theref
ore, dismissing what could be dismissed, materialism and atheism soon made their
 appearance. When Napoleon asked the physicist Laplace where God fitted into hi
s model of the universe, the scientist s answer was: II ne me faut pas de cette hyp
othése-la (I have no use for that hypothesis which you mention). Man can understan
d nature without postulating an extra-natural Being called God.
Recently, God has lost one of the last uses attributed to Him in explaining natu
re: creating life out of dead matter. So far, materialist science was unable to
explain how nature could generate such complex structures. Now, the study of sy
stems far from equilibrium and of the spontaneous genesis of order from chaos, ha
ve brought the genesis of life within the reach of materialist science. We may c
onfidently look forward to a satisfactory explanation of life s genesis in the nea
r future, one in which no supernatural intervention by any God is needed.2
God wasn t needed for explaining nature, and He also wasn t needed as a foundation f
or man s ethics. The Church had tried to instill morality by threatening man with
hellfire. But according to Enlightenment thinkers, reason and the study of man
and society could form a sufficient basis for ethics. In this connection, Volt
aire liked to point to the Chinese moralist Confucius, who strictly refrained fr
om religious speculation but nonetheless taught a consistent and workable (in fa
ct, highly successful) system of morality.
If God was still to make any sense, He had to be found somewhere else. He was n
ot dictating Scriptures, He was not operating heaven and hell, but perhaps He is
still there where man cannot see Him: inside man s consciousness. The conception
of religion as an exploration of the divine inside man s consciousness had been t
here all along in a number of heathen religions, Now, European Christians began
to rediscover it for themselves. In the late nineteenth century, the Dutch poet
Willem Kloos wrote: Ik ben een god in het diepst van mijn gedachten (I am a god i
n the deepest of my thoughts). Both Protestants and Catholics expressed their i
ndignation at this sacrilegious statement.
In the twentieth century, this approach to religion as an adventure of conscious
ness has become a mighty trend. It has been propelled by the discovery, on an e
ver larger scale, of the teachings of Eastern thinkers. Some Christian apologis
ts contend, as a last line of defence, that Eastern spirituality may be valuable
but is not fit for Western man. But more and more, they are forced to recogniz
e that Eastern paths are just universally human paths that merely happen to have b
een developed in the East. Worse, to some extent they once were just as much pa
rt of the European or Mediterranean heritage, but they were stamped out by Chris
tianity s concerted efforts.
So, in spite of the predictions of 19th century materialists, religion has survi
ved the untenable prophetic belief systems. As Salman Rushdie has said, there i
s a God-shaped hole in the world. In an article with the eloquent title: Never min
d God, let s have religion , the British-Jewish columnist Chaim Bermant observes: Abo
ut 30 years ago, a Church of England bishop hit the headlines because he didn t be
lieve in God: today it is little exaggeration to say that a Church of England bi
shop would hit the headlines if he did. A substantial number of people do not wan
t to abandon the existing community structures shaped by the Churches, but they
are transforming religion from within. Either way, religious-minded people have
outgrown the stranglehold of dogma.
Religion is no longer conceived as the result of a bizarre intervention of a sup
ernatural being in the natural world, either through miracles or through privile
ged spokesmen, let alone only-begotten sons. Even if people believe in the supe
rnatural, that still doesn t bring them back into the bosom of the Church. Those
people make a distinction between supernatural phenomena (clairvoyance, magnetic h
ealing), and blind faith in Scriptural dogma. They assume that even in their ex
perience of the supernatural, a certain rationality, a certain as yet unknown la
w of nature must be at work, rather than a divine intervention.
Consider the belief in miracles, for long the mainstay of popular religion. Bot
h Protestants and Catholics believe in miracles, though with a different flavour
. Protestants always talk about Jesus: Jesus gave me the strength to do this, e
verything changed when Jesus came into my life, etc. Many of them are very seri
ous about faith healing, and some of them even reject modem medicine and vaccina
tion on the ground that the Bible doesn t allow it, or that only Jesus should heal
them. The Catholic Church leaves the miraculous cures preferably to the saints,
in their places of pilgrimage. It also recognizes a number of miraculous appea
rances of the Virgin Mary, around which more places of pilgrimage have sprung up
, where people go for miraculous cures.
Modem people don t have patience with Christianity s faith in these miracles. A cri
tical scrutiny of the miracles shows that nothing genuinely miraculous is going
on. In the case of miracle cures, it turns out that no actually supernatural th
ings ever happen, such as an amputee getting back his lost limb. What routinely
happens, is that psychosomatic diseases are cured, due to a psychological jump
from despondency to faith. Your faith has saved you , is what the priest will say
(quoting Jesus) on such occasions, and correctly so: but not the faith in Jesus,
much less Jesus himself, but faith in the possibility of cure. Medicine has so
far underestimated the psychic factor in health, and miracle workers do address t
hat inner strength by creating confidence with the aid of powerful mental images
, one of which may be Jesus, or the Virgin Mary. Other gods, other prayers, oth
er rituals could do the job just as well, provided they create a sufficiently st
rong impression on the patient s mind.
While consciousness is dawning that the miracle cures effected in Lourdes and ot
her places of pilgrimage, are merely applications of an as yet insufficiently ex
plored healing power within ourselves, there has also been research into that ot
her Christian miracle: the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Some striking facts:
over 90% of the apparitions concerns children between nine and fifteen; what th
ey see, is the typical Virgin Mary of the statuettes in churches, dressed in blu
e and white; the geographical spread of the apparitions is such that the Virgin
Mary hardly ever appears in Protestant countries, where she is not worshipped no
r depicted; she only appears to people who are believers already.
So, the Virgin Mary appears only to people who already have emotionally charged
images of her in their heads, and perfectly fits the image they have of her. Tha
t points to a purely psychological phenomenon. The recipients are children at an
age when they are very susceptible to what the German psychologist Erich Rudolf
Jansch (1883-1940) called eidetic images : mental images of emotionally charged ob
jects, that seem very lively and real. The contents of what Mary has to say fit
s this age group. On the one hand, she offers a bit of simple platitudinous the
ology: calls to better their lives, to turn to her or to God, to pray and to spr
ead the Gospel. She doesn t come up with something that those youngsters couldn t h
ave thought up themselves. On the other hand, she often pays a lot of attention
to the recipients personal problems, encourages them, gives them confidence: jus
t what an understanding educator does towards kids in that self-searching stage
of life.
In the cases where several children saw her at the same time, it turns out that
the first time they see different images, but after they exchange information on
what they have seen, the image seen by the leader among them, is also seen by the
others. In several cases, it was noticed they declared seeing the same image.
For instance, in the apparition in Beauraing (Belgium, on November 29, 1932) on
e child declared it saw the Virgin Mary with a golden heart on her breast (just
like in many statuettes). The next time, the two other children saw the same th
ing. Their descriptions were, however, not identical to the detail, and observer
s noticed they were focusing on a different spot. Essentially, the image was in
their minds.3
So today, people see through these miracles , and they are convinced that what mira
culous elements there were in Jesus life, must have been of a similar nature (if
not fiction concocted by the Gospel-writers). The second evangelization campaign
that pope John Paul II has called for is not going to re-convince people of the
divine hand working through such miracles.
At the same time, it should be mentioned that today, the popularity of places of
pilgrimage is at an all-time high. Of course, this quantitative peak should be
put into perspective: the population numbers are higher, especially old people
(still the most religion-prone age group) are far more numerous than ever in his
tory, and they can travel far more easily. Still, many people who don t set foot
in their parish church anymore, do go on pilgrimage sometimes: they want to experi
ence the powerful atmosphere that they expect to find at those places. Just like
the heathens of old.
On the whole, modern rational education has not destroyed religiosity, but it ha
s fatally cracked the age-old tendency to be over-awed by phenomena that are not
readily understood, as well as the hope for such phenomena to solve our life s pr
oblems. A skepsis has made religions based on irrational beliefs outdated forev
er. This skepsis extends beyond petty miracles to the basic miracle supposed to
underlie the entire Abrahamic tradition: God s verbal or actual intervention in h
uman affairs.
1.2. Prophethood
At the centre of the Judaeo-Christian tradition stands an institution which we m
oderns tend to consider as irrational par excellence: the belief that the Creato
r of the Universe is a person, with personal traits and whims, who communicates
messages to us through privileged channels called prophets. This irrational bel
ief mixes up the eternal and the temporal, the metaphysical and the phenomenal.
Moreover, it is the foundation of exclusivist claims on divine revelation: it d
ivides mankind in those who are in touch with the privileged messengers and thos
e who aren t.
Biblical prophetism has evolved as one specific line of development from a world
-wide culture of trying to understand the gods designs for the world. Prophetism
in the broadest sense could mean any practice of revealing truths unknown to ma
n, esp. knowledge of the future, or at least good advice tuned to the future cou
rse of events. The world over, people have devised techniques of obtaining such
hidden knowledge.
The oracle bones of the Chinese Shang dynasty (mid-2nd millennium BC) reveal an
oracular procedure that was highly systematized and formed part of a magical way
of relating to the world. First, the will of the gods was sought to be reveale
d through an oracular technique, usually causing a crack (by inserting a hot nee
dle) in a tortoise s shield or in cattle s shoulder blades: the shape or direction of
the crack gave the desired information. This information could be a simple yes/
no reply to a question, e.g.: should the army attack or not? Otherwise, it conc
erned the specific sacrificial wishes of the gods: which sacrifice should be bro
ught, human or animal, at what time, etc.? To us, this would seem doubly irratio
nal: to believe that you can influence events by sacrificing specific items to t
he supposed gods, and moreover to determine the wishes of these gods by a proced
ure yielding nothing but the random cracks cause an innocent flame or hot metal
in an innocent animal s bone.
The Etruscans had perhaps the most elaborate divination system of antiquity, men
tioned and partly borrowed by the Romans. While there was a wealth of technique
s, the essence was that first a field was created in which the different parts g
ave the different possible outcomes: yes or no; attacking or retreating; allying
 oneself with candidate A, B or C; moving in direction east, west, north or sout
h. These sectors were called the temples , whence our word contemplation, i.e. sur
veying the different factors of a situation (compare, in the slightly younger an
d more learned technique called astrology, the houses of a horoscope, and the term
consideration, i.e. surveying the configuration of the sidera, the stars). Sub
sequently, the diviner made, as it were, a god or a divine sign appear in one of
these temples, i.e. he let coincidence make a choice between one of the sectors
. This could be done by letting a bird fly up in a specific direction, or by ch
ecking which part of the liver of a ritually slaughtered goose showed any remark
able sign, or in many other ways. At any rate: the gods were supposed to speak
through coincidence, through a provoked random choice between a predetermined numb
er of possibilities.
The location of the gods in the sphere of coincidence has something rational to it
: in the realm of coincidence, they can interfere without interfering either in
the laws of nature or in man s free choice. Compare with the notion of Sankhya ph
ilosophy that there are three types of karma (causal factors of destiny): from on
eself (adhyatmika), i.e. wrought by one s own doings; from the elements (adhibhautika
), i.e. wrought by the intrinsic nature of beings and substances, or in modem te
rms, by the laws of nature; and thirdly from the gods (adhidaivika), i.e. resultin
g from coincidence. If you happen to be in that one-in-a-million airplane which
crashes, it is not your own doing, nor a necessary result of the laws of nature,
but what we call coincidence or (bad) luck , and what the ancients called the will of
the gods . Coincidence is that malleable medium which the gods can knead accordi
ng to their wishes, even while respecting the autonomy of both man and nature.
The point with divination is that we don t wait till the gods visit upon us a piec
e of coincidence devastating to our lives and plans, but we catch them in a prea
rranged laboratory situation, where they can determine something inconsequential
(though meaningful), such as the shape and direction of a heat-induced crack in
a tortoise bone. Before ridiculing the ancients way of handling destiny, let u
s appreciate the primitive streak of rationality present in it.
Apart from different guilds of technical diviners, there were also spontaneous f
ortune-tellers, what we would now call clairvoyants and mediums. A clairvoyant,
when focusing his mind on a given object or person, gets images relating to its
or his past or future. No divine person is asked to intervene, but clairvoyant
s are usually religious persons who nevertheless do ascribe their powers to some
divine power or person. A medium is someone who makes contact with spirits, ei
ther spirits of deceased human beings or spirits belonging to a different catego
ry of divine or demonic beings, who have access to knowledge kept hidden from or
dinary mortals. A well-known variety of the medium category are the shamans, wh
o allow a spirit to take control over their bodies to speak through them.
This type of direct communication with the realm of the divine was not necessari
ly confined to a class of specialists. In some cultures, all men were expected
to undertake a vision quest at least once in a lifetime, usually with the aid of p
sychedelic drugs. A typical characteristic of these purposely induced hallucina
tions, whether drug-aided or otherwise, was that they were allowed to happen wit
hin certain limits of place, time and circumstance, leaving secular space to the
more sobre states of mind. This is the radical difference with pathological ha
llucinations, which are out of the affected person s control and refuse to be conf
ined to special occasions. On the other hand, the apparent similarity between t
he sacred visionary experience sought by normal men and the pathological halluci
nations of mentally deranged people has often led to the recognition of the latt
er (at least the more interesting and articulate specimens) as divine persons.
But to prevent misunderstandings, let us repeat that in principle, the visions w
hich constituted a communication with the heavenly world were a controlled and p
urposive activity undertaken by sane people, occasionally or on a professional b
asis.
It is in the category of people who receive messages from a supposed superhuman
source on a regular basis that the origins of Biblical prophethood can be found.
In the oldest stage of the Israelite state, both systems existed: diviners and
clairvoyants. The latter are attested since the beginning and remain protagoni
sts until ca. 100 AD, the former are only present as an institution during the p
eriod of the Judges and early kings (12th-10th century BC).
Divination was practised by the high-priest, who used a system mentioned but not
technically explained in the Bible. Attached to the Ephod, a strip of cloth fo
rming part of the priestly robe, there was a square bag containing the oracular
pieces, the Urim and the Thummim. We do not know what exactly they were, though
it is significant that the former name starts with the first letter of the Hebr
ew alphabet (Aleph), and the latter with the last letter (Thau). It is assumed
that these were little pieces of wood or stone, which were handled like dice.4
A passage in the book 1 Samuel (14:41-42) reveals that they could be used for ye
s/no answers, and consulted by the method of successive elimination: Therefore Sa
ul said: If this guilt is in me or in Jonathan my son, give Urim; but if this guil
t is in thy people Israel, give Thummim. And Jonathan and Saul were taken [meanin
g the result was Urim], but the people escaped [it was not Thummim]. Then Saul
said: Cast the lot between me and my son Jonathan. And Jonathan was taken.
After the reign of David, this priestly divination system is no longer attested.
David himself consults three diviner-priests, but is also described as directl
y addressing Yahweh with yes/no questions, following the same procedure of succe
ssive elimination (1 Samuel 23:4, 2 Samuel 5:19); it is probable that he used a
similar system, but that the material details have simply not been mentioned.
A century later, we find king Ahab exclusively consulting prophets , also called men
of God , seers and sons of prophets ; he had 400 attached to his court. It was unders
tood that a prophet (navi) had direct knowledge of God s plans. There was an exta
tic element in their prophesying: prophets had to get into the right mood to rec
eive inspiration. Thus, the prophet Elisha once asked for musicians to help him
get the inspiration.
There were different types of prophet. The sons of prophets (bene-neviim) were he
reditary extatic prophets who lived as a community. They were the pre-Israelite
religious class of Canaan, and they used music and ritual celebrations on hillt
ops to invoke the divine vision. When Elijah is facing the Baal prophets who ar
e wildly dancing and cutting themselves with knives, it is said that this was th
eir custom (1 Kings 18:28). King Saul himself joined in these prophets extatic d
ances (1 Samuel 19:20-24).
Prophets were usually dedicated to a particular god. The prophets of Yahweh wer
e one class among others. On the one hand, they were part of a traditional insti
tution of godmen, on the other, they were increasingly part of an anti-tradition
al ideological movement, described by Bible scholars as the Yahweh Alone movement.
5 This movement was obviously directed against polytheism and idol-worship, but
its ideological thrust was slightly richer than mere iconoclasm. In the utteran
ces of these Yahwist prophets, we find one recurring theme that makes them quite
respectable for modem post-religious readers: the denunciation of sacrifice as
the meeting-place of man and god, its replacement with a call to ethical living,
and the concomitant attacks on organized priesthood. While the temple-cult, at
least that in the temple of Jerusalem which contained the Ark of the Covenant (
at least until the Exile 587-538), was a constituent part of the Israelite natio
nal identity, there is a general anti-temple and anti-priest tendency discernibl
e among the major Yahwist prophets.
To be sure, the contrastive depiction of Yahwist and other early prophets in the
 Bible, regarding both ideology and personal behaviour, should be treated with e
xtreme caution: the ultimate Bible editors were strongly biased in favour of the
Yahwist prophets. Similarly, the depiction of ritual priesthood as a den of co
rruption is obviously not unmotivated, though sociologically it makes sense, esp
. by comparison with similar aberrations in other cultures.
Apart from the peripheral prophets, whose tirades against kings and priests have c
ome to represent the core of the prophetic ideology, there were also central proph
ets, associated with the court or the temple, such as Nahum and Habakkuk, who we
re linked with the cult in the Temple of Jerusalem. These were generally more i
n favour of the establishment and the status-quo, and prophesied doom against th
e Israelites enemies rather than against the Israelites themselves. The fact tha
t the peripheral prophets have taken the ideological centre-stage in the prophetic
part of the Bible, can be understood from the post-exilic opposition between wh
at we may call the Temple party (the Sadducees of Gospel fame) and the Scripture
party (the Pharisees and Scribes).
The first two Yahweh prophets who formed the classical type of prophet, were Amo
s of the southern kingdom Judah and Hosea of Ephraim, heartland of the northern
kingdom Israel, both working in ca. 750 BC. Amos was the first writer-prophet;
that the Yahwist movement ultimately triumphed, is at least partly due to its li
terate accumulation of a corpus of doctrine. It is through Amos that Yahweh dec
lares: I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemb
lies. Eventhough you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will
not accept them... Take away from me the noise of your songs, to the melody of
your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righte
ousness like an overflowing stream. (Amos 5:21-24)
Though many people will readily get carried away by the ethical stand of this ut
terance, it contains a fallacy: it falsely implies that a choice has to be made
between ethical conduct on the one hand, and rituals and hymns on the other. In
India today, missionaries still like to contrast the Hindu wealth of ritual cele
brations and devotional music with the Christian call to charity and justice - a
s if the ritual-minded Hindu religion does not at the same time foster a develop
ed culture of charity and righteousness (dharma). Amos could have attacked poss
ible excesses of the priesthood without attacking the ritual aspect of religion
itself. Further, Judeo-Christian apologists like to identify this call to right
eousness and social justice with Yahweh s intervention through the prophets; while
in fact, other cultures and other ideological milieus have equally expressed th
e same ethical and social concerns (e.g. Chinese Taoists who had no notion of a
personal god). This at once shows the fundamental flaw of the ideology identifi
ed as prophetic : it excludes things that are normal and deserve to be included.
When Amos attacks Amasiah, the priest of the temple of Bet-El, the latter scolds
him and calls him a seer (hozeh), one of those professional hereditary extatic pr
ophets. But Amos replies that he is not one of those sons of prophets , that he wa
s a simple cowherd until Yahweh spoke to him and entrusted him with a mission (A
mos 7:12-15). Clearly there is a sociological dimension to the opposition betwe
en the traditional religious personnel and the new breed of Yahwist prophets, an
d Marxist-leaning Bible scholars have naturally tried to explain the rise of Yah
wism in terms of an economical transformation of Israelite society.
What is of more concern to us here, is what Yahweh has to say in this confrontat
ion with Amasiah, as on other occasions. For the flavour: Your wife shall be a h
arlot in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and
your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean l
and, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land (7:17). And: The en
d has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them. The songs of
the temple shall become wailings in that day, the dead bodies shall be many (8:2-
3). And: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land trem
ble on this account, and everyone mourn who dwells in it ? (8:7-8). This sets the t
one for the entire lineage of Yahweh prophets: through them, an angry and vengef
ul Yahweh scolds his Chosen People for being disobedient and unfaithful, and pro
mises, terrible punishment through natural disasters and victorious enemies.
The prophet Hosea introduces the symbolism of the adulterous woman: the Israelit
e people that becomes unfaithful to its national god by worshipping other gods.
The introductory chapter relates Hosea s personal married life, and it is his own
wife who is painted as adulterous and marked for punishment. Here already, we
have a hint of how prophecies of national importance can be linked with the pers
onal experiences of the prophet. From then onwards, as prophetism in the name o
f Yahweh takes on a classical form and repeats a classical message, the role of
Yahweh s prophet will increasingly attract a certain type of man, one whose inner
life fosters the same grim and bitter outlook that becomes the hallmark of Yahwe
h s prophetic communications.
Hosea is identified by many theologians as the one man who takes the jump from m
onolatry or henotheism, i.e. the worship of a single god disregarding all other
gods, to full-blooded monotheism, the belief that this single god is the only go
d in existence. Until then, Yahweh may have been in the picture, may even have
been a jealous god, but he was not yet conceived as the only possible divine per
son. The conflict between Yahweh and Baal in the 9th century (massacre of Baal
priests by Elijah, removal of Baal idol from Samaria temple by king Joram, massa
cre of Baal priests and destruction of their temple by the usurper-king Jehu), t
hough reinterpreted by the Bible editors as a struggle for monotheism, was in fa
ct only a struggle for political supremacy between the national god Yahweh and t
he supra-national god Baal. Even the adultery image in Hosea is still indicativ
e of henotheism, with Yahweh being jealous of other gods, rather than being conf
ident of being the only god. Moreover, the metaphor of Yahweh (originally the w
arrior-god of the desert nomads) as husband is borrowed from the epithets of the
fertility god Baal, whose cult was very popular.
But in Hosea 13:4, Yahweh declares: I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt
; you know no god but me, and beside me there is no saviour. Whether this is real
ly such a big innovation in itself, is an interesting topic for debate; for many
centuries after Hosea, mature monotheism will continue to worship a jealous god
, who is not confident of being the only one but wages war against his supposedl
y non-existent rivals. At any rate, this is the first appearance of the ideolog
y embodied in the doctrine surrounding Moses Decalogue, which, according to a con
sensus among Bible scholars, has only been given its distinctive monotheistic ed
ge by the Deuteronomist Bible editors in the 7th-6th century BC.
The effect of monotheism on the status of prophecy was far-reaching. The belief
in one God who is valid for every person in every time and circumstance gave a
totally new universality to the utterances of His prophets. In the heathen cont
ext, an oracle was always meant for a specific occasion and a specific audience.
In monotheism, the prophets utterances were worth preserving and repeating in p
laces and on occasions unrelated to the original. This stimulated their preserv
ation and the extraction of a somewhat systematic theology from them.
This claim to universal validity of Yahwist prophetism contained the germ of pro
phetism s undoing as a living religious institution. Gradually, the reports of Ya
hweh s revelations acquired Canonical status, which made it more difficult for new
prophets to acquire prophetic legitimacy. When in the Hellenistic and Roman pe
riods, Scripture became the centre of religious life in Judaism, replacing the T
emple, the gate of prophecy got closed. New claimants to prophetic status were
regarded with suspicion, as Mohammed was to find out. This dying out of the pro
phetic institution in mature Judaism was a logical development: if the utterance
s of the earlier Yahwist prophets had validity beyond the confines of their own
space and time, they remained valid and had little need for updating with new pr
ophecies. While mysticism, conceived as a type of communication with God but wi
thout prophetic pretence, has never been without popular appeal, prophetism as s
uch became a fringe phenomenon. Scripture had replaced prophetism as the commun
icator of God s will to man.
It was not until after the return of the Israelite elite from exile in Babylon (
538 BC) that prophetic revelations were forged into a substantial corpus of Scri
pture that could command theological authority. After that, prophetism becomes
increasingly referential, i.e. explicitly indebted to earlier prophets as well a
s to other components of Scripture. With the reforms of Ezra (late 5th century)
, patronized by the Persian overlords, officially recognized prophecy was restri
cted to a class of Levites associated with the cult in the Second temple. It is
in the two centuries before the return from exile that the great prophets could
have their unfettered flights of prophetic space-travel. It is in this high ti
de of prophecy that the prophetic institution attracted some of its weirdest rep
resentatives, as we shall see in ch.2.5.
The institution of prophethood was already subject to criticism in Antiquity. U
nlike the early court prophets and diviners, the great prophets met with hostili
ty or with derision and rejection, a fact of which they and their ultimate edito
rs have made much, as if it confirms the prophets genuineness. Jeremiah mentions
a priestly letter in which he himself is denounced as insane (Jer. 29:26). Ano
ther well-known case is Mohammed, who had to defend himself time and again (the
Quran lists a dozen instances) against the allegation that he was ghost-possesse
d. While the people could not yet put it in exact words, they felt that there w
as something wrong with these messengers of doom and abuse. If prophetism could
already be rejected as a source of religious doctrine in those half-educated so
cieties of yore, it can definitely not be accepted without due scrutiny in the m
odern age.
While some prophets have affected that the skepsis and rejection by profane crit
ics they met was precisely a sign of genuine prophethood, we may say that those
critics were generally right in their appreciation. What the prophets claimed to
be God s word, was very much their own word. In the best cases, it could be a per
tinent social critique or the expression of a certain man-made theological convi
ction, but in other, important cases it was also an expression of the prophet s ow
n mental darkness.
1.3. The importance of prediction
Modem theologians find it a bit too simplistic for comfort, but it is an obvious
fact that the prime role of the prophet was to predict the future. Only one co
rrective is needed to this simplistic formulation: predicting the future was onl
y one aspect of the prophets real task, which was to discern the will of the gods
, or in monotheistic parlance, the will of God. In the world at large, the actu
al outcome of events was by definition God s will, because nothing can happen agai
nst God s will. In the human world however, there was an extra factor: man had a
choice to co-operate with God. In the human sphere, therefore, the prophet s task
was to discern what God wanted from man (cfr. the Shang oracles: which sacrific
e did the gods want men to bring?). However, the insight into the wishes of the
gods was in turn a part of the over-all pattern of God s will: either you live up
to God s wish, and then the outcome will be X, or you don t live up to it, and then
the outcome will be Y. Even in a more sophisticated conception of the prophet s r
ole, predicting the future remains the overriding concern.
The Biblical prophets live up to that role. Their reports on God s wishes and opi
nions is full of definite and verifiable predictions. Often they are in the con
ditional form: if the people is faithful, it will be victorious; if not, then no
t. In the complexities of history, the conditions and promised punishments and
rewards are sometimes a bit more complex as well, but essentially this pattern i
s followed throughout. When doomsday prophets have given up all hope that man c
an sufficiently free himself from his faithlessness, they make their predictions
unconditional: God has decided to wipe a people out, or to have His own people
subdued by the Babylonians, or to make an idolatrous king lose the battle agains
t the Assyrians.
The predictions made by prophets were as often as not untrue. It is only the lat
er editors who have back-projected some far-sighted predictions into the mouth o
f their heroes; no doubt they have also censored out many embarrassingly failed
predictions.
The predictions of Daniel, situated by his editors in the 6th century BC but in
fact writing in about 165 BC, are simply fraudulent predictions after the fact.
They are floated because they have to render credible the genuine predictions m
ade in the same text: the way Daniel s predictions of the downfall of the Babylonian
, Medic, Persian and Hellenistic empires have come true, so the prediction of th
e everlasting independence under the Maccabeic dynasty will also come true. Thi
s last prediction was genuine but failed to come true: the Romans gained influen
ce and would formally occupy the country a century later.
Even the short-term predictions about polytheist kings meeting their doom and mo
notheist kings being rewarded, often did not come true. Elijah predicts Ahab s do
wnfall; but because Ahab goes in sackcloth for a while, Yahweh changes His mind
and promises to bring the misfortune over Ahab s (so far innocent) son instead (1
Kings 21). What had happened was clearly that Elijah s prediction failed to come
true, and that the later editor, who knew about Ahab s son s downfall, adapted the s
tory to turn it into a second-best way of making Elijah s prophecy a true one. Li
ke our modern fortune-tellers, the prophets and their editors knew the tricks of
wriggling out of such unambiguous tests falsifying their prophetic reliability,
e.g. by stating that Yahweh was withholding the deserved punishment (predicted
but failing to materialize) from a trespassing king but that He would visit it u
pon the king s descendents. And of course, as every dynasty is bound to fall one
day, such prediction cannot fail.
After valiantly keeping the formidable Assyrian threat at a distance and thus re
futing Amos and Hosea s prophecies, the northern capital Samaria did fall in 721 BC
, three decades after the prophecies. During the exile, Jeremiah s and Ezekiel s la
ter prophecies which uncharacteristically promised a hopeful outcome, were not f
ulfilled for decades, until finally, like most conquerors, the Babylonians were
defeated in their turn by the Persians.
Moreover, where outside information is lacking, we have to depend on the biased
version of history given by the Bible editors themselves, but from cases where w
e do have the control of outside information, we know that the Bible editors rew
rote not only the predictions to make them suit history better, but also history
itself.
The Bible itself says that a false prophet can be recognized by his predictions
not coming true (Deut. 18:22). By that standard, most prophets were false, and w
e wonder why God would allow such misuse of His name, and even the sanctificatio
n of this false prophetism as Sacred Scripture.
The failed predictions are one reason for definitely rejecting the claim that an
omniscient supernatural being, Yahweh, was speaking through the prophets. Like
everyone, they were sometimes right on common-sense predictions about politics
or about the logical consequences of people s behaviour: e.g. Mohammed s correct pre
diction of a Byzantine come-back in the war with the seemingly unstoppable Persi
an army. But there is not a single case in the whole Abrahamic prophetic tradit
ion of a prophet making a genuine prediction (not one visibly back-projected by
the later editors) about something normally unforeseeable, and getting it right.
 It is like the common astrologer who can, along with many non-astrologers, pre
dict which of two candidates will win an election, but proves incapable of fores
eeing the place and date of the next big earthquake.
It gets worse when we consider the eschatological predictions (referring to ulti
mate doom, the coming of the Messiah, and judgment Day), a matter that should be
dose to God s heart. So far, all such predictions have badly failed, from Jeremi
ah through Jesus, Saint Paul, the different Apocalypse books, Mohammed, the Medi
eval millenarists, the Jehovah s Witnesses. Nostradamus enthusiasts claim their h
ero has predicted the end for 1999; let us see. So far, the prophets did not de
monstrably have any access to a higher source of knowledge.
The Jehovah s Witnesses believe that they are the select segment of humanity that
will inherit the earth after the imminent catastrophe of which the scenario has
been given in the Apocalypse. Jehovah Witnesses founder Charles Tase Russell said
Jesus would return in 1874 and complete his work in 1914, when God s Kingdom woul
d start. His successor Franklin Rutherford predicted in 1920 that millions livin
g now will never die , and had a royal mansion built for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
due to return in 1925. When the prediction failed to materialize, the Witnesse
s claimed that it had been made by the old light , and that the new light would surel
y do better. Another leader, Nathan Homer Knorr, predicted the Armageddon catas
trophe for 1975, to be followed by God s empire. Then W.F. Franz predicted 1986,
etc. So, if ever you are troubled by those obtrusive Jehovah preachers, simply
say to them: Deuteronomy 18:22. But remark how these failures are always rationali
zed by the believers: the fact that a prophet has a following and keeps it, does
not prove that his prophecies come true.
Some believers may shrug off the cold test of prediction as a kill-joy, but it i
s considered pertinent by scientists: genuine knowledge is proven by accurate pr
edictions. The source of the prophets statements was not any genuine knowledge,
but uncertain opinions and beliefs, ranging from common sense opinions and theol
ogical doctrines to psychopathological delusions. Certainly it was not an omnis
cient God who communicated their failed predictions, unless He was also maliciou
s.
1.4. Modern Interpretation of prophethood
Modern theologians who have problems with the exclusive claims of prophets, but
who are still too attached to the image of prophets as upright and far-sighted m
en, might venture to interpret prophethood in a more abstract sense: identificatio
n with God s viewpoint on a certain given matter, with God in turn being interpreted
as the Truth or the Good or the Whole . Thus, when members of a group are quarrellin
, and someone transcends his own private interest and identifies with the intere
st of the group as a whole, and guides the quarrelling parties out of their detr
imental disunity by impressing upon them the dependence of their separate intere
sts upon the well-being of the Whole, then one might call his stand prophetic.
One who becomes the spokesman of the Whole, is a prophet. But there is nothing
exclusive or Chosen or supernatural about it, in fact everyone can aspire toward
s this kind of prophetic consciousness.
Modern Scripture interpreters have sometimes tried to attribute this kind of rol
e to the historical prophets. Thus, when the prophets rebuke the kings and the
rich for neglecting and oppressing the poor (or king David for coveting commande
r Uriah s only wife Bathsebah while he has many wives himself), one might say that
they are conscience-keepers who remind the selfish rulers of their duty towards
the whole of society. However, a closer analysis of some prominent prophets per
sonalities and careers shows that if they paid attention to social injustice, it
was more because unhappy and querulous people just happen to be perceptive and
tireless fault-finders, always seeking out the bad things in order to confront o
thers (especially those of whom they are jealous) about them; or because they th
emselves were poor and deprived; or because they saw a strategic advantage in al
lying with the poor. Even those in whom no such impure motives or distorting co
nditions can be found, were just public-spirited men and good speakers, but that
did not make them messengers of the Creator in any literal sense.
An example of the new and more rational meaning which modern theologians try to
give to the term prophet , I saw in an article about divorce, in a Catholic paper.
As divorce is a grave sin for Catholics, the title was rather shocking: Divorce
is often a prophetic event . The essence of the article was that, while many peop
le step into marriage mindlessly, nobody will divorce mindlessly. A marriage ca
n be concluded in a self-deluded moment of infatuation, but divorce is the resul
t of a painful and highly conscious process. It forces you to face questions ab
out your own weaknesses, values, expectations from life. This hard, even forced
awareness of life goals and of one s own shortcomings is compared with the effect
of the prophets warnings and tirades to their complacent contemporaries.
So, awareness and consciousness-raising are the new contents of the concept proph
etic . Of course, we are all for awareness and consciousness-raising, in a ration
al sense; but it is unhistorical to identify these lofty undertakings with what
the Biblical prophets saw as their message . One may agree with some of the things
the prophets said, but their method of arriving at their messages is simply unsus
tainable in an age that has chosen to cultivate the scientific temper. If a pro
phet spoke out against social injustice, fine. Let us do as he did, and as all
those others did who spoke out against social injustice without claiming a divin
e source. If a prophet woke people up from their self-satisfied and mindless sl
umber, good. But if we follow his example, let us not pretend it is some supern
atural being that is speaking through us.
Prophets are also praised as the ones who don t accept reality as it is. To be pr
ophetic means, for Liberation Theologians, to go against the way of the world.
For instance, the recent upsurge of violent nationalism has made theologians say
: against the common belief that people first belong to their nation and not so
much to humanity as a whole, the Church has a prophetic mission to question this
seemingly natural and instinctive nationalist loyalty.
When we look at the actual prophets, we see that they certainly do militate agai
nst the existing reality. But whether this is always so elevating, is a differe
nt matter. What we do find is frustrated people who stand up against the succes
sful in life, who are unwilling to accept their own inferior position. With tha
t, nothing pejorative has been said: a pupil who has enough of his mediocre scho
ol results and decides to fight back and to work hard and become top of the clas
s, deserves praise; a member of an oppressed nation standing up against his coun
try s occupiers, is hailed as brave and freedom-loving (though not in all circumst
ances as wise). It is something else when people do not try to remedy their dep
ressed position with a, real solution, but posit an imaginary superiority instea
d. That is what we see prophets of the Abrahamic lineage do, time and again.
When the Israelites are suffering under the yoke of the Assyrians, the Babylonia
ns, or the Romans, we see prophets announce that God will take these enemies awa
y, that he will burn them down, that he will raise the fallen warriors of Israel
to life so that they can drive out the enemy. In some cases, this is coupled w
ith a practical programme of armed resistance (as with Bar Kochba, early 2nd cen
tury AD), but more often it is just an invocation of imaginary threats from heav
en against very real worldly overlords.
Even without the humiliation of foreign occupation, the prophetic Israelite reli
gion has features of a collective overcompensation of an inferiority complex. I
n the beginning, the Israelites were a cattle-rearing semi-nomadic tribe living
at the mercy of the increasingly well-organized sedentary populations: the story
of the farmer Cain and the shepherd Abel (Gen.4), where God accepts the latter s
but not the former s sacrifice, and where the latter is the former s innocent victim
, testifies to this early experience of nomadic vulnerability. After establishi
ng themselves as a kingdom, they were still a peripheral nation living in the sh
adow of the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The status of God s Chos
en People , which need not be supported by actual cultural achievements or politic
al grandeur, but can be claimed on the strength of an unverifiable exclusive divi
ne revelation , comes in handy to overcome this gnawing sense of inferiority.
This self-elevation from a real-life insecure and peripheral tribe to a mythical
Chosen; People that is the centre of God s concern, is the unique contribution of
the Old Testament. As a matter of collective psychology, it had fed on the ins
ecurity of a wandering tribe. After a few centuries as a moderately powerful st
ate, this need of imaginary self-aggrandizement was re-stimulated by the defeats
against the Assyrians (722 BC) and the Babylonians (587 BC), and took the form
of the vengefulness of a defeated nation. Their religion had given them an imag
inary superiority. It should be noted that the Hebrew self-promotion from real-l
ife smallness to the status of Chosen People, was in essential respects re-enact
ed by the founders of Christianity and Islam.
Sociologically, both Jesus and Mohammed were unimportant people, as were their f
irst recruits. Educationally, it is even more striking that the founding groups
of Christianity and Islam were all fairly backward people. In later apologetic
s, this is taken as a good point: what God hath not revealed to the wise and mig
hty, he hath revealed to these simple people. This is a revolutionary and irrat
ional assumption, that uneducated people can just start a new religion, and know
it all better than educated people. If education has the value which experienc
ed people ascribe to it, if it is really that indispensable for a mature and ful
ly developed faculty of judgment, we would expect people lacking in education to
come up with a second-rate product. We would expect them to improvise a clumsy
and inconsistent doctrine full of exaggerated claims and half-digested borrowed
ideas, without proper method or sense of proportion. And indeed, these are typ
ical traits of both Christianity and Islam.
Recent history provides a number of similar cases where prophets announce a God-
ordained glorious future or superior status, as well as miraculous help, to comm
unities in distress. The colonial period was especially rich in Christian-influ
enced instances of prophethood among natives of non-Christian cultures with some
exposure to Christian beliefs. In India s tribal communities, there has been a w
hole series of prophets, the most famous of whom was perhaps the Munda leader Bi
rsa, who organized rebellions at the end of 19th century (a full survey of these
Indian prophetic movements has been given by Stephen Fuchs in his book Godmen o
n the Warpath).6 In China, Hong Xiu-Chuan, a schoolteacher who had failed thrice
in the imperial exams, and who had converted to Protestantism, answered God s cal
l to start a messianic movement for establishing the Tai-ping Tian-guo, the heave
nly country of supreme peace . This Tai-ping rebellion (1851-64) would wreck publ
ic life in central China, and in the subsequent civil war millions were killed.
Among the Xhosa people of South Africa, the prophetess Nongqawuse stood up to an
nounce that on a specified day (18 February 1857), the sun would rise and sink b
ack into the East, and during the ensuing 48 hours of dark, the ancestors of the
people would come back to life and the British colonizers would be driven into
the sea. In order to show their confidence, the people had to kill their cattle
and destroy their harvest, and prepare for the final battle. But the day came
and went, and the people got hungry. After this catastrophe, they had no choice
but to go to the Europeans begging for menial jobs. Like that, numerous prophe
ts have brought disasters over their followers and other fellow-men.
These pitiable prophets of heavenly intervention give a much better idea of what
Biblical prophethood was like, than the sophisticated notions (say, prophetic no
n-conformism ) preached by modem theologians. It is alright to preach modem attit
udes and discard antiquated ones, but the theologians will have to face the cons
equence, viz. that by discarding the primitive Biblical belief in an exclusive l
iteral revelation announcing a drastic personal intervention of God Himself in w
orldly affairs, they are also discarding the basis of Christianity s claims to exc
lusive truth. The vague interpretation of prophethood as public-spiritedness or no
n-conformism constitutes a climbdown from claims of exclusive God-given truth to
the submergence of Christian identity in the multifarious religio-ethical effort
s of humanity at large.
1.5. Borrowed themes in Scripture
The Biblical text as a whole, comprising both the actual revelations from God an
d the much lengthier narrative surrounding them, may or may not be conceived as
God s word. Nowadays, only some fundamentalist Churches maintain that every word
in the Bible was literally intended by God Himself. Most Christians would rathe
r accept that the experiences narrated contain a revelation of God s plan for huma
nity, but that the actual wording has been man s work, and that it is up to us to
interpret the text and extract God s intention from it.
Though directly it may make little difference to the question whether the messag
es uttered by the prophets were really God s revelations, it is still interesting
to see to what extent the surrounding Biblical narrative is unmistakably a human
creation. Those who wrote and re-wrote the Bible, were human beings conditione
d by cultural motifs and attitudes prevalent in their national and international
environment. It follows that what they have transmitted to us as reports of pr
ophetic utterances, may in fact have been composed or at least rewritten to suit
certain ideological concerns, polemical exigencies or political compulsions.
The Bible editors had undoubtedly borrowed important cultural motifs from Egypt
(where the Israelites lived during the first half of the second millennium BC) a
nd Mesopotamia (where they ultimately came from, and where they lived in exile i
n the sixth century BC). Though we are told that the Chosen People s experience of
monotheism and the Covenant is one of the biggest events in history, it can only
be understood if we realize that this people was a satellite of now the Egyptia
n, then the Mesopotamian civilization. Both in contents and in literary techniq
ues, the Bible has borrowed considerably from the neighbouring cultures.
The Creation story, for a start, is thousands of years older than the Bible. Go
d making man out of clay is a classical motif in the myths of divergent cultures
. The fact that Eve, whose Hebrew name means life , is taken from Adam s rib, can be
explained by a process of borrowing from a Sumerian creation account, because i
n Sumerian the words for rib and life are homophonous. in a story from the Talmud (t
he rabbinical guide to life and to Bible reading, a very human and sensitive tex
t), the explanation is given that God took woman from man s rib so that she will al
ways be close to his heart : this shows man s inventiveness in enlivening and humani
zing an ancient story, but it cannot undo the borrowed and non-revealed nature o
f this Bible passage.
A tradition that is much closer to historical events, and which was also borrowe
d from the neighbouring cultures, is the story of the Flood. Of this story, sev
eral variations are known in West Asia, but the Bible is true to the common narr
ative skeleton: the whole earth is flooded, only a small group of people, who ha
ve taken precautions, survive in a ship (the ark of Noah), together with some sp
ecimens of other species. However, the Bible re-interprets this old story as Go
d s design to undo the evil that is part of His creation, and to help His handpick
ed favourites among the human beings to survive this mass destruction - a prefig
uration of God s later Covenant with His Chosen People.
More important borrowings are not so much the stories related in the Bible, the
pieces of contents, but the symbolic patterns and formal characteristics of the
Bible text. One borrowed element is the astrological symbolism of the Mesopotam
ians. Its two chief sets of symbols were the seven planets (which include sun and
moon) and the Zodiac.
Today, the Zodiac is known mostly as a tool in fortune-telling; for the Mesopota
mians, it was much more than that. Astronomically, it was the year cycle, the s
uccessive stages through which the sun accomplished its yearly journey. Philoso
phically, it became the archetypal cycle, the cosmic pattern of every cyclical p
rocess in its completeness, the structure of every complete set, every universe.
The planets were the active agents of destiny. Long before the Zodiac came into
use for fortune-telling, the planets were already used for that purpose. They
were the incarnated gods, heaven-dwellers who, in contrast to the background of
the fixed stars , were always in motion, just like the earthlings (though in a more
perfect, regular way). The planets were not the immutable absolute level of di
vinity, but the creative, world-oriented, destiny-regulating department of the d
ivine sphere.
In the Bible, God creates the world in six days and then has a day off. But the
seven-day week was not invented by God, as medieval Christians used to believe,
but by the ancient astronomers. They put the planets in order of apparent spee
d: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. They divided the day in tw
enty-four hours, and named these hours after the planets in descending order, st
arting with the sun for the first hour of the first day. The days were named aft
er the same planet as their first hour, and the resulting arrangement is still i
n use today: Sunday, Moonday, Marsday, Mercuryday, Jupiterday, Venusday, Saturnd
ay.7 This arrangement had existed for centuries by the time the Hebrew creation
story was written. Sunday had been given the honour of being the first day, so
that Saturday was the last. This was symbolically right in the sense that Satur
n is the slowest planet, representing therefore minimal activity and introspecti
on. For the Hebrews, this Saturn s day became the Sabbath, with its extreme ban o
n any kind of work, in imitation of God s own rest on the seventh day.
As for the signs of the Zodiac: the twelve sons of Jacob (also called Israel) ar
e clearly an embodiment of the sacred twelvefold of the Mesopotamians. For all
we know, the Zodiac imagery as we know it today was developed in Mesopotamia in
just the same period when the Hebrew people was living there in exile. In Genes
is 49, some of Jacob s sons are even described with characteristics typical of the
twelve signs: Juda as a lion, who shall wield the sceptre (Leo), Joseph as a bu
ll (Taurus), Dan as a snake (which, along with the eagle, is an old variation on
Scorpio). In Deuteronomy 33, a complete correspondence between Zodiac symbols
and the twelve sons/tribes is worked out. In Jesus time too, the Zodiac, or more
abstractly the twelvefold, was an all-important motif. Later, the European pai
nters would depict the twelve apostles as people with the characteristic physiqu
e which medieval astrology ascribed to the natives of the twelve signs.
The prophet Ezekiel uses the imagery of the four fixed (mid-season) signs of the Z
odiac: Bull (Taurus), Lion (Leo), Eagle (old image used for Scorpio), Man (Aquar
ius). These four were later coupled with the four evangelists. The writer of th
e Apocalypse describes a woman (ordinarily interpreted as the Virgin Mary) with
the moon at her feet and twelve stars around her head. The twelve stars is simply
the Hebrew expression for Zodiac .8
But the Zodiac, or at least the twelvefold arrangement, is also present in a mor
e complex and abstract way. The division of the circle into twelve is a very si
mple but very interesting geometrical operation. In fact, it is the most natural
division of the circle, i.e. it doesn t require anything that is not already prese
nt in the construction of the circle, viz. the compasses with a given radius: by
drawing six equal circles on the circumference of a given circle, the 12 inters
ection-points form a six-pointed star, and the straight lines connecting them wi
th the central point yield a division in 12 times 30 degrees. This must have be
en a momentous and awe-inspiring property for the primitive geometers of those d
ays. Just like the contemporary attempts to read mystical profundities into the
latest findings of modem science ( Tao of Physics c.s.), there was a tendency in an
cient cultures to link the first attempts at science with religion and metaphysi
cs. We all know about the Pythagoreans linkage of numerical properties with the
mysteries of the cosmos, but Babylonians and Egyptians had similar lines of spec
ulation, which no doubt influenced the Hebrew priests. They called the six-point
ed star David s Shield (Magen David), and nowadays it is present in the national f
lag of Israel.9
Another interesting thing about the construction is that it introduces the symbo
lism of the number thirteen. There are twelve intersection points on the outsid
e (six on the circumference of the basic circle, each followed by one outside th
e circumference), and one in the centre. They are representative of the world w
ith its twelve-stage cycles (like the year with its twelve moon-cycles) and of G
od, motionless in the centre. One might speculate that this is the origin of th
e taboo on the number thirteen: since the thirteenth point represented God, thirt
een was something like a God s name, and many nations including the Hebrews enterta
ined a taboo on pronouncing God s name. This speculation is corroborated by the fa
ct that to the Hebrews, the number thirteen was a sacred number: e.g., the Thora
(the five books of Moses), the most sacred part of the Bible, is called the thir
teen-petalled rose .10
Moreover, in this geometrical construction as well as in the Bible, the numbers
twelve (the outside points marking the division of the circle) and thirteen (the
total number of intersection points) always appear together. Take the sons of
Jacob: there were twelve of them, but they had one sister, Dinah, so Jacob had t
hirteen children. Take the twelve tribes of Israel: each one of Jacob s sons was
the ancestor of one tribe, except Joseph whose two sons both headed one tribe.
So the twelve tribes were really thirteen. But then the tribe of Levi had no te
rritory of its own, so that the land of Israel s thirteen tribes was divided into
twelve. Even in the New Testament, we see the same pattern: there were twelve a
postles around Jesus, making thirteen; and even among the apostles, after Judas s
uicide, a thirteenth member, Matthias, was accepted to replace Judas. And in th
e description of the days of Creation, the working days are listed as a day and
a night, six plus six being twelve, but of the Sabbath, only the day is mentione
d, making thirteen day-halves.
This list of Biblical motifs apparently borrowed from neighbouring cultures is b
y no means exhaustive. Without denying that the Bible editors have added some i
nventive imagery and symbolism of their own, we may safely conclude that the hum
an source of this aspect of Bible composition can be traced to the Israelites cul
tural environment; and more generally to human reason and human imagination rath
er than to the all-knowing Creator.
1.6. Numerical perfection of Scripture
The Kabbalah tradition of Jewish Scripture interpretation has always held that t
here are elements of highly intricate structural and numerical perfection in the
architecture of the Bible. These could reveal meanings unnoticed in a superfic
ial reading.
Thus, a technique called Temurah (permutation) was considered to reveal hidden m
eanings by exchanging the letters within a word or sentence. So, the opening wo
rd of Genesis, BeREShTh ( in the beginning ), was permuted to form the word-group Be
RITh-ESh, Covenant of Fire , a dramatic image of the Covenant as well as an allusio
n to the column of fire which went before the Israelites on their exodus through
the desert. It is also permuted to BarA-ShITh, He created six , referring to the
six days of creation and to a supposed sixfold structure in creation (e.g. the s
ix directions of space, represented by projection onto two-dimensional space as,
once more, the six-pointed star). To be sure, this kind of game can be played
in any alphabetic language, e.g. to say that GOD is merely DOG in reverse.
According to the Spanish kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla (13th century), like through
a garment, God s name is woven through the Thora . In the Renaissance, some Christi
an authors too sought to unveil secret structures containing coded messages, esp
. secret annunciations of Jesus the Redeemer. In more recent times, many deplor
able crank books have been written about hidden structures and messages in the B
ible. The main part of these Kabbalistic readings (or manipulations) of the Bib
le text concerns numerical structures. Recently, scholars have set out to check
the claim that the Bible is indeed such a numerically sophisticated constructio
n, without any superstitious expectations nor skeptical prejudices.
The Austrian professor Claus Schedl has put forward the thesis that sacred texts
, just like sacred buildings, were subject to architectonic rules.11Professor C.
J. Labuschagne, Old Testament scholar of Groningen University, has discovered a
series of clearly non-coincidental numerical patterns in the Hebrew text.12 One
coded message of the Bible editor is that numerical data embody heavenly phenome
na such as the planetary cycles.
For instance: one of the mysteries in the book of Genesis is the high age of som
e of the earlier human beings. In general, one may surmise that as memories bec
ame more distant, stories were exaggerated, and all kinds of facts were blown ou
t of proportion, including the life-spa- of the ancestors. We see this exaggerat
ion in history-based legends the world over. However, there is a strange exactn
ess about the ages of these ancestors in Genesis: Lamech reached the age of 777,
Henoch 365, Mahalalel 895, Yared 962. Of course, in Henoch s age we recognize th
e number of days in the year. The other ages can be analyzed as the sum of one
planet s synodic cycle (i.e. the number of days from one conjunction of the planet w
ith the sun till the next conjunction) with another planet s synodic cycle. Thus,
777 = 399 + 378 (Jupiter + Saturn), 962 = 584 + 378 (Venus + Saturn), 895 = 116
+ 779 (Mercury + Mars).
Numbers are present in the Bible not only in their explicit form, such as the nu
mber of years in someone s life, but also in a more intricate way. First of all,
there is the number of letters in a sentence, the number of words in a chapter,
etc. Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, the same number as the letters in the alphabet,
apparently symbolizing cosmic completeness. For the same reason, the New Testam
ent book of the Apocalypse has 22 chapters, but the Psalm does even better: each
of the letters of the alphabet is the first letter of one stanza (acrostic).
Secondly, before Indian numerals came into use, the letters of the West-Asian an
d Greek alphabets were used both as sound-representers and as number-representer
s. Thus, Aleph equaled one, Beth two, etc., Yod ten, Kaph twenty, etc., Qoph on
e hundred, Resh two hundred, etc. Therefore, any written word could be read as
a combination of numerals (though usually not in the correct order of hundredfol
d-tenfold-unit). In Arabic script this can still be done, e.g. in the inscripti
on on the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya it is said: The date of its erection will becom
e manifest by the words: it will remain an everlasting bounty , because the latter
expression is written in Persian with letters that add up to 935, being the yea
r AH (equivalent to 1528-29 AD) when the building was claimed to have been const
ructed.13 Similarly, the number 786 is considered a lucky number by Muslims, bec
ause it is equal to the sum numerical value of the Kalima, the Islamic creed.
This practice is almost as old as alphabetic writing, and was fairly common in t
he cultural surroundings of the Bible editors. A well-known example: Sargon II
of Assyria, in the 8th century BC, had a city wall constructed around Dur-Sharru
kin, the length of which (16283 el) corresponded to the numerical value of his o
wn name. The Gnostics discovered the basic oneness of their god-concept Abraxas
 and the then very popular Persian god Meithras (Mitra) in the fact that the nam
es of both, written in Greek, had the same numerical value: 365. In medieval Ju
daism, this practice, called Gematria, became very prevalent, and all kinds of v
ariations were invented, e.g. a filled numerical value, being the sum of the numer
ical values of the fully spelt names of the letters that make up a word.
For example, the word Shaddai, one of God s extra names, is ordinarily analyzed in
to Shin/300 + Dalet/4 + Yod/ 10 = 314. Its filled value is counted as the sum o
f the letters that make up a the letters: SH-I-N + D-L-T + Y-O-D = (300 + 10 + 5
0) + (4 +30 + 400) + (10 + 6 + 4) = 814. As an example of the use to which thes
e calculations were put, the followers of the Jewish messiah Shabbetai Tsevi (17th
century AD) proved his messianic pretence by showing that his name (Sh-B-T-I + Ts
-B-I = 300 + 2 + 400 + 10 + 90 + 2 + 10) had the same numeral value, 814, as the
filled numerical value of Shaddai. However, their opponents pointed out that his
name s numerical value also equaled that of the expression Ruakh Sheqer, false spi
rit (R-U-Kh + SH-Q-R = 200 + 6 + 8 + 300 + 100 + 200). Which did not so much prov
e they were right in rejecting this false messiah (who was pressured into conver
ting to Islam), but rather that this number play should not be taken so seriousl
y.14
In the Bible this play with numbers also occurs. Important numbers are chiefly
26 and 17. The godname YaHWeH15 numerically consists of Yod/10 + He/5 + Waw/6 +
He/5 - 26. However, in the reduced variety of gematria, all numerical values of
the letters were reduced to unit level, dropping the zeros: that made the numeri
cal value of the letter Yod 1 instead of 10, and the total value for YaHWeH 17 i
nstead of 26. Both numbers appear in all kinds of ways. Some examples. The to
tal number of words spoken by Yahweh in the Book Deuteronomy is 442, or 26 times
17. The ages of the patriarchs are the following: Abraham 175, or 7 times 5 ti
mes 5; Isaac 180, or 5 times 6 times 6; Jacob 147, or 3 times 7 times 7. Now if
you replace multiplication by addition, then (7 + 5 +5) = (5 + 6 + 6) = (3 + 7 +
7) = 17. This is clearly no coincidence. Apparently, the hidden presence of 1
7 indicates the intimate company of Yahweh who was with the patriarchs all throu
gh their lives.
In the Hellenistic period, some Pythagorean lore was spread to many countries, i
ncluding new forms of number symbolism that often came to reinforce older and si
mpler forms. The Gospel of John (21:11) mentions 153 as the number of fish caug
ht by the apostles. Any Pythagorean can see that 153 is the triangular number of
17, meaning the sum of all the integer numbers from 1 to 17. Moreover, 153 is a
lso the only number that equals the sum of the cubes of its components: 1 + 125
+ 27. If the Gospel writer takes the trouble of giving an exact count of the fi
sh in Peter s net, there must be a good reason for it. In this case, it may be a
combination of Greek number symbolism and Hebrew gematria.
In the gematria system, the number 13 gains an extra significance: it is the num
erical value of EHhaD, meaning one . That God is one is the central affirmation in t
he Jewish religion.
The Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC seems to have steeped the Hebrew sc
ripturalists in this symbolic-mathematical lore of the heathen Mesopotamians, an
d it is just after this exile, under Persian rule, that the Thora was codified f
or good. It seems now that the final editors of the Hebrew Bible took the stori
es handed down to them (the contents of the Bible), and shaped them according to
these symbolic-mathematical designs, adding a word here, repeating one there, s
pelling some words in an unusual way, in order to create meaningful numerical pr
operties in the text. Says prof. Labuschagne: For me it is clear that the Bible
text constitutes a premeditated unity. The invisible structure, insofar as it h
adn t been handed down to them, must have been put in by the final editors. This
throws a new light on the seemingly superfluous repetitions: they were probably
used in order to reach a predetermined number of words.
This doesn t invalidate the theories which see the contents of the Bible as the re
sult of a slow growth process, with layers, additions, interpolations, internal
reinterpretations etc. it simply means that in this process, especially in the f
inal stages, the culture of mathematical sacred symbolism was an important forma
l element in the composition of the Bible.
It is now very clear that the Kabbalists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
who rediscovered these numerical properties while reading the Bible, were wrong
in inferring that they proved a superhuman design in the Bible composition. On
the contrary, these number games suggesting coded secret messages are a fairly t
ypical cultural phenomenon of that period of human development in which the Bibl
e was written. They were a human way of making Scripture more sacred.
The effort to give meaning to every possible structure in the Bible, even if obv
iously cranky, is only a logical consequence of the belief that the Bible is God s
revelation. Books in which one word means one thing, are ten a penny; but a bo
ok composed by God Himself should be truly perfect, and should be composed in su
ch a way that it keeps on revealing new aspects of the infinite divine with ever
y new way of reading it.

Footnotes:
1The striking and profound similarity between Spinoza s philosophy and Eastern tho
ught, particularly Mahayana Buddhism, has been described and analyzed exhaustive
ly by Jon Wetlesen: The Sage and the Way, Spinoza s Ethics of Freedom, Van Gorcum
Publ., Assen (Netherlands) 1979.
2See the ground-breaking study by Ilya Prigogyne, the Russian-born Belgian Nobel
Prize winner, and mrs. Isabelle Stengers, his colleague at Brussels Free Univer
sity: La Nouvelle Alliance, 1979 (English translation: Order out of Chaos).
3Full discussion in the yearbook of De Ronde Tafel 1989-90 (Gent 1990), in the r
eport on Mary s Apparitions in Yugoslavia.
4The story of prophethood in Israel is told by Bernhard Lang: Wie wird man Proph
et in Israel?, Patmos Verlag, Dusseldorf 1980; Jean-Marie Van Cangh: Le Propheti
sme Biblique et Chrétien, El-Kalima, Brussels ca. 1990; Mircea Eliade ed.: Encyclo
pedia of Religion, entry Prophecy.
5On the rise of monotheism in Israel, see Morton Smith: Palestinian Parties and
Politics that shaped the Old Testament, Columbia press, New York 1971; and Johan
nes C. De Moor: The Rise of Yahwism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism, Leuven U
niversity Press, Leuven 1990.
6S. Fuchs: Godmen on the Warpath. A Study of Messianic Movements in India, Munsh
iram Manoharlal, Delhi 1992. It also deals with Islamic quasi-prophetic movement
s whose origin cannot be attributed to Christian influence but to the Islamic tr
adition itself.
7In the Germanic languages, the names of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday
are coined after the corresponding Germanic gods Tiwas/ Mars, Wodan/Mercury, Th
or/Jupiter and Freya/Venus.
8These twelve stars now figure in the flag of the European Community. It was th
e winning design in a public contest in the 1950s. The designer, a devotee of t
he Virgin Mary, said that this image from the Apocalypse was his inspiration (vi
a the so-called Miraculous Medal, the design of which included this same twelve-
star-circle, and which had been revealed to the French nun Catherine Labourié in 183
0).
9It must, however, be pointed out that the six-pointed star was then not used as
a distinctive flag of the Jewish People (just like the swastika is seen used as a
religious symbol everywhere in India, as well as other countries, without being
the private symbol of one religion). Only in the late 18th century AD, Jews ad
opted it as a symbol of their community, to match the Christians cross. See the
appendix on Magen David in Gerschom Scholem: Kabbalah (Keter Publ., Jerusalem 19
74; Meridian, New York 1978).
10For this reason, the famous Israeli Talmud scholar Adin Steinsalz's book on th
e Jewish religion is titled: The Thirteen-Petalled Rose (Basic Books, New York 1
980).
11Claus Schedi : Baupläne des Wortes (German : Building plans of the Word ), 1974.
12Report in Elsevier, 4/8/90, P. 75 ff.
13Radhey Shyam: Babar (Janaki Prakashan, Patna 1978), app.6.
14For a fuller treatment of gematria, see Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah, ch. 2.10.
15YaHWeH was sometimes written with the vowel-marks of word ADoNaI, my lord , which
was usually read instead of the unpronounceable god-name, resulting in the mist
aken pronunciation YeHoWaH.

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CHAPTER TWO
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROPHETISM
The main part of this book is intended as an introduction to important findings
in Bible research from the angle of psychology, with the emphasis on the work of
the Flemish Bible scholar and psychologist Dr. Somers (parts of chapters 3.6 to
3.10 are little more than a re-wording of his original writings).
2.1. A Jesuit breaks free
Dr. Herman H. Somers, born in Antwerp on 3 October 1921, is an accomplished scho
lar with acclaimed contributions in many fields of learning. He studied in Leuv
en and Rome, and is an M.A. in Philosophy, Ph.D. in Classical Philology (i.e. La
tin and Greek), Ph.D. in Theology, and Ph.D. in Psychology. For forty years he
was in the Jesuit order. He had worked as a schoolteacher, journalist for the J
esuit-led paper De Linie, lecturer in Classical Philology and in Psychology, pra
ctising psychopathologist in a mental asylum, before he went on to devote 25 yea
rs to scientific research. He has been active in a variety of research projects
, from noise ecology and experimental psychology to pioneering work in computer-
aided mathematical text analysis of the Bible.
As he studied the Bible more closely, he developed doubts about its divine chara
cter. In the face of unexpected findings inconvenient to the faith, he refused
to renounce scientific standards, and drew his conclusions. In what he describes
as a painful process, he grew away from the Christian faith, and left the Jesui
t order. Pro-Jesuit sources claim that it is only because of his unwillingness
to comply with his vow of poverty (concretely: renouncing the family property in
favour of the order after his mother died) that he has left the order.
In 1986, he published the book: Jezus de Messias: was het Christendom een Vergis
sing? ( Jesus the Messiah: was Christianity a Mistake? ).1 Written in Dutch, it is a
n abridged version of a more technical study in French, which he sent to a numbe
r of experts and interested parties, among them the Vatican. It is a ground-bre
aking exploration of the psychopathological syndromes accurately described in th
e New Testament, especially of Jesus mental condition.
In June 1990, he published a more voluminous sequel, this time also dealing with
the Old Testament prophets. It is called: Toen God sliep, schreef de mens de B
ijbel. De Bilbet belicht door een psycholoog (Dutch: When God slept, man wrote t
he Bible. The Bible explained by a psychologist ).2 We hope that it will soon be
translated into all major languages, and meanwhile we will offer a summary of th
e book s most striking points.
Since then, dr. Somers has also written a history of the Jesuit order, a psycho
logical study of Mohammed, and a study of the Jehovah s Witnesses.
2.2. Methodology
A psychological investigation of the Bible starts from the premise that the Bibl
e text is based on real events. Of course, in the centuries of writing and rewr
iting, distortions may have crept in (deliberately or by mistake), stories from
other traditions may have been added, historical facts embellished, blown up to
mythical proportions, or on the contrary, concealed. But nonetheless, the very
tradition of which the text is a part, could not have existed if the founders of
that tradition, whose life and times are described in the text, had not existed
. The core of the actual texts must be function of real words and deeds by real
people.
That this premises, evident though it seems, is not automatically accepted, may
be seen from two trends in modern Bible studies. Firstly, there are people who
flatly deny that Jesus ever existed. According to the Marxist-leaning scholar P
. Krijbolder, Jesus was merely a character invented as a literary device in the
presentation of a new ideology, and the four Gospels were designed to present fo
ur aspects of this ideology.3 In that case, if at all there is scope for psychol
ogical analysis, it is of the psychological motives and attitudes of the writers
, not of the text s characters, since these are fictional.
Secondly, there are a lot of theologians who follow the German theologian Bultma
nn in his Entmythologisierung (demythologization) of the Bible stories. This me
ans that the stories are not to be taken literally, since they are in fact merel
y myths. They are stories made up by the community of believers in order to exp
ress their faith. If we want to read the Bible correctly, we have to relinquish
 the idea that it describes what really happened, and interpret it as a collecti
on of expressions of the faith, moulded in literary genres developed for that ve
ry purpose. This approach does usually not imply that Jesus existence is doubted
, merely that the miracle stories, the virgin birth, the resurrection are not to
be taken literally .
The skepsis regarding the existence of Biblical characters may be more reasonabl
e in the case of persons situated in the distant past, like Noah, Abraham, Isaac
, Jacob, Joseph, but from Moses onward the stories start looking too much like t
hey are essentially historical. However, the demythologizing skepsis regarding th
e reality of Jesus divine vocation and miracles may well be extended to character
s like Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, and Solomon: while their life and times may
have been real enough, the postulated divine intervention in them is considered
, by the demythologizers, as just a figure of speech.
There are reasons for giving in only minimally to the extreme skepsis regarding
the basis in reality of the Bible narrative, and for sticking to the essentially
historical character of the Bible s stories. Firstly, there is a logical contrad
iction in postulating that the core text of a religious tradition is unhistorica
l, mere narrative. A religious tradition can only be created by people, in fact b
y people who have managed to attract the loyalty of a number of followers. If th
e first Christians made myths in order to express their faith , then someone must h
ave generated or inspired this new faith among them. Saying that Jesus never ex
isted, implies that the Gospel-writers did write about someone who did not exist
and did not found their religion, but failed to write about the man who did cre
ate their religion and therefore must necessarily have existed. This is not str
ictly impossible, but it is also like saying that the Shakespeare to whom the fa
mous plays and poems have been attributed, never existed, but that his plays and
poems were written by someone else whose name may also have been Shakespeare.
Secondly, there is quite a bit of external evidence. There are several referenc
es to Jesus in non-Christian sources, just like there are external references to
the Hebrew migration from Egypt. Of course, philologists have taken great pain
s to find forgeries and interpolations in these texts, but by now this explainin
g-away has been superseded by a willingness to take sources seriously as long as
there are no solid independent grounds for suspecting forgery. For instance, t
he historical authenticity of the passage on Jesus in Flavius Josephus work (late
first century AD) is now accepted by many scholars: though it has been tampered
with, it was not inserted.
Thirdly, there is a lot of internal evidence in the Bible text. That is to say,
there are passages that could not have been there except as references to reali
ty or (often as polemical replies) to historical outside comments on Jesus. Whi
le theologians of the Entmythologisierung school say that many passages are edif
ying fables, a number of Gospel passages are not edifying at all. For instance,
Jesus cursing an innocent fig tree when, out of season, it isn t bearing fruit.
Or Jesus not being able to do miracles in some places, and not being believed by
his own townsfolk, even being considered insane by his own family. These thing
s are mentioned because people in the audience of Christian preachers remembered
them, and they had to be acknowledged and, if possible, explained in consonance
with the preachers doctrines. If these things hadn t really happened, there would
not have been any reason for Christian writers to mention them. Other criteria
of internal evidence, esp. to separate genuine testimony from made-up stories, a
re provided by modem methods of forensic psychology to evaluate courtroom testim
onies.
Fourthly, the psychological investigation of the Bible comes up with a new inter
nal criterion. We can safely assume that the Bible writers were not aware of th
e findings of modem psychopathology, i.e. the study of mental diseases. They di
d not know the psychopathological conditions that modem psychologists have studi
ed and organized into categories of coherent syndromes. Yet, in some places the
y do give accurate descriptions of such psychopathological syndromes. The stamp
of realness is that in these descriptions, no symptoms of different conditions
get mixed up. Anyone can name a few acts and attitudes that he associates with
the term madness . But realistically describing a condition of catatonic schizophr
enia, or querulous paranoia, can only be done by someone who knows psychopatholo
gy - or by someone who merely describes what he sees in a particular real case o
f such a condition.
It is not out of place to look for psychopathological conditions in the Bible.
After all, then as now, a certain category of mentally afflicted people would be
attracted to religion, and become the most ardent students of Scripture. Certa
in mental conditions do not lead to a total personality disintegration, to a los
s of intellectual capacities, or to an unbearably antisocial behaviour. In fact
, highly talented and literate people can be afflicted by psychopathological con
ditions. In the old days, some of them could set themselves up as teachers and
prophets, and their eccentric behaviour would only add to their aura of godmen.
And though many religious madmen would be recognized for what they were, a few
would not (at least not by the final editors of the Bible), and it is these few
that interest us here.
For a first example of a pathological description, we can take a very clear and
simple case from the Gospel. It does not concern Jesus or another prophet, but
a possessed child, cured by Jesus according to Luke 9:37-43, Mark 9:14-29, Mathew
17:14-21. The Gospel relates how a child is brought to Jesus, because it is pos
sessed by a deaf-and-dumb demon which it has had since birth. When it sees Jesu
s, it gets a crisis, shakes and with foaming lips falls to the ground. Jesus ra
ises it up and the crisis is over, the demon has gone out . Remark that the text d
oesn t say that henceforth the child can hear and speak.
Even a layman can recognize this as an epileptic crisis which, as is normal, sub
sides after a few minutes. But the story gives two important details that compl
ete the syndrome. Firstly, the child gets the crisis when it is confronted with
Jesus. Typically, these crises erupt after sudden emotions, such as a child ma
y feel when confronted with this strange man with his charismatic airs, probably
accompanied by a number of followers. Here, the story does not say that the ch
ild was already having a crisis before Jesus came in. It was the other way roun
d: apparently, Jesus entry was causally related to the crisis.
Secondly, the child has been deaf (and therefore it can also not speak) since bi
rth. Now, one typical physiological cause of epilepsy can be a trombophlebitis
occurring around the time of birth, which leaves a scar on the brain, thus indir
ectly causing epilepsy while directly causing deafness.
This simple story thus gives us important conclusions. Firstly, this possessed c
hild must have existed. It is so completely improbable that a writer who knew no
thing about these subtler points of the epileptic condition, would have invented
this story. It could only be an account of a real case.
Secondly, from the fact that the story is told as a report of a miracle wrought
by Jesus, it is clear that the writer did believe that a cure took place, and th
at Jesus extraordinary powers had been demonstrated. In fact, from the details o
f the story, it seems that Jesus himself believed this. Yet, both the writer an
d Jesus were wrong: epileptic crises always subside, and that is no indication o
f cure at all. This shows how easily people in those days could be made to beli
eve in the miraculous power of anyone who had the guts to style himself a miracl
e-worker; and how some people, notably Jesus, could erroneously believe such a t
hing about themselves.
As Dr. Somers writes: The features, found in the text, are all coherent with the
syndrome of epilepsy and especially with an infantile form: perinatal infection
of the ears with inflammatory complications, causing thrombo-phlebitis in the br
ain with the consequence of epileptic seizures and deaf muteness. In the text o
f Mark 9, all symptoms are described with precision: the child is mute, falls in
the water and the fire (a loss of consciousness), utters a cry and is agitated,
has foam on his mouth, becomes like dead and after a while is cured . Obviously,
2000 years ago nobody was aware of the true nature of epilepsy and the typical f
eatures of this illness in young children. If a witness describes so correctly
the phenomena of an epileptic seizure in a child with all concomitant circumstan
ces, this fact has precedence over all philological arguments and constitutes pr
oof of authenticity and historicity. If moreover, the witness mentions all thes
e features in order to prove his incorrect view on the facts (viz. that Jesus ef
fected a miracle cure), it is clear that the testimony is beyond suspicion. If a
nything here depends on culture, it is the interpretation, in this case: that it
is the devil who causes the seizure.
Another example is the exorcism related in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20. A man wa
s possessed by a host of demons, and dangerous. He had broken the chain in whic
h people had put him, and now lived in caves and on burial-grounds, and the peop
le were afraid of him. Jesus asked the demon in this man for his name, as was cus
tomary in exorcisms. The name was Legion , since there were many demons at once.
Then he drove the demons out, into a flock of pigs, who became mad, threw themse
lves into the lake, and drowned. The man became calm and asked to stay with Jes
us, but was not allowed to. The people of the area asked Jesus to go away.
This man apparently suffered from schizophrenia with catatonic agitation. In a f
it of rage, such people can develop an unbelievable strength, enough to break ha
ndcuffs. Even Jesus, after curing him, is apprehensive about having him around, a
nd consequently sends him away. Such people s personalities totally disintegrate,
they eat their own excrement and live worse than animals. Jesus speaks to the
man, and the next thing we read is that the pigs become mad and run away, into t
he lake. Unless you believe in miracles, this seems to mean that the man went i
nto a rage and didn t take on Jesus but went after the pigs.4 Seeing the madman in
his rage, the pigs naturally ran away, and afraid as pigs can be, some of them
even ran into the lake. But then, as always, the rage subsides and the afflicte
d man becomes quiet. Jesus sends the man away, and a proof that this indeed was
a lasting cure is not even attempted.
In this story we have a smaller number of elements, so the improbability of the
writer just making it up is not as striking as in the first story. Still, the p
icture of the sick man here is realistic, as is the impression that mere passers
-by, such as Jesus followers (who don t get to see his regular crises followed by e
qually regular periods of calm), would think that after a fit of rage everything
has come back to normal , and that a cure has been effected.
From these examples a method can be derived:
1.
the search in the text for certain symptoms should precede any other consi
deration;
2.
if a well-known syndrome can be identified, all other elements should be c
oherent with this syndrome (if no syndrome can be identified, then psycho-pathol
ogy considers its job finished. it is nobody s intention to force a psycho-patholo
gical explanation where there is no solid ground for one);
3.
the fact that the witness is unaware of the scientific significance of the
 elements he mentions, will be considered as decisive.
Therefore, this psychopathological control of old texts can decide the questions
about the historicity of the facts almost with certainty. As the syndrome desc
ribed is culture-neutral and independent, all textual and philological criticism
has to take this fact into account. Some methods of judicial expertise can sub
sidiarily be applied (such as the criteria of U. Undeutsch)5 in order to decide
about the truthfulness of a testimony according to internal criteria.
As a consequence of this methodological solution some earlier philological concl
usions are to be re-examined. It can be shown that a number of hypotheses inten
ded to solve ununderstood texts of the Gospel and the Apocalypse, are defective.
If one reads that in the story of the epileptic child two devils were mentioned
: a mute one and an epileptic one, and that therefore one can suspect that two d
ifferent stories were joined, it is clear that this clumsy construction is only
rendered necessary by ignorance of the infantile epileptic syndrome.6
According to Somers: Similarly, the attempts by some philologists to explain the
story of the possessed man of Gerasa (Mark 5) as a synthesis of two or three oth
ers, mixed with folklore, is now superseded by a realistic understanding of the
story through psychopathological examination. The possessed of Gerasa shows all
symptoms of schizophrenia with catatonic agitation. The story is quite realist
ic, including the delusion that he was possessed by a legion of devils. Mark s te
xt is rather precise: the man was subject to a grandiose delusion; he was agitat
ed esp. during the night, he roamed amidst the graves, howling, and he mortified
himself with stones. Nobody could control him, he broke all chains. It is not
very strange that such a lunatic chases a herd of pigs while uttering loud shri
eks, sending his devils into them. All these elements confirm the diagnosis of
catatonic schizophrenia.
The probability that such description could be put together by accident is infini
tesimal. In practice, there can be no more doubt about the historicity of the f
acts. There is only one story, no folklore, nothing but a rather precise report
of a real encounter of Jesus with a schizophrenic patient, written with the int
ention to show how Jesus had power over the devils. The witness intended to pro
ve a very different thesis from what he actually did prove. Indeed, in our two
examples: the epileptic child and the schizophrenic of Gerasa, Mark has shown th
at Jesus did not have power over the devils because there were none, but that he
thought he did. From these two examples it is clear how the psychopathological
examination of these texts is able to explain them and to show directly their h
istorical truth.
These were two examples of accurate descriptions of psychopathological condition
s in the Gospel. Now, after many years of Bible analysis, dr. Somers realized
that the descriptions of some prominent Bible characters also show coherent desc
riptions of psychopathological syndromes.
2.3. The Patriarchs
The first Old Testament character who deserves a closer psychological investigat
ion, is Abraham. His story is that of a man who has no children, but hears a vo
ice promising him a numerous progeny.
Dr. Somers takes the trouble of demonstrating that everything in the story of Ab
raham regarding marriage customs is authentic: the fact that children born by a
slave girl were legitimate, that the official wife could adopt such a child (e.g
. if she was sterile, as Sarah is said to be), that the nomads lent out or sold
their sisters and daughters to visitors or in exchange for food supplies, and so
on. Some of these customs were not in vogue anymore in the time the Bible was
committed to writing, so if they figure in this story, this indicates its histor
ical authenticity. The report of Abraham s visit of Egypt completely fits the soci
al facts that we know from Egyptian historiography. Modernist theologians are m
istaken if they say that the patriarch s story is just an edifying narrative conco
cted by priests in order to express the Israelites faith in their God.
The theological dimension of the story seems to be more recent, but the skeleton
of actual events related is no doubt about real people, living in the 16th and
15th century BC. The personal data about Abraham also bear the stamp of authent
icity. Dr. Somers lists the following remarkable data which the Bible narrative
gives us about Abraham:
1.
He hears Yahweh s voice, giving him orders, and claims Yahweh visits him.
2.
He thinks he is the progenitor of a numerous progeny, though at first he c
annot have children with Sarah.
3.
He offers his wife for the pleasure of the Pharaoh and of chieftain Abimel
ek.
4.
He considers himself Yahweh s chosen one, elevated above all other tribes.
5.
He institutes male circumcision, and gives it the symbolical meaning of th
e Covenant with Yahweh.
6.
He sends his eldest son Ismael, together with the latter s mother, the slave
girl Hagar, into the desert.
7.
He wants to kill his and Sarah s son Isaac.
This is not a normal behaviour pattern. Yet, it is not entirely inconsistent.
In fact, the psychopathologist recognizes a typical pattern: the syndrome called
paranoia. In this mental disease, the patient suffers from persistent thoughts
that are in conflict with reality. Typical delusions are: being persecuted by
an enemy, being endowed with a special mission or special powers, belonging to a
family of otherworldly descent. These delusions can be accompanied by hallucin
ations, usually the well-known phenomenon of hearing voices . Often these voices c
ommand him to commit very specific symbolical acts, sometimes specific crimes.
The refusal of one s own sexuality, as well as sexual impotence, often accompany t
his condition.
The limited mutilation called (male) circumcision, is not something invented by
(or prescribed by God to) Abraham. The Egyptians and other peoples knew the pra
ctice. The rationale was that everyone has both a male and a female soul. In t
he male, the left-over female resides in the prepuce, the skin covering the top
of the penis; in the female, the leftover male resides in the clitoris. Inciden
tally, this primitive insight corresponds with certain findings of modern embryo
logy: the same tissue that becomes the glans (top of the penis) in a male embryo
, becomes the clitoris in the female embryo; and the same tissue that becomes th
e labia, the visible part of the girl s genitals, becomes the boy s prepuce. So, in
order to achieve full sexual differentiation, the part which corresponds to the
outermost part of the opposite sex s genitals is removed. In order to make real
men, the left-over labia is cut off, and in order to make real women, the left-ove
r glans is removed.
Since womanhood is more taken for granted, whereas a real man is something one has
to become, the practice of female circumcision is fortunately not that widespre
ad. Today, it is confined to North and East Africa, where its defendants often
invoke Islamic sanction for the practice. In fact, Mohammed never prescribed it
, but according to a tradition, when seeing a girl s circumcision, he told the peo
ple to diminish but not destroy , which is generally understood as an acceptance of
the minor circumcision (removal of the clitoris), but a rejection of the major
circumcision (removal of the labia, followed by sewing up the vaginal opening un
til the day of defloration). The practice is extremely painful and destructive,
and the World Health Organization and many social activists are trying to eradi
cate it. Male circumcision, on the other hand, is fairly harmless and is found
among many peoples in different continents. The Bible only mentions circumcisio
n as applicable to males.
The fact that circumcision is so widespread, invalidates the Bible s claim that it
was the token of the exclusive covenant between Yahweh and His chosen people.
If Abraham perforce wanted to circumcise his son, there must have been a differe
nt reason: perhaps the paranoia syndrome. Attempts at mutilation of one s own or
a child s genitals are not uncommon among paranoid patients. They are a violent e
xpression of their refusal of their own sexuality.
But probably the story of Abraham instituting circumcision does not warrant any
inferences about the historical Abraham s personality. It is quite possible that
the priestly Bible editors during the Babylonian exile (6th century BC) retroact
ively made circumcision into the sign of the Covenant. In Palestine and Egypt,
it could not have been a distinctive custom, because it was widespread, but in B
abylon the Hebrews distinguished themselves from the Babylonians by this custom,
so it got emphasized and sanctified as a factor of the Hebrews identity. To giv
e the practice full sanction, it was attributed to God s own will as expressed in
the Covenant with Abraham.
On the other hand, while circumcision may not originally have been introduced as
a sign of the Covenant, it may well have been started, as far as Abraham s own cl
an was concerned, by Abraham himself. At least, if we accept that Abraham was a
n immigrant to Kanaan from Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia, it is logical that h
e was the first in his clan to have his son circumcised, as a matter of cultural
adaptation to his new environment. All in all, it is safer to subtract the int
roduction of circumcision from the list of peculiar behaviour traits in the hist
orical Abraham. The aforementioned six facts that remain are still peculiar eno
ugh.
It is possible that Abraham at first had a healthy sex life, and that he got no
children due to purely physical causes (impotentia generandi rather than impoten
tia coeundi). The frustration and inferiority feeling that would naturally foll
ow from being a married man without children, might then have been a typical sta
rting-point for the progressive development of a paranoid delusion. The inferio
rity feeling gets transformed into delusions of greatness and divine favour. Th
e typical construction you find among many paranoid patients is: my present misf
ortune (including the fact that people consider me mad and put me in a mental ho
spital) is merely a stage of testing, after which my true mission will become cl
ear to all and I will be glorified.
Abraham lent Sarah to other men (Genesis 12:10-20, 20:118). Doing this with you
r own wife (rather than with your sister or daughter) was very unusual, because
the laws against adultery were very strict. In fact, both the pharoah and Abime
lek were very unhappy and indignant when they found out this woman they had hire
d was already someone s wife. Is this practice of making a childless wife availab
le to the inseminative potential of other men not an indication that her ultimat
e pregnancy was brought about by one of those other men?
In Genesis 18:1-15 it is related that a visitor, called Yahweh (but otherwise a
perfectly human fellow who washes his feet and eats flour cakes), wants to see S
arah, and afterwards tells Abraham that next year he will have a son. Although
the story may have been censored a bit in the final editing, there can be no dou
bt about what had happened in between. It would explain the oral tradition ment
ioned in the Talmud, that Isaac didn t resemble Abraham at all. Similarly, the so
n that Hagar is said to have given Abraham, may well have been another man s offsp
ring: nobody keeps check on what exactly a simple maid is doing at night.
At any rate, Abraham does not behave like a man who, after years of fruitless tr
ying, has been blessed with two sons. He sends the eldest, Ismael, together with
his mother Hagar, away into the desert. The youngest, Isaac, will be sacrifice
d at Yahweh s command. Did Abraham suffer at the thought that these children, who
had restored his manhood in the eyes of his tribesmen, were in fact not his chi
ldren at all? Did he suffer from a conflict between his delusion of a God-given
promise of numerous progeny, of which the sons were the fulfillment, and the sn
eaking realization that they were not his own sons? At any rate, in a completel
y pathological development, he hears a voice telling him to sacrifice his son.
This is one of the great religious founding moments of the Judeo-Christian tradi
tion: Abraham obeying Yahweh all the way, even past the limits of absurdity. Bu
t in the Bible narrative (Genesis 22:1-19), this great and profound act is condu
cted without any religious pomp, even secretively. He doesn t tell his family he
is going to obey Yahweh s glorious command. He makes his son believe they are goi
ng for an ordinary animal slaughter, until Isaac himself notices that they have
everything for a proper slaughter except an animal. He expressly tells his serv
ants that he and his son will both come back soon. He knows his family will pre
vent him from obeying Yahweh s command, and rightly so.
The narrative goes on to relate that Abraham is prevented from striking and kill
ing his son. it says that an angel of the Lord intervened. If we discount the h
ypothesis that angels exist and intervene in human actions, we simply read that
someone stopped him. Perhaps the voice ( Yahweh ) has changed its mind, and now tel
ls him not to go all the way. It tells him that he has already passed the test
of obedience, and resumes the older tune that he will be the ancestor of a numer
ous people. But more probably, it is the people in his surroundings who stop hi
m, and the explanation that they have really been Yahwah s agents ripens later in
Abraham s brain.
We may suppose that his family was kind enough not to start arguing when he gave
his own paranoid explanations for his behaviour. In fact, it is not uncommon t
hat the patient s surroundings, after they have come to know the line of his delus
ion, start playing along. Perhaps, when Sarah gave her favours to the visitor,
hoping he might get her pregnant after all, she and the other family members tol
d Abraham, in consonance with the things he himself usually said, that this man
was Yahweh, who had come to fulfill his promise. And when Abraham had been prev
ented by the servants from killing Isaac, they joined him in ascribing it to div
ine intervention. This way, a family tradition was started that interpreted the
family saga in the terms of Abraham s delusion. And because it was such an unusu
al story, it was preserved and came down to the time of the Bible s codification,
to become the well-known foundation narrative of prophetic monotheism.
In handing down the story, it is the unusual, not the ordinary, that gets most a
ttention. That is why the faithful report of Abraham s strange behaviour has reac
hed us. It is also why any report of a normal religious man, who does his daily
devotions but doesn t pretend anything weird like being Yahweh s chosen one, would
never have become so well-known and influential (for better or for worse).
Readers who fear that we are going to declare all the prominent Bible characters
madmen, need not worry. The next two patriarchs, Isaac and Jacob, were not cra
zy at all. There are some interesting non-pathological psychological aspects to
their adventures, but we will not go into that here. It will suffice to remark
that Jacob was a very sly and unscrupulous man. He and his sons shared an amaz
ing harshness and lack of fellow-feeling. But in this world, that may be an adv
antage: Jacob, also called Israel, is one of the few people (next to Bolivar, Co
lumbus, and Bharata) who have a country named after them. When his sons went to
Egypt, they remembered Kanaan as the land of Israel (in Hebrew: Eretz Ishrael).
This expression was later understood as the land Israel , so that Jacob s new name go
t eternalized as the name of the land which is also known, after the inhabitants
from whom the Israelites wrested it, as Kanaan or Philistine/Palestine.
2.4. Moses
The Bible report about Moses is spread over no less than four Bible books: Exodu
s, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. In these books, exegetes distinguish four l
ayers. The first is the Yahwist tradition, written in the time of Israel s kings,
in the early first millennium BC, and in which Yahweh is consistently used as God s
name. The second is the Elohist tradition, written in the time of the great pr
ophets, and in which Elohim is used as God s name. The third is the Priestly tradit
ion, from the time of the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC, and immediatel
y after. The fourth is the Deuteronomist tradition, the codification of the Mosa
ic law, which was largely created in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and attributed
to Moses for the sake of sanctity. So, the original narrative has gone through
many hands, and the historical Moses lies buried under many layers.
Yet, in tradition-oriented cultures, stories were often preserved in full detail
for many centuries. Especially typical and unusual facts about people and thei
r remarkable feats were accurately preserved. To test the reliability of the Mo
ses narrative, we dispose of two types of criteria: external criteria, viz. some
few possible references in Egyptian sources; and internal criteria. These latt
er comprise the coherence between the different stages in the story: is the Mose
s of the time before the Exodus depicted as having the same personality as the M
oses of the wanderings in the desert? This is the so-called split-half reliabil
ity. The other important internal criterion is whether the narrative gives us a
n unambiguous and typical character description, or a mere collection of commonp
laces and stereotypes. Moreover, does such a character description reveal negat
ive traits which were certainly not concocted for glorifying the founder of monot
heism , or perhaps even pathological traits which the writers couldn t have thought
up even if they had wanted to?
Moses in Egypt is depict d as a man of violent temper, who did not shy away from
terrorism. When a Hebrew worker is whipped by an Egyptian officer, which was a
rather common practice in those days, Moses goes as far as killing the Egyptian
. If historical, the tenth plague of Egypt , the killing of the first-born son of
every house, was clearly brought about by a terrorist campaign. Why else were t
he Hebrews ordered to make a sign on their doors? Surely God didn t need such a s
ign to avoid killing the wrong people: but the terrorists did. The other plague
s of Egypt (locusts, mosquitoes, hail storms, the colouring of the Nile water) w
ere all natural phenomena, which Moses or the narrators may have played up as di
vine signs. Moses was a panic monger, who knew how to impress and fool the crow
ds. He was very cunning and even beat the court magicians at snake tricks. Con
sidering the Biblical information on his court education, he may have been train
ed by one of the fabled magicians of Egypt, and had shown himself a gifted and c
reative pupil.
The Moses of the desert years is definitely the same impulsive man. According t
o Ex. 32:19-25, when he came down from Mount Sinai and saw the golden calf, he w
as enraged and destroyed the idol; he gathered a band of Levites and ordered the
m to go around the camp and make a slaughter; they killed 3000 people. Trespass
ers of Moses Law are punished with death, the one and only penalty Moses knows: So
meone who had cursed Yahweh s name was stoned to death, as Yahweh had ordered Mose
s to do (Lev. 24:23). A man who was caught in the act of chopping wood on a Sabba
th day was brought before Moses, who ordered the people to stone him (Num. 15:32
-36).
And Moses still played his magic tricks. Once when the people uttered their dis
content, Yahweh sent snakes to bite the people (Num. 21:4-9): if we remember Mos
es dexterity with snakes displayed before the pharaoh, we can guess who was behin
d this act of Yahweh s. Several times, Moses asserts his authority by invoking mi
racles from Yahweh. Thus, he plants his brother Aaron s staff in the ground, and
it starts to blossom (Num. 17:16-28). The most famous occasion is of course his
stay on top of Mount Sinai, where he receives the Ten Commandments: the hilltop
gets covered with a cloud of smoke, and mighty trumpet calls are heard. It was
a simple kind of show, enough to impress the credulous people. Like any juggler
, he never allowed people to peep behind the curtain: in Ex. 19:21-24, Yahweh or
ders Moses not to allow the people to come near the mountain, for many would die ,
and Moses assures Him that the mountain has been sealed off safely.
Like in Egypt, but on a far larger scale, he practised terrorism against other p
eoples who came in the way of his own people s expansion. Yahweh ordered him to d
estroy the altars and sacred symbols of the peoples of Kanaan (Ex. 34:12-13). Thu
s ye shall do unto them: ye shall strike down their altars, smash their sacred s
tones to pieces, fell their sacred trees and bum their idols. Nobody will resis
t you until ye have exterminated them (Deut. 7:2-24). Indeed, Yahweh is not satis
fied with idol-breaking, he wants skulls to be broken as well, many thousands of
them: [of the peoples who are remote neighbours] ye shall slaughter all the male
s. But in the cities that Yahweh puts in your possession, ye shall not let anyo
ne survive (Deut. 20:13-16). Perhaps killing the males and abducting the females
can be somewhat excused as a common practice in every kind of war. But even by
those standards, Yahweh goes too far when he orders all living beings killed.
Moses put these divine orders into practice. He flew into a rage when his men h
ad killed all the adult males of the Midianite people (which, incidentally, had
given Moses shelter years before, see Ex. 2:11-18) but had left the females and
children alive. He had all the boys and non-virgin women also killed, but the v
irgins they could keep for their pleasure (Num. 31:7-18). After Moses death, his
successor Joshua followed in his footsteps. The gruesome treatment of the 31 ci
ties he conquered, is described in detail in Joshua 8-12: He destroyed all the li
ving beings in the city and did not let anyone escape (10:28). Joshua merely car
ried out the commandments inherent in Moses deal with Yahweh.
In all this slaughter, Moses styled himself as merely the hand of Yahweh. It wa
s not he but Yahweh who did the killing, as is clear from Deut. 19:1: When Yahweh
your God hath exterminated all the people of the land that He hath given you From
the theological viewpoint, the importance of this is that he introduced the con
cept of Holy War, which in principle meant that God engaged in warfare for (actu
ally also through) His people. From the viewpoint of the inquiry into the histo
ricity of the Moses narrative, the importance is that Holy War talk is perfectly
consistent with Moses style of action in Egypt (where he also portrayed the kill
ing of the first-born Egyptians as God s intervention).
It is remotely possible that this consistency (the split-half reliability) is du
e to a systematic imposing of this Holy War doctrine on the entire Moses narrati
ve by the editors. The tirade against other gods and the repeated induction to
kill apostates, in Deut.13, may be such a later priestly interpolation. Perhaps
Moses was much too busy with actual warfare to carry out religious inquisition
and purification campaigns, which was more a task for. the later scribes and pro
phets. But the Holy War doctrine is probably not a later addition, for it does
fit the military situation well. Even if it were a later addition, this would o
nly weaken but still not contradict the case for the historicity of Moses persona
lity description as the Bible has preserved it.
External evidence has been claimed to exist, confirming Moses historicity and the
essentials of his religious outlook.7 Egyptian sources give a lot of informatio
n on a character whose career is contemporary with and entirely similar to that
of Moses: the Egyptian dignitary Beya. The name already points to the Semitic Y
ahwist tradition: Be-Yah means on/by/in Yah , as in by Yah (I swear) or in Yah (I trus
t) . He also had a long Egyptian name of which moses (child of) was a part, as was
very common in Egyptian names. So, it is possible that Moshe/Moses was a Hebrai
zed abbreviation of the Egyptian name of this Beya.
This dignitary Beya was a very powerful man at the Egyptian court, and several d
epictions of him have been preserved. It is striking that he apparently refused
to be depicted as bowing before any of the Egyptian gods. He disappears from t
he Egyptian sources after the unsuccessful palace revolution of the regent princ
ess Tausret against the legitimate young king Siptah. Probably he was part of t
he conspiracy, and had to flee after its failure. As he is called the Syrian in o
ne source, he may have joined hands with the numerous Semitic immigrant communit
y (which may have been held guilty, rightly or wrongly, for the political troubl
e, just like the Hyksos earlier), and led it into exodus.
Without using those sources, and merely relying on the (not obviously interpolat
ed) data in the Bible narrative, dr. Somers claims to discern some not exactly p
athological but still rather extreme traits in Moses. Thus, the burning bush need
not be understood as a hallucination, but can be explained by natural causes: c
ertain plants in the desert secrete etheric oils which can inflame spontaneously
under the sun s heat. This might have made a big impression on someone not famil
iar with it, and the desert heat may have helped in making Moses sense a divine
presence.
Moses may have suffered from what is called a reactive psychosis , caused by guilt
feelings about the murder of an Egyptian in anger against his punishing a Hebrew
slave (or about other, unrecorded crimes). That is also the line followed by F
reud in his analysis of Moses. What sometimes happens in such cases, is that a
murderer afterwards develops the conviction that God had wanted this murder, tha
t it was God s will overruling human morality, so that the murder was justified.
This would then have led to Moses remarkable and self-righteous proneness to murd
er, terror and the death penalty.
Dr. Somers rejects the thesis put forward by Hirsch that Moses suffered from par
anoia. Contrary to the objections of some religious people, the psychological i
nterpretation of the Bible narrative is not an arbitrary projection of modem pre
judices, with paranoia as a catch-all for everything that does not live up to our
standards of irreligious conventionalism. It is a precise scientific analysis,
in which a precise syndrome has to be discerned and checked against all the reli
able data in the narrative.
Of course, not everyone who has committed a crime develops this same psychosis.
A certain temperamental disposition should be present. Psychology knows of a s
pecific condition called the ixoid (= viscous, sticky) personality, with these c
haracteristics:
1. domineering and vindictive behaviour;
2. impulsive, inclined to violence;
3. intolerant of disagreement;
4. waves of bad temper, explosions;
5.
 yet, over-social, wants to serve, has a sense of fairness (so that their a
ngry explosions are occasioned by perceived injustice);
6. meticulous, order-loving, pedantic;
7. persistent and tough;
8.
speech disturbances may occur (certain similarity, on a less physical leve
l, with epilepsy).
While this syndrome may perhaps lack in precision, so that a firm conclusion abo
ut its application to Moses may seem like overstretching the method a bit, it is
correct that this syndrome is in evidence in Moses behaviour. It is indeed in rea
ction to a perceived injustice against the Hebrew labourer that Moses kills the
Egyptian. And it is mentioned explicitly that he complains of not being a good
speaker, so that Yahweh allows his brother Aaron to speak for him.
Since man makes God after his own image and likeness, it is legitimate to trace
some of Moses personal character traits in the God-image which Moses has impresse
d upon scores of generations of Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheists. The s
ometimes morbid character of revealed monotheism is partly traceable to Moses per
sonal psychological condition.
2.5. The great prophets
For some really pathological cases, we should read the stories of the prophets.
Let us briefly relate dr. Somers diagnosis of the greatest of them.
Of course, not all prophets were mentally disturbed people, many just practised
a kind of clairvoyance but remained balanced people, some even with a healthy cr
itical intellect. Others are fanatics, but are not described as personalities w
hich we would now recognize as mentally disturbed.
The prophet Elijah was not at all crazy, just clever. When he engages in a comp
etition with the Baal priests, the poor fellows try to get a fire burning on the
ir alter by singing invocations of Baal, while he has sprinkled water on his altar
and claims the honour for Yahweh once it catches fire (1 Kings 18:20-40). The
story smacks of propaganda, but may nonetheless be a true report of a Yahwist pr
ophet s unscrupulous deceitfulness. The nature of the water sprinkled by Elijah bec
omes clear when we read of a similar feat in the book of the maccabees (2 Macc.
1:20): the Levites have to get fire in a cave, they only find drab water, they b
ring it nonetheless, and yes, it brings forth fire. A subsequent verse calls th
e water nephtai : petroleum was already known to some insiders, and priests used it
as a trick to impress people. The Romans also used it, as is clear from the al
legation by the writer of the Apocalypse (who appears not to have known the tric
k) that they had the power to make fire come down from heaven (Ap.13:13).
After this episode, Elijah also manages to do what other prophets only rant abou
t and promise to make Yahweh do: some large-scale killing. After cunningly asse
mbling them, he has hundreds of Baal priests massacred. On the whole, Elijah to
o believed he had a private telephone line with God, but he had retained a firm
grip on social and strategic realities, and acquired a much more honourable posi
tions than some of his colleagues.
For a more tragic example, we turn to Isaiah, the man of sorrow . He had a schizop
hreniform accident, a vision with schizophrenic contents, which deeply influence
d his further thought, but did not form a chronic condition of schizophrenia. I
n this vision, he has sensory hallucinations, catastrophic revelations, and a st
rong delusion of being chosen by God to serve a mission. This will condition hi
s self-image and his prophetic style of logorrhea, emotional exaggeration, and mak
ing predictions.
Taking into account that some of Isaiah s successful predictions are in fact later i
nterpolations, we find that the remaining authentic predictions are little more
than expressions of the prophet s own vengefulness and wishful thinking. Liberati
on theologians get a kick out of Isaiah s tirades against the mighty and the succe
ssful (who will be wiped away when the Lord cometh), thinking that he was a kind
of social revolutionary; in fact, he was just another typical unhappy man who d
eveloped both an intense vengefulness against the successful and a, delusion of
being special in a supernatural way. Unhappy and vengeful people are keen obser
vers and critics of others faults. And who will believe that Isaiah s walking bare
foot and naked for three years (Is.12) is not abnormal behaviour but a deliberat
e sign of warning?
Isaiah s hymn on the newborn son ( For a child is born unto us, a son is given , 9:5-6)
, interpreted as referring to Christ by Christians and probably by Christ himsel
f, is more realistically about the prince Manasse, born in 699 BC. Of course, s
ome of the imagery in Isaiah is of great and lasting beauty (especially when put
to music by Haendel in his Messiah), in spite of the morbid element in the prop
het. We should realize that the man, and more so his final editors, integrated
his delusion into a genuine religious vision. A mere copy of his authentic tira
des and predictions would not have enthused many followers, but a suitably enlarge
d and edited version endowed with a literate religious doctrine and style became
genuinely powerful.
Jeremiah, the prophet of doom par excellence, is a clear case of paranoia querul
ans. Israel has fallen and will be punished. The king of Babylon who subdues I
srael is merely God s punishing arm; which will not save him, the idolater, from e
qually being punished in the end. Jeremiah is against everyone, including rival
ling godmen and prophets, and God s revenge will be total. His immense hatred for
everyone who disagrees and his hammering on always the same allegations and pro
mises of doom, and a secondary delusion of being persecuted, are typical signs o
f querulous paranoia.
As Dr. Somers writes: The book Jeremiah teaches us nothing about God, it illustra
tes how a sick mind pictures God in terms of his own delusion Jeremiah shows a ch
aracteristic trait of the paranoia patient: a deadly hatred against everyone who
disagrees with him, a totally disproportionate reaction to the other opinion , ins
pired by hurt narcissism. The inflated ego is invested with divine dignity and
power. Whoever speaks up against God, must die. In a sense, this is a diagnosis
of not only Jeremiah, but of prophethood itself.
Ezekiel, who lived in the Babylonian exile, reiterated the condemnation of unfai
thful Jerusalem by his contemporary Jeremiah. But he is of a different psycholo
gical type: he is not aggressive towards his audience, rather he is indifferent.
The evil has been done, the catastrophe is sure to follow, whether people list
en or not. Ezekiel is an unmistakable case of schizophrenia. In the 22 years (
592-570) covered by the book Ezekiel, we see a typical development of this condi
tion: he gets hallucinatory visions, develops an increasingly bizarre behaviour,
isolates himself. In moments of calm, he relates his visions to others and giv
es detailed descriptions.
Not every schizophrenia patient makes it to the status of prophethood. Ezekiel
was not an extreme case, and he was a literate man who could somehow make his vi
sions relevant through religion, which made them interesting for the Bible edito
rs. It was also his initial deep religiosity that made him vulnerable to emotio
nal collapse when Jerusalem fell, its temple usurped by Baal priests, and the pe
ople (at least, the elite) forced into exile in Babel. Unlike many fellow Hebre
ws, he could not adapt to this Pagan city full of opportunity, and his emotional
collapse developed into a permanent mental affliction.
2.6. Henoch
The last Old Testament prophet we must mention in this brief survey, is Henoch.
His book (mid-second century BC) is classed as apocryphal, but it is an integra
l part of the prophetic tradition. Henoch was a staunch pharisee8 and leader of
the Essene sect. Probably he was the sect s teacher of righteousness , mentioned in
the so-called Death Sea Scrolls unearthed at Qumran. It is he who first applie
d the notion of the Son of Man (developed by Daniel as pertaining to the Israelite
nation as a whole) to himself, which personalized notion Jesus in turn was to i
nterpret as applying to himself. There can be no doubt that Jesus borrowed from
Henoch: the New Testament contains 64 almost literal quotes from Henoch, plus o
ther types of, references.
The book Henoch contains the writings of someone suffering from paranoid schizop
hrenia (with all the typical features of schizophrenia as Karl Jaspers described
them).9 And it is these Henochian visions which constitute an essential compone
nt of the belief system of Jesus and his disciples.
Once more, it should not surprise us that someone with such an affliction could
be the recognized leader of a sect. Among other factors, people with a distorte
d consciousness are often capable of feats of asceticism which require tremendou
s will-power in ordinary mortals. And the common people of those days would nat
urally associate the abnormal with the supernatural, especially if it came cloth
ed in the language of religion. But remarkably, in the case of Henoch at least
the guardians of the official religious tradition were suspicious of the divine
character of Henoch s book, mostly because of its very open self-centredness. The
typical thing with all people suffering from delusions, is that these delusions
are very self-centred and allot special importance to the sufferer. But in the
case of Henoch, it was conspicuous even to not very discriminating people that
Henoch was glorifying more himself than Yahweh.
Henoch claims that he had been given a divine job by God Himself, to reprimand t
he angels who, sometime before the Flood, had fallen in love with human females
and begotten, on them the giants (remark the element of jealousy). Then, he is
taken on a trip through heaven: And I, Henoch, I alone have seen the vision, the
end of everything, and no man will see the way I have seen (19:3). In heaven, he
sees someone called the Head of Days , who comes to him and says: You, you are the
Son of Man, who was born for righteousness and righteousness remains with you an
d the righteousness of the Head of Days will not abandon you (71:17). In a visio
n of a terrible Day of Judgment, he refers to himself as the Chosen One.
The concept of the Son of Man had already been introduced in the book of Daniel, w
ritten at most a few decades earlier. But there, it explicitly refers to the Ch
osen People, the nation of Israel which will inherit the rule over the earth aft
er four successive great empires have gone down. But Henoch and later Jesus mis
takenly identify the Son of Man with their own individual selves.
The common trait in prophets is that they give themselves a very central place in
history. Being the spokesman of the omnipresent Creator is not a very modest cl
aim. it belongs to the realm of psychopathology.
2.7. The first century
The next important god-sent is none other than Jesus, whose case will be present
ed in the ch.3. He lived in an age when prophets or at least messianic and mille
nnarist characters flourished. One of his younger contemporaries was the real f
ounder of Christianity, Saint Paul, who taught and believed that the Second Comi
ng of Christ, inaugurating the final days of the world before the judgment, was
just around the corner.
The big turn in Paul s life came when, on the road to Damascus, he fell from his h
orse and had an experience which he later understood as Jesus calling him. But
this experience was completely different in nature from the prophetic revelation
s and conversations with God which we have mentioned above (except for Moses awe
before the burning bush, which is a close parallel). The event on the road to D
amascus, which triggered Paul s conversion, was not a crisis in a developing menta
l disease, but a simple and typical sunstroke. Paul (then still called Saul) he
ars a voice but doesn t recognize the speaker: this confusion is the opposite of t
he intense clarity typical of a hallucination.
Paul suffers a natural blindness for a few days, and under the care of a Christi
an convert, he gets well again. His inner stress because of his frustrated desi
re for perfection in the observance of the Law, and more acutely his guilt about
the killing of Stephanus, the first Christian martyr, would invest this otherwi
se ordinary breakdown with a religious significance that was to have world-wide
and millennia-long consequences.
Paul s sect was just one among a number of first-century Jewish sects who expected
the end of the world, the coming of the messiah, or a similar cosmic event.
The Apocalypse of Baruch is a prophecy of the impending struggle for Jerusalem,
written in the revolutionary fervour of ca. 68 AD. It has remained apocryphal,
either because the Jews saw too much inspiration from the Christian Apocalypse i
n it, or because its predictions had failed in a much too obvious and much too d
ramatic way. Indeed, it had predicted that the Romans would not be able to take
the Temple Mount or to bum down Jerusalem. It is because the text was not cano
nized that its failed prediction survives in cold print. By contrast, Mark s Gosp
el, edited just after the fall of Jerusalem, has the correct prediction that of th
e Temple of Jerusalem, not one stone will be left upon the other (13:2).
Baruch s Apocalypse is not at all the product of visions and hallucinations, but a
n intellectual construction modelled on the extant prophetic literature, adding
some newer literary techniques such as the Socratic dialogue. It constructs ima
gery to evoke the shocking developments of the final days, before Jerusalem shal
l defeat her enemies and reign in glory. While we will not further deal with it
here, we note that the book is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it is a k
ind of missing link between Judaism and fledgling Christianity, at a time when b
oth were expecting the ultimate catastrophe and glorification. Secondly, it ill
ustrates how sane and intelligent people subscribing to an established belief sy
stem can integrate the prophetic outlook in their worldview. The entire edifice
s of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology are similar intellectual elaboration
s of a basic literary material with an important irrational visionary component.
The last Jewish prophet was called Ezra. In ca. 100 AD, he wrote a book relatin
g a dialogue with an angel, who is asked why God could let the recent catastroph
es happen to his chosen people, and what He has in store for them now. The visi
ons described are very coherent, are followed by an explanation, and give system
atic answers to the questions which Jews are asking. Short, it is an intellectu
al construction, not the report of real prophetic visions . It is not the result o
f pathological experiences, but merely a kind of theological manifesto.
The apocryphal book of Ezra contributed to the enduring revolutionary fervour am
ong Jewish die-hards. It employs images from the earlier apocalyptic literature
including the Christian Apocalypse, and in more cautious wording it retains ess
entially the same message: God has not abandoned His people, He has been testing
them, and the final crisis is approaching. In some details, its predictions we
re even enacted in the last Jewish insurrection, that of the self-styled Messiah
Bar Kochba in 132-135. Ezra had predicted (13:9-10) that the saviour will have
a flaming mouth, and so Bar Kochba took burning hay in his mouth to prove his c
redentials.
With the collective suicide of the last Jewish insurrectionists in Masada, the p
eriod of Messianic expectation came to an end. Reality had outlasted and defeat
ed all the prophetic Doomsday scenarios. By that time, the Christian sect had a
lready accepted that Jesus second coming was not around the corner after all. Fo
r Doomsday prophets, the glorious days were over.

Footnotes:
1Published by the leftist publishing-house EPO in Antwerp, Belgium (in spite of
many priests leftist leanings, hard-core leftists remain strongly anti-clerical,
and they were glad to publish a book that undermines Christian claims).
2Published by Facet Publishers, Antwerp 1990.
3E.g. P. Krijbolder: Jezus de Nazareeer. Een studie over de historiciteit ven Je
zus en de oorsprong van het Christendom, Amsterdam 1976, The same thing had earl
ier been said about Socrates, who would have been merely a literary creation by
Plato, but that theory has been discarded.
4These patients are not dangerous because of aggressiveness. Their rage is not
directed at someone specific, as is the case with paranoia patients.
5U. Undeutsch: Courtroom evaluation of eyewitness testimony , International Review
of Applied Psychology, 33(1), 1984, p.51-67.
6e.g. in P. Benoit & M.E. Boismard: Synopse des quatre evangiles, II, Paris, 197
2.
7See Johannes C. De Moor: The Rise of Yahwism, ch.4.6.
8The pharisees were a reform movement that moved the centre of religion away fro
m the priesthood and the temple worship, towards the reading of Scripture and th
e observance of the Law. Decentralized and separate from the national symbol wh
ich the temple was, they led Judaism through the Roman crackdown on the Jews aft
er the rebellions of 70 and 134 AD, and shaped the rabbinical tradition which ha
s since been virtually synonymous with Judaism. The anti-pharisaism in the Gosp
el text is therefore actively anti-Judaism and one of the sources of Christian a
nti-Semitism.
9K. Jaspers: Allgemeine Psychopathologie, Berlin, 1948.
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CHAPTER THREE
PSYCHOLOGY OF JESUS
3.1. Nietzsche on Jesus
The first to take on Jesus as a psychologist, though not as a medically trained
psychopathologist, was the German scholar and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, o
ne of the greatest critics of Christianity (who ended up suffering an irreversib
le mental breakdown himself).1 Like many Christians, he thought that the histori
cal Christ was a very different man from the Christ of theology. Thus, Christ h
ad renounced the law and chosen a life of childlike innocence, whereas the Churc
hes had built an elaborate system of morality on top of his teachings.
However, unlike some softhearted poetic Christians who felt unhappy with dogmati
c Christianity and attracted to the experiential Christianity of Christ himself, N
ietzsche rejected this original religion of Christ. For him, Christ was a décaden
t. This somewhat technical term in Nietzsche s philosophy means: someone who has
given up worldly ambitions, who is tired of the world with its passion and strug
gle, who wants to retire to some kind of paradisiacal sphere. Such a prophet ma
y be good for people who are tired of this world, weak and unhappy people, loser
s.
In Nietzsche s assessment, Jesus was anti-world, anti-mighty, anti-order, anti-hie
rarchy, anti-labour, anti-struggle, anti-difference. Total non-struggle, surren
der, softness, love. That is the Jesus who is still somewhat popular among thos
e few young dreamers attracted to Christianity. Tolstoy thought this was the re
al Christ, sharply different from the Church s Christ created by Saint Paul. For
instance, obedience to the worldly authorities is a duty for Church Christians,
not for the original Christ. Nietzsche, while agreeing with Tolstoy on the cont
rast between Jesus and the Church teachings, does not follow him in choosing for
the original Jesus. He merely sees two forms of decadence at work, both to be
rejected. But he will agree that Jesus attitude was his own problem, whereas Sai
nt Paul s attitude (and theology) has sickened an entire civilization.
While Jesus preached a spontaneous and unconcerned life, his posthumous disciple
Paul, the first Christian , would build a full-fledged theology out of a few eleme
nts of Jesus career and teaching, an ideological system that has very little to d
o with the actual Jesus. For Jesus, the concepts of Sin and of Law had lost all
meaning. He believed in sinlessness, no need to tread any specific path of mor
ality to avoid sin. But in Christianity, sin becomes the raison d être of religion:
Christ has come, suffered and risen in order to save humanity from sin.
And yet, somehow this Salvation is not complete, because on top of it, man must
also go under the yoke of a system of morality, adapted with strong simplificati
on (deritualization) from the Mosaic Law, in order to earn his place in Heaven.
It is this emphasis on dry morality that has made Pauline Christianity so unpop
ular among the pleasure-seeking section of humanity. A lot of modern Western li
terature is about people outgrowing their tense submission to Christian morality
. Some Protestant sects have decided that morality is not instrumental in our S
alvation (though for the sake of public order they support morality and explain
that one s degree of morality is a sign, but not a factor, of one s predestination f
or either Heaven or Hell), but they too stick to the notion of sin as fundamenta
l to the human condition until Jesus saves us.
The question of salvation through one s own works or through mere faith in Jesus aut
us act of Salvation is a much-debated one among Christian thinkers including Aug
ustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin etc. The controversy exists, mutatis mut
andis, in some other traditions too, e.g. Shaiva Siddhanta. Borrowing a Shaiva
metaphor, we might say that Christianity too has advocates of the way of the kitt
en , which is grabbed by its mother and saved without effort, and of the way of the b
aby monkey , which clings on to its mother and is saved through its own effort. But
in Christianity, unlike Shaivism, one is saved not from ignorance about one s own
ever-divine Self (i.e. restored to one s own intrinsic divinity), but from one s ow
n ever-sinful self. No one is a Christian if he does not accept that we human b
eings are all intrinsically sinful, and that Jesus has come to save us from sin.
But, all according to Nietzsche, Jesus never cared about sin. Contrary to Jes
us, Christianity feeds us an obsession of being profoundly evil and God-alienate
d.
At this point we must comment that Nietzsche has taken the traditional image of
Jesus too much for granted, an image built on those Bible stories that are the m
ost likely to be inserted borrowings from other sects, such as the Sermon on the
Mount. In the more reliable Gospel passages, we find that the historical Jesus
was not the exalted, ever-innocent pacifist and passivist he is often made out
to be.
One thing that Nietzsche has against the Christianity of the Church still domina
nt in his time, is that it is not religious enough. Religion for Jesus was a re
volutionary thing, an extreme thing. And while Jesus religiosity was bizarre and
unintegrated in the world (it was an anticipation of the Kingdom of Heaven expe
cted soon), it has a certain kind of uncomplicatedness and cheerfulness about it
which is proper in a healthy religion. But Pauline moralistic Christianity is
drab, unhealthy, worrisome, negatively limiting without offering anything positi
ve and great in return. Nietzsche s own religiosity is a longing for the superhum
an which transcends human smallness. It is the antithesis of Pauline Christiani
ty, which to him seems to have nothing great and mentally uplifting to it.
While Christ s religion is centred on love and surrender, Paul s Christianity become
s, in Nietzsche s analysis, the religion of hatred and revenge. Paul was obsessed
with the Law, the central topic for the Pharisees. He was painfully aware of m
an s (esp. his own) incapability to live up to the letter of the Law. Fortunately
, Christ has delivered us from the Law, and replaced it with the law of love : a re
volution. So far, Paul is in tune with the spirit of Christ, as Nietzsche under
stood it. But in Paul s vision, this revolution comes hand in hand with another r
evolution, in one movement: the abrogation of the Law is the ideological startin
g-point of Christianity s mission among the Gentiles. Paul s life, and with it that
of many others, will no longer be burdened with the Law, but will now burden it
self with a new task, unprecedented in history. Paul breaks with Judaism and it
s oppressive Law observance, and starts to win the rest of humanity for Christ.
His own frustrated desire to live up to the demands of the Law, now gets transf
ormed into a tremendous ambition to spread his new-found religion of Salvation t
hrough Christ.
Nietzsche draws the parallel with Luther, who had aspired so earnestly to live a
n ascetic life and fulfill the commandments imposed by Church teaching, but had
ended up hating the Church and the pope and the monastic rules so bitterly that
he became their declared enemy, crusading to spread an alternative. Paul is so
tired of the Law, that he turns into a follower of its declared enemy, Jesus, on
ce a psycho-physiological crisis had broken through his resistance. As Dr. Some
rs has shown, this crisis, befalling Paul on the road to Damascus, was a sunstro
ke, of which the effects and sensations were afterwards interpreted as a divine
revelation. Once this liberating decision to break with the Law has its exaltin
g effect on him, he feels that this solution for him, is also the solution for m
ankind. He will now become the apostle of the destruction of the Law, which has
been replaced by faith in Christ.
Saint Paul was not a prophet, but he was a political genius. He saw the potenti
al of his new doctrine and of the situation in the Roman empire, especially the
provincial towns. Away from the worldly turmoil of Rome and from the extremist
zealotry of Palestine (two places where the Christians would encounter plenty of
martyrdom), Paul found the optimum terrain for the onward march of his new reli
gion. In these towns (in Greece and Asia Minor), he would set up communities th
at would imitate the social ways of the Jewish communities spread across the Emp
ire, with their honourable inconspicuous lives as craftsmen and traders, with th
eir mutual support and communal solidarity, and with their quiet sense of superi
ority as the Chosen People. Instead of the unbearable burden of the Mosaic law,
he would give them some petty bourgeois morality, but all the same he would pro
mote among them this communal superiority feeling of being the Saved ones in Chr
ist.
The contrast between Jesus and Pauline Christianity, is treated by Nietzsche as
a contrast between two doctrines. Nietzsche does not really analyse Jesus person
ality, self-perception or public image. He mistrusts the historicity of the Gos
pels. At the time, the critical method of investigating the historicity of piec
es and layers of text was not as refined, and especially the psychological analy
sis which 20th century psychologists tried out on Jesus, was not yet at his disp
osal. So, his psychological evaluation of Jesus, and of Saint Paul, the creator
of Christianity, concerns more the ideology they represent than their historica
l personalities. Nietzsche puts their personalities between brackets, and conce
ntrates on the ideologies that their (doubtlessly distorted) Biblical biographie
s represent.
One might say that Nietzsche s view of Jesus was very one-sided. The peaceful apo
stle of love is a popular image of Jesus based on only a few gospel texts: the S
ermon on the Mount; when you get slapped, offer the other cheek also ; he who lives
by the sword shall perish by the sword ; the lilies of the field don t toil, yet Solo
mon in his splendour was not as good-looking as any of them ; do not judge lest you
yourself by judged . These passages are of disputed historicity, while many reli
ably historical passages show us a very different Christ. short-tempered, defian
t, and a Doomsday prophet. The gentle Jesus, who was in Nietzsche s view the orig
inal Jesus whose teaching and example were later deformed by Pauline Christianit
y, was himself just as much a creation of his second-generation disciples.
While Nietzsche s evaluation of Christ is somewhat marred by the immaturity of the
historical research on Christ, his understanding of the Old Testament already h
ad the benefit of a Biblical scholarship that has, in great outline, been confir
med by the more recent scholarship. The chronology of the Old Testament had mor
e or less been established, and the political context of the successive stages o
f editing were already understood.
According to Nietzsche, Yahweh s support for his people came to be seen as conditio
nal and dependent upon the Hebrews own behaviour, when they had become losers on t
he international scene. God was no longer seen to be giving them victory, so th
ey tried to regain control over their destiny by assuming God s support to be depe
ndent upon their own moral behaviour (observance of the Law). Nietzsche conside
red the Bible s emphasis on morality as a revenge operation of a defeated people:
winners are not burdened with morality, which is the weapon of the losers.
Nietzsche has paid little attention to the next stage in Israel s religion. Durin
g the period of the exile, prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel and deutero-Isaiah ha
d again disconnected God s sovereign decision from man s degree of obedience to God s
will. Man s morality and law-abidingness no longer make a difference: God s judgmen
t has already been determined, his final intervention will come anyway, and our
Salvation will be brought about not by our own goodness but by the Messiah. The
apocalyptic stage in the doctrinal development in Hebrew religion, which will c
ulminate in the Jewish rebellions of the first and early second centuries AD, wa
s already appearing on the horizon at the time of the exile, when the classical
doctrine of the Covenant, the mutual contract between Yahweh and His chosen peop
le, was still being formulated and imposed upon Israel s history through the final
Bible editing.
While Nietzsche s analysis concerns ideologies or collective mind-sets rather than
persons, and while some of his insights have simply become outdated by the newe
st Bible research, he has the merit of being one of the first to apply human psy
chology to the supposedly divine revelation embodied in the Bible. He was instr
umental in breaking the spell that had been shielding the Bible from critical in
quiry. Moreover, unlike the radical atheists and skeptics who simply disregarde
d the Bible or dismissed it as fable, Nietzsche took the more balanced position
of honouring it as a highly interesting and psychologically revealing human docume
nt.
3.2. Psycho-analyzing Jesus
Shortly after Nietzsche made his psychological analysis of what he understood as
Christian doctrine, rightly or wrongly attributed to the historical Jesus by th
e Gospel editors, professional psychologists tried to get at the historical pers
onality of Jesus. In the beginning and more even at the end of this twentieth c
entury AD, psychology has thrown a mighty new light upon the development of the
Abrahamic or prophetic-monotheist lineage of religions.
Since the dawn of modem Western psychology, the Bible has interested psychologis
ts. Freud, the Austrian-Jewish father of psychoanalysis, gave a lot of attentio
n to the character of Moses.2 For example, in Freudian theory, Moses lack of a no
rmal father relation (according to the Bible, he was a foundling brought up in t
he Egyptian court) made him an excellent object of study: this circumstance coul
d have accounted for his sternly authoritarian and patriarchal conception of God
. Even more unorthodoxly, Freud claimed that Moses had not been a Jew but a hig
h-placed Egyptian: fearing trouble after committing a murder, he had joined the
impending Exodus of the beleaguered Jewish immigrant community.
Freud was very hesitant to publish his work on Moses, because he expected it to
shock the Jewish community, and that at a time when Nazi Germany was taking one
anti-Jewish measure after another. Freud s work is in many ways outdated, but rem
ains of great importance in this context because he did, even while expressing h
is great scruples and hesitation, what many believing Jews and Christians could
not intellectually tolerate: he looked at the founder of his religion through th
e inexorable eyes of scientific analysis. Some other older psychological studie
s of Bible characters include C.G. Jung s study of job and K. Jaspers study of Ezek
iel.
Probably the first attempt to analyze Jesus was made in the late 19th century by
the French neurologist Jules Soury, also known as the secretary of Ernest Renan
. Inspired by remarks by David Friedrich Strauss, who had called Jesus a rabid
fanatic, Soury wanted to go beyond scornful rhetoric and apply the budding scien
ce of neurology to the case of Jesus. However, it was the heyday of materialism
in the human sciences, and with the conceptual instruments at his disposal, he
could hardly do justice to psychic phenomena. In his diagnosis, he settled for
a highly disputable verdict which we would consider more physiological than psyc
hological: progressive paralysis .
The first truly psychopathological diagnosis of Jesus was made separately by thr
ee psychiatrists, W. Hirsch, Ch. Binet-Sanglé, and G.L. de Loosten. After thorou
gh examination of the Gospel narratives, they independently reached the same con
clusion: Jesus was mentally ill and suffered from paranoia.3 In E. Kraepelin s cla
ssification of mental diseases, paranoia is defined as the sneaking development o
f a persistent and unassailable delusion system, in which clarity of thought, vo
lition and action are nonetheless preserved .
In his reply, the Christian theologian and famous medical doctor, Albert Schweit
zer, admitted: if it were really to turn out that to a doctor, Jesus world-view mu
st in some way count as morbid, then this must not - regardless of any implicati
ons or the shock to many - remain unspoken, because one must put respect for the
truth above all else. But he rejected the psychiatrists conclusions.4
Schweitzer alleged that from a historical point of view, most texts were dubious
or certainly not historical, e.g. the quotations from the Gospel of St John, th
e most theologically polished and least historical of the four Gospels; and that
from a medical point of view, the alleged symptoms were misunderstood. Three o
bjections seemed essential:
1. there is no certainty about the historical truth of the texts;
2.
what seems to us to be a symptom, was possibly a normal trait, a cultural
feature in that civilization;
3.
there are not enough fully reliable elements in order to base a safe judgm
ent on them; even the pathological symptoms claimed, viz. pathological Ego-delus
ion and hallucinations, are insufficient to conclude a definite diagnosis.
These objections can be met, as we shall see in subsequent chapters. The last o
f the three can be met right away: if a psychiatrist notices both hallucinatory
crises and an Ego-delusion in a patient, he will most certainly conclude that th
ese are symptoms of a mental affliction, and this all the more certainly if they
can be identified as a known syndrome, and are accompanied by a number of coher
ent typical behavioral features.
Dr. Schweitzer was not a psychiatrist, but his Doctor s title was already enough t
o put all doubts to rest. After his reply the Churches felt reassured, and few
outsiders made new attempts to psycho-analyze Jesus.
An exception is Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, with the chapter The problem of Jesus in h
is book Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm (German: Genius, Madness and Fame ), of which we ha
ve excerpts from the third edition at our disposal: it was still prepared by the
author himself in 1942, while the fourth edition of 1956 has been seriously tam
pered with by outsiders, esp. in this chapter.5
Dr. Lange-Eichbaum writes: The personality during the psychosis (we only know Jes
us during this life stage) is characterized by quick-tempered soreness and a rem
arkable egocentrism. What is not with him, is cursed. He loves everything that
is below him and does not diminish his Ego: the simple followers, the children,
the weak, the poor in spirit, the sick, the publicans and sinners, the murderer
s and the prostitutes. By contrast, he utters threats against everyone who is e
stablished, powerful and rich, which points to a condition of resentment. In thi
s, all is puerile-autistic, naive, dreamy. In this basic picture of his persona
lity, there is one more trait that is clearly distinguishable: Jesus was a sexua
lly abnormal man. Apart from his entire life-story, what speaks for this is the
quotations of Mt. 19:12 (the eunuch ideal), Mk. 12:25 (no sex in heaven, asexua
lity as ideal) and also Mt. 5:29 (removing the body parts that cause sin: intend
ed are certainly not hand and eye). The cause may have been a certain weakness
of libido, as is common among paranoia sufferers
There is a lack of joy in reality, extreme seriousness, lack of humour, a predomi
nantly depressed, disturbed, tense condition; coldness towards others insofar as
they don t flatter his ego, towards his mother and siblings, lack of balance: now
 weak and fearful, now with violent outbursts of anger and affective lack of pro
portion According to both modern and ancient standards, he was intellectually und
eveloped, as Binet has extensively proven; but he had a good memory and was, as
is apparent from the parables, a visual type. Binet also emphasizes the lack of
creativity. A certain giftedness in imagination, eloquence and imaginative-sym
bolic thought and expression cannot be denied. He was certainly not a genius in t
he strict modem sense. The later psychosis is however in no way in contradictio
n with his original giftedness which was above average: in paranoia this is quit
e common
The entry in Jerusalem is doubtlessly the result of increased excitement: psychic
ally, Jesus is on fire. For laymen as well as for theologians, there is somethi
ng painful and absurd about this entry. Isn t the psychotic streak all too obvious
here? Hirsch calls the parade on the donkey absurd and ridiculous and Schweitzer
too finds it painful. It is only enacted to fulfill the Messiah prophecy, secr
etively and for the eye of his followers. It may be sad or tragic-comical that
the buffoon-king is making his entry this way. Nowhere is the purposeless natur
e of psychotic activity more in evidence than in the entry in Jerusalem: his act
s lack any logic. What does Jesus want? He is tossed this way and then that wa
y. Worldly power? Yes and no. Messiah claim? Yes and no. Defiance and death
wish? Yes and no
The exact diagnosis is not that important for us. A paranoid psychosis: that may
be enough. Maybe real paranoia, maybe schizophrenia but without irreversible d
ecay, in the form of a paraphrenia. Or a paranoia based on an earlier slightly
schizophrenic shift. Anyone checking with the extant scientific literature is s
truck by the remarkable similarity of the symptoms.
Dr. Lange-Eichbaum s diagnosis belongs to an earlier stage in the development of p
sychopathology, when all kinds of explanations were read into symptoms, without
using strict criteria. Freud s psycho-analysis is so notoriously full of unfalsif
iable statements (i.e. impossible to prove wrong, escaping every cold test) that
Karl Popper classifies it among the pseudo-sciences along with astrology. Dr.
Lange-Eichbaum stays closer to factual reality in his description of symptoms, b
ut is hazy in the formulation of a final diagnosis. Moreover, his knowledge of
the Biblical backgrounds and the Roman-Hellenistic cultural milieu are limited,
so that many possibly pertinent facts escape his attention. We would have to wa
it for Dr. Somers multidisciplinary competence to formulate a truly comprehensive
diagnosis.
There is an element of modem man s triumphalism, so typical of the Enlightenment,
in Lange-Eichbaum s conclusions: Can an intelligent and critically disposed person,
who has abandoned childish beliefs and childish prejudice, seriously doubt that
this is a case of psychosis? For an educated mind this psychosis is so clearly
discernible that he would expect even the layman to notice it. Jesus destiny ca
nnot possibly be understood without the aid of psychopathology. The dark misgiv
ing which historical theology has had for the past 100 years, was on the right t
rack. Anyone who surveys the extant literature, can see it with shocking clarit
y. The notion that Jesus was a mentally ill person, cannot be removed anymore f
rom the scientific investigation. This notion is triumphant. First, science ha
s brought Jesus down from his divine throne and declared him human; now it will
also recognize him as a sick man.
A confirmation that the dispassionate study of Jesus as a human person leads irr
evocably to a psychopathological diagnosis, is given by a Protestant preacher, H
ermann Werner. Objecting to liberal theology with its historicization and humaniz
ation of the divine person Jesus (in the theological line of research known as t
he Leben Jesu-Forschung, investigation of Jesus life ), he shows what becomes of Jes
us when he is measured with human standards: The image of Jesus as [the liberal t
heologians] want to describe it in ever greater detail, got equipped with traits
 which made it ever less commendable. This Jesus is, no matter how much one wou
ld want to ward off this conclusion, mentally not healthy but sick. Although ma
n s - and certainly Jesus - deepest life, is a mystery which we cannot unveil down
to its deepest roots, yet certain limits can be agreed upon within which one s sel
f-consciousness must remain if it is to be sane and human. There are, after all
, unassailable standards which are valid for all times, for the ancient oriental
as well as for the modem western. Except in completely uncivilized times and n
ations, no one has ever been declared entirely sane and normal who held himself
to be a supernatural being, God or a deity, or who made claims to divine qualiti
es and privileges. A later legend may ascribe such things to this or that revere
d person, but when someone claims it for himself, his audience has always consis
ted exclusively of inferior minds incapable of proper judgment 6
Perhaps Rev. Hermann underestimates the belief of the ancient civilized Pagans i
n the possibility of divine incarnation, of having a divine person in their mids
t, in which the meaning of the word divine can be stretched a bit; but then he is
right in assuming that this divine status is normally only ascribed to the rever
ed person after his death. That the modem skepsis towards claims of being a div
ine person were shared by Jesus contemporaries, can be seen from the Gospel itsel
f. The Jews (for whom this skepsis became indignation for reasons of exclusive m
onotheism) wanted to kill Jesus because he not only broke the Sabbath but also ca
lled God his Father, making himself equal with God (John 5:18), and because you, b
eing a man, make yourself God (John 10:33).7 Either Jesus was really God s only-bor
n son (and by accepting that, you become a believing Christian), or his claim to
divine status was absurd and abnormal by the standards of both ancients and mod
erns. A liberal theology which humanizes Jesus and yet remains Christian, is im
possible: it is either the fundamentalist belief in Jesus divinity, or no belief in
Jesus Christ at all.
Rev. Hermann concludes: Everyone knows that the sources on Jesus life are insuffic
ient for writing his biography. But they are sufficient to reach the conclusion
that he was a pathological personality. At any rate, these are the conclusions
which liberal theology has reached by thinking and taking into account the find
ings of modern psychiatry.
3.3. Jesus the magician
From the Gospel it is amply clear that Jesus was first of all known to his conte
mporaries and to the audiences of later Christian preachers as a miracle-worker,
a magician. He must have had an aura of intensity about him. He impressed the
ordinary people with his charismatic airs, and he believed in his own miracle-w
orking act. The role he fulfilled in the eyes of his followers, was that of the
exorcist, a well-known type in those days (though the characters filling this ro
le must have been of diverse kinds and dispositions).8
The softness and harmlessness which peaceniks have sought in Jesus, was an image
possibly based on some historical events in Jesus life, but certainly not the do
minant traits of his character or public image. He would never have become such
a public and controversial figure had he been such a simple dove.
In popular preaching and counter-polemic, miracles were the most important topic
. As late as the third century, the Pagan polemist Porphyry tried to counter Je
sus with the story of Apollonius of Tyana, who was also depicted as a miracle-wo
rker. Jesus was accused by audiences and rival preachers of having an evil spir
it himself, thought to be the cause of all kinds of ailments with which people c
ame to miracle-workers. Much in the miracle reports in the Gospels is polemic a
gainst such allegations.
While some miracle stories are simply unbelievable, there is a historical core i
n quite a few of them. Thus, the procedure of demanding that the evil spirit de
clare its name accurately fits the exorcism procedures then in use.
Moreover, some of the miracle stories convey information which was not useful to
the early preachers, much less to the later theologians. For instance, Jesus c
hasing the evil spirits of the possessed man of Gerasa into the swine, is, in sp
ite of what theologians may say, not very edifying. Those swine who lost their
lives had done no harm to anyone; their owner, who lost a source of income, had
not done any wrong to anyone. Certainly this story cannot be meant as a symbol
for Jesus defeating the forces of evil , as some theologians claim. In fact it is
quite an authentic report of what was believed to be a miracle (which interested
the common people a lot more than the defeat of Evil). But as we have seen in
ch.2.2, its details suggest precisely that both Jesus and his followers deluded
themselves, mistaking the end of the acute crisis for the end of the chronic dis
ease, and mistaking an ordinary symptom for a miraculous cure. Like the crowds,
Jesus saw Jesus as a man of miracles. Like many Pagans, he believed that a div
ine being could walk on the earth; but unlike them, he (and Paul and the theolog
ians after him) also gave this an interpretation of a unique and exclusive divin
e status.
If miracles are the only argument for the supposed divinity of Jesus, one must t
ake into account that a number of these are certainly pseudo-miracles. The othe
r miracles, which are unverifiable either way, become equally suspect, if one co
nsiders the fact that not Jesus, nor the disciples were able to see the differen
ce between the end of a crisis and the end of a disease. With regard to the exo
rcisms it is very dear that Jesus, as the Gospel attests, cannot prevent the dev
il from coming back (Mt 12: 43-45).
We should also study the cases where Jesus refuses to do a miracle: e.g. in Naza
reth (where everybody knows him); before the Syro-Phoenician woman; when the Pha
risees ask for one. One should understand the difficult position of somebody wh
o has to do miracles and to heal the sick in a village where everybody knows eve
rybody. If there are true recoveries, anybody will know; but pseudo-recoveries
will soon be seen for what they are. So Jesus refuses to do miracles before his
home community. One could also wonder why the Pharisees had to ask for a sign,
if it was true that so many miracles were taking place already. Further, one c
an suppose that some miracles were simply declarations of Jesus that somebody wa
s healed. Thus, from the ten leper-patients declared cured, only one came back.
The nine others, sent to the priests for verification, had obviously not been
declared cured. So, the miracles of Jesus cannot seriously be considered as a p
roof of divinity.
Suppose the Son of God really appeared on earth, would he need miracles of dispu
table quality to prove his identity? Surely he could do something unmistakably
supernatural like, say, actually moving a mountain (which he declares possible f
or those who have faith)? The whole story of these shaky miracles supports the
hypothesis of an ego-delusion which made Jesus really believe in his supernatura
l powers, combined with a willingness on the part of a gullible and uneducated c
ommunity of fishermen to be over-awed by the divine airs which Jesus gave himsel
f.
3.4. Sifting out the real Jesus
We know by now that the Gospel is not a 100% authentic report about Jesus doings
and sayings. But it is possible to more or less sift out the authentic core fro
m the theological additions. Some of the recognizable additions are the followi
ng.
According to the Gospels, Jesus is tried and sentenced by the Jews, with Pilate
a mild and innocent bystander. In reality, Pilate was a cruel governor, and eve
n the central rulers in Rome ended up removing him from office for causing too m
uch trouble by his harshness. As for the Jews , it was the priests who tried Jesus
, but the crowds (at least in the province) who supported him. But after the de
feat of the Jewish rebels at the hands of Titus in 70 AD, it became more rewardi
ng for the Christian missionary strategy to move closer to the Romans and emphas
ize their separateness from the Jews. These could now be blamed for everything,
while an early sympathy for Christ on the part of the Roman governor was also s
uggested.
That is why Pilate is made to say: I see no guilt in this man I wash my hands in i
nnocence. On the other hand, the Jewish crowd is reported in the Gospel as clamou
ring for Jesus death: His blood may come over us and our descendents , so that they
become morally guilty of deicide , god-murder. On the basis of this Gospel story,
the Church has considered the Jews as the murderers of Jesus, a stigma it has on
ly removed (and that only on condition that they dis-identify with the Jewish ge
neration contemporary with Jesus) in 1962.
It is possible that Pilate had sympathy for everyone who was a troublemaker to t
he Jews, whom he hated, but the depiction of his personality is certainly the pr
oduct of missionary editing. The allotment of guilt in the story of Jesus trial
is in very large measure responsible for centuries of Christian anti-semitism, c
ulminating in Auschwitz. This allotment of guilt, with its far-reaching consequ
ences, was the product of conscious history distortion by the early Christian mi
ssionaries, who considered it opportune to identify with the Romans and blame th
e Jews.
A similar political turn is probably the key to the story of Jesus saying: Give u
nto Caesar what is Caesar s, and unto God what is God s. At first the Christians were
very uncompromising and they refused to pay taxes: they expected the Second Com
ing and the destruction of the Empire. When that changed (around 55, probably b
ecause at first the new emperor Nero had raised high expectations among the Chri
stians, or because Claudius persecutions had forced them into compromise), they j
ustified this change to some of their more radical followers, and at the same ti
me assured Roman or pro-Roman listeners about the genuineness of this new policy
by invoking Jesus own authority. So, possibly this well-known episode is not hi
storical, but a motivated insertion.
A lot of the parables and sermons attributed to Jesus may well be common proverb
s and insights of the contemporary religio-cultural scene. For instance, the di
ctum: To him who hath, shall be given, but from him who doeth not have, even what
he hath shall be taken , may well have been a commonly known observation on life.
Most people will feel compelled to give bigger presents to rich friends than t
o poor friends on a similar occasion: it is the kind of common knowledge that en
ds up crystallizing into a proverb. Jesus himself may have applied this dictum
to a religious topic (the Kingdom of Heaven), but even in its application to a r
eligious context, it may have been borrowed from the Pharisees or from one of th
e proliferating sects of the time.
It is very common that the miracles of one saint are attributed to another saint
by the latter s followers. In Communist books, I have found Voltaire s witticisms
being attributed to Karl Marx. The pranks attributed to the Turkic wit Mollah N
asruddin (now popular in the People s Republic as A-fan-ti, i.e. Effendi) have bee
n appropriated in Indian sources for the Indian wit Birbal, and vice versa. So,
it is only normal that wise and saintly statements that carried an aura of resp
ected profundity, were put in Jesus mouth by followers.
An important statement of Christian doctrine that was probably borrowed from sec
tarian sources, either by Jesus or by the Gospel editors, is the Sermon on the M
ount. Another Christian classic, the injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself ,
is typically pharisaic, and in tune with traditional morality expressed here an
d there in the Old Testament. It can readily be linked with pharisee Hillel s fam
ous statement that the Jewish law can essentially be summed up as: What ye do not
want done unto you, do not do that unto others ,- the Golden Rule which Hillel ha
d in common with Confucius, among others.
A different type of addition by the Gospel editors is the hardening of miracle s
tories into fully attested reports. In the Gospel of John, written as the last
of the four, we read that the apostle Thomas refused to believe that the man bef
ore him was the resurrected Jesus, so he asked to touch his wounds. And yes, th
ey were real, it was the crucified and resurrected Jesus. This detail of the ch
ecking of Jesus wounds is not present in the other Gospels. What happened was th
at Christian preachers used to relate the story of the resurrected Jesus meeting
with the apostles, and people in the audience would ask: Did it really happen? D
o you know this for sure-? And so, to anticipate these questions, John fabricated
a certificate of empirical proof.
Similarly, in the successive Gospels, the report on the baptism of Jesus in the
river Jordan becomes ever more realistic . Mark reports it as a subjective impress
ion: Jesus saw the heavens open and a dove descend on Him . In Matthew this becomes
: And lo! The heavens opened and He saw God s Spirit descend on Him in the shape o
f a dove. The seeing of the dove is still a matter of Jesus own subjective percept
ion, but the interpretation that it was God s Spirit has been added. According to
Luke, it happened that the Heavens opened and the Holy Spirit, in the physical s
hape of a dove, descended on Him . Now, the whole episode has become an objective
fact. Finally, John goes another step further: And John [the Baptist] gave test
imony and said: I have seen that the Spirit descended as a dove from heaven I have
seen it myself and attested: this is the son of the Lord. This time, there is eve
n a witness willing to testify.
What has started as a report of Jesus subjective experience, recorded from Jesus o
wn report, has become an objective and even a well-attested fact. A theology as
well as a polemical fortification is increasingly being imposed on the original
innocent report. Now, all such insertions, suspected omissions, and reworked v
ersions, can more or less be traced and mapped. After that, a solidly historica
l core remains. Among the reliably historical elements are those which go again
st the intentions of the Christian preachers, or those which are beyond their ca
pacity of invention.
Therefore, a solidly historical element in the Gospel narrative is the psychopat
hological syndrome which is clearly present in Jesus personality. The Gospel wri
ters could not have invented such a coherent description of a well-defined syndr
ome even if they had wanted to, and secondly they certainly didn t want to pass on
such information about their Saviour. The syndrome so well illustrated in the
Gospel is called paraphrenia.
3.5. Jesus the paraphrenic
Paraphrenia is a fairly rare mental affliction in which the patient develops a d
elusion (mostly genetic, i.e. concerning his parents or ancestry), which is trig
gered and fed by only rarely occurring hallucinatory crises. Starting from this
delusion, he builds up an entire system complete with interpretative delusions (
misreading events to make them fit, rather than disturb, the basic delusion). O
therwise he remains well-integrated in his environment.9 Paraphernia is sometime
s classified in the larger category of paranoia and opposed to schizophrenia. In
contrast to the schizophrenic, the paraphrenic remains adapted to his milieu, ha
s a coherent thinking and a well-organized behaviour. Generally hallucinations
are rare, but initiate a delusional state, often with a grandiose genetic theme.
The paraphrenic is very sensitive to opposition to his ideas; he is therefore
somewhat secretive, and often full of resentment and hate. This is exactly the
image the Gospel has painted of Jesus.
If we assume this diagnosis, which is suggested by several striking events in Je
sus life, and extend it to understand his whole life story, the Gospel narrative
becomes coherent. One hypothesis will suffice to explain diverse elements for w
hich the exegetes now need a whole string of hypotheses: methodologically, that
is a very strong point.
Today, the theologians have caught themselves in a construction of difficult and
contradictory hypotheses that is convincing no one. The fundamentalists who re
fuse to think and therefore just take the whole Bible as God s own word, ridicule
the theologians with all their difficult terminology invented to create a concep
tual framework in which the diverse and contradictory Bible narratives might mak
e sense. The real scientist is equally unimpressed by the patchwork of hypothes
es to which the theologians resort in order to make sense of the Gospel narrativ
e. The paraphrenia hypothesis takes care of the entire Gospel narrative at once
.
Jesus had, on all hands, a problem with the identity of his father. In the apoc
rypha, he is called son of a whore . According to the Jewish tradition, he was the
son of the Roman soldier Pandera and the local girl Miriam (Mary), the hairdres
ser. The existence of a Roman soldier with that name has actually been verified
. A few years after the start of the Christian Era, he was transferred to the l
egion in Germany, where a grave bearing his name has been found: perhaps the onl
y left-over of the Holy Family. At any rate, the Gospel narrative is explicit e
nough that Jesus conception was a matter of scandal: his social father Joseph wan
ted to break off his engagement with Mary when he found she was pregnant. In a v
illage, such a circumstance could not possibly be kept secret from the child Jes
us. In the playground he must have been reminded often enough of being an illeg
itimate child.
The first sign that Jesus is trying to work out his inner problem with his paren
tage, and at the same time that people think there is mentally something wrong w
ith him, is his visit to the temple at age 12. For lack of a physical father, t
he only father that was left to him was the Creator, Yahweh. Like many boys of
his age, he wanted to know more about his origins, and he looked for information
in the Scriptures. When he went to the temple, he went to the house of his Fat
her. There, he expected to learn more from the Scribes. The questions he asked
them must have sounded strange to them. Jesus was hanging around for three day
s, without telling his parents anything. And when he returned home and his fami
ly got angry for his causing them so much worry, he replied: Don t you know I belon
g in my Father s house? He claimed the right to solve his own identity problem, eve
n if that implied insensitivity to others feelings. At that age, this behaviour
is not abnormal, except that few youngsters would have taken Scriptural imagery
so literally as to believe that their personal fatherhood problems could be solv
ed by identifying God as the missing father.
The little bit of information about this childhood episode indicates a prodrome
of the later crisis. By itself, the temple episode need not be pathological, it
could have been a fairly ordinary event in the difficult puberty process of sel
f-discovery. But it does betray a psychological setting in which a deeper menta
l disease can develop.
The first real crisis we hear of, is the baptism in the river Jordan. There, Je
sus sees a bird coming from the opened sky, and hears a voice bringing an enormo
us message: You are my son, in whom I take pleasure. Seeing light, perceiving a bi
rd (zooscopy), hearing a voice with a short message in the second person and whi
ch is absolute and takes away all doubts: that is the description of a typical s
ensorial hallucination.
The famous Flemish theologian Edward Schillebeeckx sees in the baptism episode Je
sus vocation meaningfully surrounded by interpretative visions . This implies that
 the visions were literary embellishment, meaningful but nonetheless unhistorica
l and invented by human beings. Progressive theologians like Schillebeeckx abho
r the traditionalist more literal interpretation. They dislike supernatural thi
ngs like visions and voices from the sky. But with that, they fail to give a cohe
rent explanation of why this imagery is being created (and why, as we have seen,
John tries to make his audience believe that the events were very real). In th
is case, the literal interpretation is the more scientific one: the bird did app
ear, the voice did speak from the sky - but only as a subjective experience of t
he mental patient Jesus, rather than as an objective cosmic revelation directly
from God the Creator.
In the Bible numerous texts mention the hearing of voices, especially the voice
of God. Current exegesis interprets these texts as metaphorical: hearing the voi
ce of God is simply the expression for a vocation by God. Sometimes, this metaph
orical interpretation is justified: to take an example from outside the Biblical
tradition, when the Greek philosopher Parmenides says that a god has revealed his
philosophy of Being to him, it is just a manner of speaking, not an actual audi
tory hallucination. In psychopathology however, hearing a voice is a common expre
ssion for an auditory hallucination, often accompanied by other sensorial halluc
inations, esp. visions (other phenomena include feeling of heat or of being pier
ced by needles). That the voices heard by Jesus were hallucinatory, is even adm
itted by Albert Schweitzer.
Important supportive information for the paraphrenia thesis is furnished by the
apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews. It relates that Jesus family thinks he is poss
essed by a demon, and that they want him to try this baptism as a possible way o
f exorcising the demon; he is at first unwilling (all accounts mention a prelimi
nary discussion between Jesus and John the Baptist). It seems that Jesus behavio
ur had been strange for some time already, and now that there is an exorcist in
the neighbourhood, the remedy should be tried: if it doesn t help, it doesn t harm e
ither. But the emotionally charged baptism experience triggers a revelation that
will plunge Jesus completely into a distorted self-image.
Typical for the delusion that gets articulated in such a sensorial hallucination
, is the absolute certainty with which the patient believes in it. Jesus will d
oubt no more: he is the son of the heavenly Father. Later, when a Church theolo
gy was developed, this notion of God as the personal Father was made into a cent
ral theme in Christianity, setting it apart from the Mosaic Old Covenant . In the
latter, God was a vengeful ruler, who only stood by His chosen people on conditi
on of its total obedience. Now, God became a loving Father. What this interpre
tation of the baptism revelation overlooked, is that the vengefulness of Yahweh
was now transferred to His Son. Jesus did not have an army, like Mohammed, but
he was very intolerant of skepsis and full of hatred against the indifferent wor
ld. In his own hallucinations, he himself would be the avenger on the Day of Ju
dgment.
After the baptism crisis, Jesus retires to the desert, where he doesn t eat for fo
rty days, and gets visions of angels serving him and the devil tempting him. Th
is period of extreme introversion after the shocking hallucination, as if to dig
est his new self-understanding, is again very typical. He is offered nothing le
ss than the power over the whole world, but he turns down the offer. This is a
typical rationalized delusion, with a reasoning which we can imagine along these
lines: To me the power over the world has been given. Then why do I not effecti
vely have the power? Because I spurned it, though it is rightfully mine and I c
ould have taken it. Still, the subsequent episodes show that he has started ascri
bing extra-ordinary powers to himself.
Dr. Somers makes the diagnosis: Psychopathological investigation discovers in Mar
k, Luke and Matthew, regardless of the fact that Luke especially adapted the ori
ginal version, a number of well-known symptoms of a hallucinatory state: hearing
 the voice of the devil, seeing wild beasts (zoopsy), having the desire to fly (
vestibular hallucinations, having visions of the whole world , suffering from anore
xia (fasting). In this light, the vision of the baptism episode is also certain
ly another manifestation of this hallucinatory state: a well-localized (heavenly
) vision, the seeing of light (opening of heaven), of a bird, the hearing of a v
oice speaking in the second person and communicating a grandiose genetic message
( you are my beloved son ). The whole picture is coherent with regard to the psych
opathological symptoms. In the text therefore, one finds the correct descriptio
n of a delusional hallucinatory state. Moreover, the Gospel also mentions circu
mstances which are coherent with this pathology.
After this bewildering revelation, Jesus starts to live up to his new self-image
. He becomes a wandering god-man, doing miracles.
The next hallucinatory crisis is on Mount Tabor. He goes up on the mountain wit
h his disciples Peter, James and John. There, in a sea of white light, he meets
with Elijah and Moses. Again, a voice from the clouds speaks: This is my Son, t
he Beloved. Listen to Him. According to Luke (9:28-36), Jesus spoke with Moses a
nd Elijah about his going-out which he would perform in Jerusalem. Then, the sce
ne stops and Jesus is alone with his disciples, who have not seen Moses and Elij
ah: they merely wake up when they hear Jesus talk to somebody. In the testimony
of Mark (9:2-10) there is the same revealing contradiction: while it is contend
ed that Elijah and Moses appeared, only Jesus is described and it is said that f
inally the apostles saw nobody but Jesus.
This crisis marks the beginning of the predictions of Jesus suffering and death,
which had been the topic of his conversation with Moses and Elijah. Taking insp
iration from a description of the Servant of Yahweh in Isaiah (53:7), he understan
ds he will be led unto his slaughter like a lamb. He reads into Scripture the i
ndication that the Son of Man will go into his glory through suffering and meek
submission to this expiatory sacrifice. According to the logic of the delusion,
he must now go to Jerusalem and provoke his death by entering as king. He pred
icts he will rise on the third day and thus enter his Kingdom.
A third report of a hallucinatory crisis is only given by John (12:20-36). Duri
ng the entry in Jerusalem he hears the voice of the Father saying: I have glorifi
ed him and will glorify him again. The people said it had thundered, some said an
angel had spoken to him, i.e. to Jesus. So it was only Jesus who had heard the
words.
Contemporary theologians like E. Schillebeeckx ascribe these stories to the imag
ination of the primitive Church, which wanted to glorify Jesus. But, asks Dr. S
omers: Why should the Church invent a number of stories which caused nothing but
difficulties? Why should the son of God be baptized? Why should he be tempted
by the devil, and that with such extravagant temptations? Why should he fast du
ring 40 days? Why should he see wild beasts? It is quite inconceivable that th
e primitive Church invented these strange stories for the glorification of Jesus
. On the contrary, the primitive Church leaders tried to interpret and to adapt
the existing story in order to demonstrate the divine origin of these phenomena
. Of a hallucinatory visionary state, they made objective supernatural events.
But they were sufficiently ignorant so that they could not mask the pathologica
l background of the events they recounted.
These hallucinations, few in number but elaborating the same theme, together wit
h the testimonies of people thinking he is possessed or mentally disturbed, point
to the paraphrenia syndrome. What confirms this tentative diagnosis and makes i
t into the first coherent explanation of the entire Jesus narrative, is Jesus beh
aviour.
The paraphrenic patient has some marked characteristics, other than the rare hal
lucinations and the delusional state, e.g.: a great hostility against those who
contradict him, often also a familial rage, as the family usually contradicts hi
m; autistic behaviour, in the sense that the criterion for judgment and action i
s not reality, but his subjective will; an interpretative delirium, i.e. interpr
eting events and utterances as pointing to him and to his delusion; concealing h
is conviction and temporizing as long as circumstances seem unfriendly. All the
se typical features can be found in the Gospel.
Jesus threatens Bethsaida, Kapharnaum, Jerusalem, because they did not believe h
im. If the Son of Man comes with heavenly power, all those who did not believe
will be killed, along with all kings and mighty men. Jesus insults the Pharisee
s, because they disbelieve and criticize him. Jesus is especially angry with hi
s family which tried to prevent his preaching. A number of logia (= sayings of
Jesus) are directed against the family, and in the Gospel one cannot find any fr
iendly word to the family and especially to his mother. Spurning his mother and
brothers who are waiting at the door, he points to his disciples: These are my m
other and my brothers, who accomplish the will of God (Mk 3:35). The disciples o
f Jesus should hate their fathers and their mothers (Lk 14:26) because the true
enemies of man are his family members (Mt 10:35; see also Mk 11:30; Mt 10:35; Mk
13:11).
A highly irrational act is Jesus cursing of the fig tree when, out of season, it
is not bearing fruit (Mk 16:20-25; Mt 21:18-22). The tree is behaving normally,
but Jesus punishes it: never again will it bear fruit.
Jesus is also violently sensitive to things relating to his supposed Father. Th
e violent scene he makes against the traders in the temple (Mk 11:15-17; Mt 21:1
2-13; Lk 19:45-46), where he objects against the transportation of any object, i
s motivated by what he perceives as their dishonouring his Father s house. Modem
preachers say that Jesus was protesting against materialism, that he was making
an important ethical and religious statement. But in fact, Jesus behaviour vis-a
-vis the traders in the temple premises was highly unadapted to reality. Those
traders were not doing anything unethical or irreligious. They had an important
function in temple life, where sacrifices were the normal and statutory practic
e. Even if their activities had been misplaced, so was Jesus tirade that they we
re making his Father s house into a robbers den : traders are not necessarily robbers,
heirs is an honourable profession, and eventhough God may be our Father, we shou
ldn t take disrespect for God s house so personally.
Another, more specific detail is that he attempts to keep his status as Son of M
an secret: Do not talk about this with anyone , he says several times. Only when h
is disciples, and later the priests during his trial, ask him straight if he is
God s son, he consents, saying that they have said it. But to theologians, it has
always remained a riddle why Jesus should be so secretive about his glorious mi
ssion. Paraphrenia patients are very aware of the attitude (and possible lack o
f understanding) of their fellow men. That is why Jesus temporizes, in expectat
ion of more auspicious circumstances.
A final symptom is the anti-sexual attitude. As the studies of Bultmann have sh
own, the primitive church has cleansed, adapted a number of logia. A relevant e
xample is provided by the logia about the children and the reign of God: unless
you become like children, you cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. In the apocryp
hal Gospel of Thomas, some logia have been preserved which explain the periscope
s of the Gospels: to be a child is to be asexual and free of sexual shame (log.
12, 21; cfr. also log. 37, 114: if you make masculine and feminine one). In the
canonical Gospels it is also said that in heaven there is no marriage, and virg
inity is exalted, as it is in the Apocalypse. The theme is constant: virginity,
inhibition of sexual activity, as well in the canonical Gospels and the Gospel
of Thomas as in the Apocalypse.
Jesus behaviour during his trial is in conformity with the diagnosis. We should
keep in mind that from the vision on Mount Tabor onwards, Jesus has been mentall
y preparing himself for death. The priests accuse him of blasphemy: he has insu
lted Yahweh by calling himself His son. Normally, they have to produce witnesse
s to prove this extremely serious allegation. But Jesus saves them the trouble:
he commits an even greater sacrilege right on the spot, by pronouncing God s name
aloud. Strictly following the prescribed procedure, the high priest tears his
mantle into two. Jesus stands convicted of sacrilege. The Gospels make no secr
et about Jesus guilt of this sacrilege, which was well known to be a capital offe
nce.
He commits what is blasphemy before the priests, with a straight face, because h
e is fully prepared to die. For months he has been mentally readying himself fo
r it, announcing that this would be the road to his glorification. When you thi
nk death is the end, the prospect of dying may be a bit horrifying. But when yo
u think it is the way to the glory, it is alright: Death, where is thy sting? His
frankness in the face of a certain death penalty must certainly have added to hi
s superhuman aura.
3.6. Some fantastic stories
The Gospel of Infancy, i.e. the Gospel narrative of Jesus conception, birth and e
arly childhood, is not so much a source of psychopathologically relevant informa
tion. It is less reliable and more open to speculative interpretations. Yet, i
t also provides material for some interesting psychological observations. In th
is respect it is important to see the essential difference between the Gospel of
Infancy and the visions during the Baptism and Tabor episodes. Most Bible stud
ents see the Gospel of Infancy as a entirely mythical corpus in the New Testamen
t and they mention numerous reasons.
1. The chronological indications are contradictory. According to Matthew, Jesus
should be born between 6 and 4 BC, during the reign of the great Herod, who die
d in 4 BC; but the census which according to Luke, obliged the parents of Jesus
to travel to Bethlehem, was organized by Quirinius, who according to the precise
indications of Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian, became procurator of Syr
ia in 6-7 AD, i.e. 11 to 12 years later. Furthermore, the beginning of Jesus pub
lic life, when he was about 30 years old, is traced by Luke (3:1) to the 15th ye
ar of the reign of Tiberius (27 AD). According to that indication, Jesus should
have been born in 4-3 BC. These difficulties were never solved by the historia
ns.
2. The divergence between Matthew and Luke is striking. According to Matthew, a
n angel appears to Joseph, not to Mary; but for Luke an angel appears to Mary an
d to Zachariah. According to Matthew, each event is predicted in the Old Testam
ent; but Luke replaces the quotations of the Old Testament with occasional proph
ecies by Hannah and Simeon. Matthew writes that a star appears, Magi come, ther
e is a flight to Egypt and a slaughter of innocents by the Great Herod. For Luk
e there are only shepherds, angels and music, the circumcision in the Temple, an
d a simple return to Nazareth. He does not mention Egypt, nor the slaughter of
the innocents.
In the Protevangelium of James another series of divergent elements can be found
. Herod kills Zachariah, while John is sought for; there is no star, no Magi, n
o prophecies, only the angels and their message to Mary and Elisabeth.
3. The only elements which all witnesses have in common are: 1) the exceptional
pregnancy of Mary; 2) the hesitation of Joseph; 3) the birth of Jesus; 4) the ex
ceptional atmosphere of wonders. Each witness surrounds these historical events
with a scenery of marvellous elements of his own.
4. Whoever the witness, the given details are typically feminine notwithstanding
a masculine elaboration. Typically feminine are: the attention to what people
say, to gifts, visits, the emotional reactions of the fiancé and the niece. Typic
ally masculine is Matthew s elaboration: the narration of each event is rigorously
closed with a quotation from the Old Testament. Typically masculine is also Lu
ke s elaboration: he omits a number of marvellous elements (the star, Herod, the v
isit of the Magi, the appearance of the angel to Joseph); he replaces them by th
e more credible visit of shepherds; while he omits the Biblical quotation, he re
places it with the occasional prophecies of Hannah and Simeon. Typical for both
is the atmosphere of wonders (signs in heaven versus heavenly music, angels), a
great historical context (a Roman census versus Herod and a flight to Egypt) an
d the glorious role for the mother to give birth to a future king of Israel.
If we submit the texts to a psychological examination, to get at its historical
core, we find that there is a common source for all stories and particularly a f
eminine one, and secondly that the majority of events are due to imaginative loos
e construction (e.g. the prophecies are not even exact allusions).
It is common opinion among exegetes that this mythic scenery can be dated to aft
er Jesus Resurrection, when in the primitive Church questions arose about Jesus or
igin. As it was due, all signs had to be present that Jesus was the future Mess
iah. As there was a Hellenistic Church (Paul) and a Jewish Church dames), so th
ere was a Jewish version (Matthew) and a Hellenistic version (Luke). For the Je
ws, Jesus had to be predicted by the prophets; for the Hellenistic people the cr
edibility was to be ensured by a more common course of events.
Even in this mythical context some fundamental data may appear which are based o
n real facts. As the indications about the census of Quirinius, about Herod, ab
out the descent from David, about the journey to Bethlehem (according to James Pr
otevangelium, Joseph and Mary live in Jerusalem, not Nazareth) may be false, it
is not impossible that Jesus was born in the period that Herodes Archelaos succe
eded his father in 4 BC. Ibis was a period of revolutionary agitation and conse
quent repression in Jerusalem. Is it unthinkable that the murder of the innocen
ts goes back to this period, and that Joseph and Mary, like probably a lot of pe
ople, escaped from Jerusalem to safer surroundings, such as Bethlehem? In that c
ontext and in accordance with the most probable chronology, Jesus was born in 3
BC during the flight from Jerusalem. But that he was born in Bethlehem, is cert
ainly not more than an invention of the Gospel editors, to declare the apparent
prophecy about the birthplace of the Messiah fulfilled in Jesus.
According to the Jewish tradition Mary was a whore and Jesus father was the Roman
soldier Panthera. There are, however, some unsolved questions: how is it possi
ble that from the beginning there is the supposition that Jesus could become kin
g in Israel? This seems quite unrealistic, if Jesus was the son of a Roman sold
ier. Things may change if on hypothesizes that actually his father was a prince
, named Herodes Archelaos (a name which evokes the word Archangelos), who in 4 B
C became the successor of the great Herod, and who was known for his unrestraine
d sexual behaviour. Is it unthinkable that a prince said to a girl that her son
could become a king?
As it had to be shown to the many new adepts of the primitive Church, who became
curious about Jesus origins, that he was really born as the Messiah, the inferio
r conditions of his birth had to be overcompensated. The scenario of conceiving
outside marriage and giving birth to an illegitimate child in bad conditions (f
light to Bethlehem) had to be changed to a direct divine intervention, a virgina
l conception, the birth of a future king with the presence of royal Magi, shephe
rds, angels, heavenly signs and prophecies.
About the mythical character of this Gospel of Infancy, there is a consensus amo
ng exegetes: a fantastic scenery was elaborated in order to mask the inferior co
nditions of Jesus birth. It is impossible to understand these fantastic stories,
if one does not reduce them to their historical origin: a woman, the mother of
Jesus, who had to play her glorious role as the mother of the Messiah to the com
munity of disciples that had gathered around her son. It is a fair guess that a
fter Jesus resurrection and departure, Mary was questioned about the circumstance
s of Jesus birth, and told the apostles the story that became the Gospel of Infan
cy. Some of the miracle-mongering may have been her own doing, as may the varia
tions: she must have told the story on more than one occasion, with less concern
for consistency than regular preachers would have.
We find Jesus mother back in another episode: the Pentecost (Acts 2). This story
is also full of commonplaces. There was a great wind, sounds from heaven, tong
ues of fire appeared, and the apostles spoke several languages. In the text it
is said quite realistically that the people thought it was the language of drunk
ards. But Luke adds that they all understood the preaching in their own languag
e, which seems rather contradictory.
This contradiction, together with the commonplace nature of several features and
the phenomenon of excited and unclear speech (therefore described as foreign lan
guage ), casts doubt upon the authenticity of the event. It appears as a show whi
ch had to overcompensate the subjective uncertainty of the apostles. Of course
they were anxious: would the people believe that Jesus was resurrected? Could i
t become a success?
The story of the Ascension is even worse. The Gospel editors who mention it (no
t all even do) relate the whole event in only one sentence and they are not unan
imous about the precise location. Luke mentions two different ones: Bethany and
Jerusalem. Nobody describes clearly the place, the event, the circumstances.
Is it credible that a witness of such a wonderful and glorious event could say n
othing more than he disappeared ? It sounds like a very simple goodbye. Why did t
hey not invite a number of witnesses to this ultimate glorification? Even the h
igh priest? For this instance let us recapitulate the arguments:
1.
The Apostles are witnesses who try to defend the thesis that Jesus now ret
urned to heaven.
2.
According to the criteria of courtroom evaluation of witnesses these are c
learly false with regard to the way of disappearance of Jesus.
3.
The only historical fact is that about Jesus nothing is said any more: he
disappears definitively from among the Apostles in Jerusalem.
It should be noted that angels appear at all difficult moments: the conception,
the birth of Jesus, the resurrection, the ascension. The Holy Ghost explains bo
th the conception of Jesus and the conception of the Church. The structural ana
lysis reveals a systematic trend, a thematic thinking: when there is a difficult
situation, a myth with angels or Holy Ghost is masking the truth. So there is
a constant mythologic activity, why not say mythomanic (not in a truly pathological,
but in a larger sense).
Exegetes use the term: post-Paschal glorification , indicating by that terminology
that all these mythical stories were invented by the Church and are to be classifi
ed as devoid of historical foundation, as purely literary products, only intende
d to promote the faith in Jesus. But this theory is unable to specify which wer
e the true historical events, masked by this mythology.
So the distinction should be made between two aspects of the Gospel. The first
one is the mythological: a myth is built, a fantastic scenery in order to show t
he divine nature of Jesus. The second aspect is the transparency of the factual
pathological trend, which could not be masked because of ignorance of psychopat
hology (baptism, Tabor, etc.). The first has been adequately recognized by the e
xegetes, the second has been ignored.
3.7. Son of Man
Jesus calls himself the Son of Man. But according to the voices he heard, he wa
s the Son of God; they never called him Son of Man. In order to understand this
complex psychological situation, one has to be familiar with the cultural backg
round, as well as with the psychopathological one.
The theme of the Son of God is essential in the story of his conception, of his bi
rth, of the temple-episodes (as a 12-year-old, and with the merchants), in the b
aptismal and the Tabor visions. While some kings in divergent cultures have bee
n called Son of God (or Son of Heaven, etc.), they never pretended to be the phy
sical Sons of God, conceived without a human father s intervention, as Jesus did.
Where followers have ascribed magical non-human conception to their leader (e.g
. the Buddha conceived on his mother by an elephant), at least the leader or pro
phet himself did not call himself Son of God.
The Son of God theme is clearly the fundamental one: the voices confirm that tide.
The contents of this status is the problem which preoccupies Jesus in the dese
rt. Could he become a Roman Emperor? Could he transform stones into bread? Co
uld he precipitate himself in the air? Jesus of course had to consult the Bible
about his condition. There he found the roles of the King, the Messiah and the
Son of Man. Never was it predicted that the Son of God would come, so if he hi
mself was the Son of God, he had to appropriate to himself the tide of the Son o
f Man as well. And this Son of Man was dearly described by Henoch. Once he was
convinced, it became clear to him that now his reign was coming, because soon h
e would come on the clouds of Heaven.
And then he announced the reign of God, implicitly his own. He kept his secret,
because it was impossible to declare to the people that soon he would be the Ma
ster of the whole world for eternity. After a while it became a problem to him
how he should attain his glory. On Mount Tabor he heard the voices that convinc
ed him that he was also the Servant of Yahweh, who had to suffer and die before
attaining his glory. Moses and Elijah clarified to Jesus that he was going to d
ie in Jerusalem.
Jesus is convinced that all texts of the Bible point to him, because he is the S
on of God. In Jerusalem he has to make his entrance on an ass as Zechariah predi
cted . Before his judges Jesus was silent because he enacted the Lamb of Isaiah,
except when he was asked who he was: then he affirmed that he was the Son of God
, the Son of Man, the King of the Jews, the Messiah.
The starting-point of this development was the genetic theme: who is my father?
The purely pathological elements are the progressive Ego-inflation, the specifi
c elaboration of the delusion, the interpretative delirium (all texts point to h
im) and the hallucinatory state. So, against Schweitzer, it has been shown that
although the content of the delusion is partly indebted to the cultural backgro
und (Jewish Scripture), the specific pathological elements are culture-neutral.
3.8 The resurrection
Jesus is sentenced to crucifixion. This was a Roman, not a Jewish punishment, a
nd Bible scholars have debated a lot about this seemingly unnecessary hand-over
of Jesus by the Jewish authorities to the Roman governor Pilate, who proceeded t
o implement the death penalty which Jesus had deserved according to the Jewish l
aw.
Crucified convicts were tied (not nailed) to a cross, and their death was brough
t about by torture and by breaking their bones. Interestingly, the Roman soldie
rs refrained from breaking Jesus bones, no doubt because they had orders to do so
. Having heard of the prediction that Jesus would rise on the third day, Pilate
must have thought it quite an interesting practical joke to arrange for the eff
ective re-appearance of this weird godman. So, he ordered a servant to look aft
er Jesus after he had been taken down from the cross, and to get him back on his
feet by the third day.
Postulating, as many modernist theologians do, that Jesus died on the cross and
that his re-appearance, which the four Gospels unanimously report, was a mere fa
ble, is hardly tenable. The rather sensational tradition that Jesus came back a
live after being crucified, can much better be explained by assuming that he did
indeed come back. The belief that he had come back was crucial to the Christia
ns faith, and only a few years after the fact, Saint Paul declared that without t
he resurrection , the Christian faith would make no sense. This belief is best exp
lained by the hypothesis that Jesus did indeed come back: to everyone s surprise,
he had survived the crucifixion. They still could not believe that one could su
rvive it, so they accepted that this was Jesus ultimate miracle: he had died and
returned to life.
To find out with reasonable certainty which versions of the resurrection story a
re reliable, there are methods of internal psychological criticism, esp. the cri
teria of U. Undeutsch. According to Undeutsch, the clearest sign of falsity of
a testimony is the presence of commonplaces. A true witness mentions particular
details which caught his attention; he mentions his emotions; even his faulty r
eactions. These criteria can help a lot in the study of our witnesses.
It is clear from the vivid and contingent details that Mark and John relate some
true events: Mark recalls how the Apostles did not believe the story of Magdale
n, when she told them that the grave was empty. John mentions the fact that he
arrived first at the grave, because he had run faster, but let Peter enter first
. By contrast, Matthew and partly Luke give a collection of commonplaces: an an
gel appears, there is light and thunder, suddenly two men are present. The conc
lusion therefore is: Matthew and partly Luke falsified the true story; Mark, Joh
n and partly Luke relate true events. So, to the great astonishment of the disc
iples, the grave was empty.
On similar grounds, it is also true that afterwards, Jesus met his apostles at J
erusalem and in Galilea. Jesus survived crucifixion. Some details in the Gospe
l may become more important in this perspective: 1) the attitude of Pilate, who
was not a friend of the Jews and liked to ridicule them; 2) the contacts between
Pilate and Joseph of Arimathea; 3) the good centurion who spared Jesus; 4) the ha
sty end to the crucifixion and the restitution of the body to Joseph of Arimathe
a; 5) the new grave and the presence of a young person (a servant).
One can suppose that Pilate ordered the centurion to spare Jesus, so that he wou
ld not die but resurrect . After three days, Jesus was sufficiently healed, and a
few days later he paid a nightly visit to his disciples in Jerusalem. But he ha
d to be careful, because if he was caught, he would have been stoned or decapita
ted. After the sobering experience of torture and convalescence, he had the pre
sence of mind to escape to safer regions like Galilea, and from there to disappe
ar forever from Palestine.
When the Apostles wanted to announce his resurrection, they had to say where Jes
us was. The simplest way to get rid of this problem was the story of the Ascens
ion. The criteria of Undeutsch stamp the Ascension story as obviously false. It
is also possible that the question of Jesus whereabouts was initially not very i
mportant, as long as Jesus Second Coming was expected; and that only when the exp
ectation was abandoned after decades of vain hope, the Church chose to lodge Jes
us safely in heaven whence he shall return at the end of time . Either way, whethe
r it was the apostles themselves or the later editors of the New Testament, thos
e who have reported the Ascension have left us a stereotypical glorification sto
ry, immediately recognizable as unhistorical.
The ascension story is one of the most vulnerable points in Christian theology,
because it makes a mockery of that one cornerstone of the Christian faith: Jesus
victory over death in the resurrection. After all, if he has disappeared from a
mong us by ascending to heaven, he is not different from us mortals, who also di
sappear after death. If vanquishing death means remaining in your physical body,
as the resurrection story implies, then Jesus has not vanquished death but mere
ly postponed it for a few weeks, something which doctors routinely do with cance
r patients. On the other hand, if he ascended to heaven physically, with body a
nd all, then he is still physically roaming somewhere, in a physical heaven, lik
e the astronauts. This dilemma, the Church can only solve by statements like: Ha
llowed be those who believe without having seen , or: I believe because it is absur
d , or: It is a mystery, and we should be humble enough not to try and reduce it to
our intellectual comprehension .
We will let the theologians sort it out, and direct our attention back to the hi
storical situation after Jesus resurrection. Jesus did indeed reappear, shocked
at his own unexpected survival, but only briefly. Shortly after, he left from a
mong the apostles, probably from fear of the priests as well as of the Romans, w
ho must have found it a good practical joke, but not one that should last too lo
ng. This survival scenario is far better able to explain why people effectively
believed that Jesus had resurrected, than the modernist interpretation that he
just died and that later his disciples merely claimed to have seen him again.
There are indeed traces of Jesus survival in the New Testament. Saint Paul relat
es how, immediately after his conversion, he went to Arabia, and returned to Dam
ascus invested with the authority to lead the Church among the Gentiles; and how
he went and joined the apostles in Jerusalem only after three years (Gal. 1:17)
. This is only seemingly in contradiction with the version of Acts 9:26, which m
akes him go from Damascus to Jerusalem. It is indeed from Damascus that he arri
ved in Jerusalem, but the information that he had to be smuggled out of Damascus
indicates that he had already been a controversial preacher for some time, whic
h again presupposes that he had been invested with some authority. Only after p
reaching for three years did he visit the Christians in Jerusalem, including the
original apostles who must have been the highest authority in the Church after
Jesus. What did Saint Paul go to Arabia for? Could it be that that is where Je
sus was staying, safely just outside the Roman Empire?
Secondly, the first line of the book Apocalypse says quite clearly that the book
was a revelation from God to Jesus. The next line says that it was then passed
on to John through his angelos, a term which has come to mean angel but literally
means messenger . The last verses of the Book repeat this information, and assure
: He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming soon. Amen. To which a l
ater editor has added: Come Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all
the saints. Amen. The Apocalypse is a vision revealed to Jesus and subsequently co
mmunicated to a disciple who calls himself John.
Jesus claims to have received a Revelation, and relates it, through a messenger,
to John and his other followers: this clear-cut information given in the book i
tself has never been satisfactorily explained by any theologian. The theory tha
t Jesus himself was the author, does explain it in the most straightforward way.
This obviously presupposes that Jesus survived the crucifixion and ascension for
some years.
If he went to live at some other place and survived for some more years, by what
could we recognize his traces if ever we come across any? If we want to find Je
sus traces, we have to look for traces of paraphrenia. The Apocalypse of John is
a striking expression of a developed paraphrenic condition. This mysterious te
xt could reveal the truth about the later Jesus.
3.9. The date of the Apocalypse
One of the least understood books of the Bible is no doubt its very last book, t
he Apocalypse or Book of Revelation, ascribed to Saint John the apostle, also ca
lled the Seer of Patmos . No theologian knows really what to do with it, and a coh
erent explanation of it is simply not extant. The book is very popular among cr
ackpots and people who expect the end of the world, like the Jehovah s witnesses.
Charles Manson, who killed the actress Sharon Tate and some of her friends in 19
69, was an adept of the Apocalypse. He had taken the Beatles song Revolution #9 (
correctly) as a pun on Revelation #9 , and interpreted this as a message to himself
, connected with the fire-and-brimstone 9th chapter of the Book of Revelation.
Like so many madmen, he related everything (in this case, both the Apocalypse an
d the songs of the Beatles) to himself. he was the leader of the select humanity
that would survive the catastrophe God was about to inflict on the world, as we
ll as an instrument in God s destruction of doomed piggies such as the decadent god-
forgetting actors.
This use of the Apocalypse in crank millenarist movements is not abnormal: the A
pocalypse is a manifesto of the expectation of Judgment Day, and it is definitel
y the product of a sick mind.
A first problem with this book is its date. The prevalent opinion still is that
it was written only in the nineties AD, making it the latest Bible book. Dr. S
omers has, however, convincingly demonstrated that it must have been written in
the mid-forties, some two decades before the Gospels. Among the clues he discove
red, one certainly deserves mention, because an end should be put to all the non
sense read into it so far: the mysterious number 666, which is said to be the nu
mber of the Beast.
The arguments for the prevalent dating are the following: in the text, seven or
eight kings of Rome (emperors) are mentioned; there is a predictive allusion to
a great fire in Rome, probably in 64 AD under Nero10 (taken to be a reference in
serted as a vaticinium ex eventu, a prophecy after the fact); and the number of
the beast, 666, is probably the number of Nero (gematria value of QSAR NRWN, the
approximate Hebrew transcription of the Greek pronunciation of the Roman name C
aesar Nero). Counting the Roman emperors from the beginning with August, and no
t taking into account the short-lived reigns of Galba (68-69), Otho (69) and Vit
ellius (69), one arrives at Domitianus (81-96) as the seventh.
But this construction does not exactly shed light on this mysterious text. On t
he contrary, it is in contradiction with other information given in the text. I
t is said that five kings are fallen and that the seventh is not yet there, and
that he will not remain for a long time. It follows that the Apocalypse has to
be dated during the reign of the sixth emperor, and that the cryptogram 666 indi
cates his name. In that case Nero should be the sixth, but this is impossible b
ecause in the list of the emperors, he is the fifth. And according to the text
the destruction of Rome should happen during the reign of the seventh, which can
not be Nero, because he is the sixth or the fifth. The solution that Domitianus
is the seventh, or the eighth, is also unsatisfying for this reason, that he di
d not reign for a short period. It is also rather arbitrary to exclude Galba, O
tho and Vitellius from the list because of their short reigns.
The reason for this hermeneutic chaos is the fact that a number of details are n
ot understood very well, e.g. the indication: the eighth king who was one of the
seven. What is needed here is an interpreter who is not merely a psychologist but
also a Classical philologist, thoroughly familiar with the details of Greco-Rom
an culture. Notwithstanding the particular traits of loose mental association o
perative in the Apocalypse writer, some details may be exact allusions to the po
litical reality, metaphors which should be identified.
This identification should proceed from an exact representation of the cultural
background at the time the Apocalypse was conceived. In the previously mentione
d interpretation this exact representation is lacking. Thus, it was forgotten t
hat the name Caesar was not a title of a function, but a proper name; that the l
ist of emperors we have does not coincide with the succession of Caesares; that
the description of the fire of Rome (borrowed from Ezekiel) is entirely differen
t from the description of the real fire (Tacitus relates an indescribable chaos
inside the city), and looks more like a genuine prediction based on the Scriptur
al model of Ezekiel rather than a fake prophecy based on a description of the ac
tual event.
To start with an easy one: the eighth who is one of the seven is simply Octavianus
(from Octavus, the eighth ), the personal name of Caesar Augustus. Julius Caesar w
as the first in the list of the Caesares, though he was not an emperor: he was m
urdered precisely because he was suspected of scheming to become king. That the
list is projected to end with the seventh emperor is a reference to a list of s
even who ruled in the beginning: the seven kings of Rome. As the seventh is not
yet there, the Apocalypse has to be dated during the reign of the sixth, becaus
e five have already fallen.
This then is the list: 1) Julius Caesar; 2) Octavianus Augustus, who is also the
eighth ; 3) Tiberius; 4) often forgotten, Germanicus, who was poisoned (fallen) be
fore assuming power but had formally been invested with the imperium maius, 5) G
aius Caligula; 6) Claudius; 7) Nero, whose reign lay in the future when the Apoc
alypse was written, according to the Apocalypse text itself. The Apocalypse can
then be dated in 45-47 AD, rather than in 90 AD or later.
The text of the Apocalypse makes unmistakable reference to the political situati
on of the day. There is a dragon and two beasts, the first beast with seven hea
ds and ten horns, the second beast with only two horns: the first beast s seven he
ads symbolize the seven kings of Rome (the seven Caesars), one of them fatally w
ounded (Julius Caesar). The ten horns are the governors of the ten Provinces of
the Roman Empire (the dragon). The dragon gave power to this beast (the imperi
al power). The beast reigns 42 months, which is exactly the period of the reign
of Caligula who reigned from the 1st July, 37 AD till the 21st January 41 AD an
d who wanted to be worshipped as a God (Zeus Epiphanes neos Gaios), even in the
temple of Jerusalem: the absolute horror for iconoclastic monotheists. The seco
nd beast has only two horns, it decrees the worship of the emperors and the taxe
s; it reigns under the supervision of the first beast. This is clearly the sena
te of Rome with the two consuls at its head. The elaborate symbolism of the hor
ns signifying rulers is an imitation of the imagery employed by Daniel in his al
lusions to the Hellenistic rulers.
But the reference to the emperor as the Beast does not merely express hatred again
st the institution of the Roman imperium, which is conceived as the new Babylon
that holds the Chosen People in exile. It is directed against the then emperor
Claudius personally. It is written that the Beast is also a man and this man ha
s the number 666. Written in Greek characters 666 = Kh.Ks.W, as follows: W or d
igamma signifies 6; Ks or ksi signifies 60; Kh or khi signifies 600. For 6/Diga
mma the meaning is clear: five kings are fallen, the seventh is not yet there, s
o it is the sixth. For 60/Ksi, the associating mind may think of Kaisar, abbrev
iated KS: 66 signifies then the 6th Caesar (this is plausible but not convincing
by itself). For Khi or 600, the meaning becomes clear when we turn to the Roma
n number system, where 600 - DC, is also used as shorthand for Divus Caius as we
ll as for Divus Claudius, the divine Claudius . The number 666 signifies emperor C
laudius.
This informed guess is confirmed when we realize that in his time, Claudius was
routinely compared with a monster, because he was indeed ugly like a beast: acco
rding to Suetonius, even his own mother said so. Divus was a title, which was a
n object of mockery for Romans, and all the more in the case of Claudius because
of his un-divine appearance. Seneca writes that Claudius body was created by th
e gods when they were angry. The fact that Claudius is described unanimously as
a beast and a monster by Suetonius, by Seneca and by the Apocalypse, was also d
ue to the fact that he suffered from a vigorous head and hand tremor, and that h
e had an abnormal gait and a raw voice, like that of a sea-monster . Seneca descri
bes these defects and adds that Hercules had seen several monsters, but not all.
Finally, the comparison with a monster may also refer to Claudius readiness to
have people killed. Seneca accuses Claudius of sentencing to death numerous peo
ple and one can understand the allusions in the Apocalypse to the decapitation o
f a great number of Christian Jews, ordered by Claudius (Apoc. 6:9; 13:9,15; 16:
6; 17:6; 18:6,24; 19:2; 20:4).
One sees that the Apocalypse imagery is a mixture of allusions to the reigns and
persons of the successive Caesars: the violent death of Julius Caesar, the shor
t reign of Gaius, the appearance and the symbolic cypher of Claudius. The evoca
tion of his ugliness is completed with the traits of the beast in Ezekiel (with
the face of a lion, etc.). The aversion for the emperor is situated in the Jewis
h-Roman conflict: emperor-worship and the taxes (paid in coins bearing the name
or picture of the emperor: the mark of the Beast ). So one can deduce the procedur
e of composition: the text is an agglomerate of historical details, loosely unif
ied by symbolic figures, all woven into a catastrophic vision of the impending D
oomsday.
The Apocalyps can safely be dated to the year 45 AD, because this date is corrob
orated by other historical Information. In 49 Claudius banished the Jews from R
ome, because they were restless under the instigation of a certain Chrestos (as
reported by Suetonius). If the Apocalypse was known in Rome in 47, it is quite
understandable that some of the Jews were in a revolutionary mood, not only beca
use of the taxes and the worship of the emperor instituted by Gaius, but also be
cause they were instigated to set fire to Rome and to refuse to pay the taxes.
Those who obey the laws of Rome are threatened with being condemned by Jesus and
being tortured with fire (Apoc. 14:10) and with tumors (16:2). There was a cam
paign of civil disobedience and terrorism severely repressed by Claudius. This
repression created more fervour for rebellion, because the rebels had to avenge
the death of some of them, condemned to decapitation by Claudius. It appears th
at Suetonius is right when he calls the instigator Chrestos.
There is a satirical play by Seneca about Claudius titled Divi Claudii Apokoloky
ntosis, Claudius transformation into a pumpkin . No transformation into any pumpkin
figures in the play and the title is probably alluding to Claudius helpless atte
mpt at pronouncing the word Apokalypsis. The Christian pamphlet Apocalypse with
its prophecies of doom against Rome and the emperor was the talk of the town, a
nd in the ensuing persecutions of the Christians, the Romans will give proof of
a remarkable familiarity with the Apocalypse s threats and predictions.
According to Suetonius, a senator said to Nero that he wished that Rome would no
t be destroyed during his reign. Nero answered that he would welcome its destru
ction, because he hated the small streets of ancient Rome and wanted to reconstr
uct the city. So one can suspect that talk of the destruction of Rome was in the
air at that time, and that the prophecy was known and talked about. Afterwards
Nero did not hesitate to arrest the Christians as guilty for the fire of Rome.11
The way he tortured them was an obvious allusion to the treatment which the Apo
calypse had in store for the emperor: he let them bum like living torches, and l
et them face the lions while themselves sewn into animals skins. Anybody could u
nderstand the allusion. That the Romans were capable of such cruel practical pu
n on the rebels own Apocalyptic predictions, was demonstrated a few years later w
hen rebellious Jerusalem was conquered by Titus: then also, the rebel leader was
given exactly the same treatment which Jewish Apocalyptic literature had promis
ed the Roman commander.
A very important indication is the reference to the hated taxes. The saints sho
uld persevere and die (14:12), and refuse to pay taxes: they should not take the
mark of the emperor s name, which is on the coins (cf. 13:17: nobody can sell or
buy, if he does not carry the name of the beast). There can be no doubt that th
e Apocalypse instigates the Christian Jews to civil disobedience, even when they
are sentenced to death. As Suetonius writes, Christ is the instigator of the t
roubles in Rome; the reason is his hatred for him who stands in the way of his c
oming in glory to rule over the whole world (2 Thess. 2:1-12). Claudius was radi
cal in the repression. By capital sentence and by banishment (49 AD) he tried t
o keep the troubles under control.
The Jews, especially the Christian ones, did not have the sense of humour that c
haracterized the Roman attitude regarding the deification of the Roman Emperors.
If one reads Seneca, one sees how Romans were full of mockery about these deif
ications. Claudius is ridiculed as he wants to become a god, and finally condem
ned to be a slave, and the fundamental reason is that tam facile homines occideba
t quam canis adsidit (Seneca: he killed as easily as a dog urinates ). This serious
ness in their opposition to the Emperor s deification makes them susceptible to ca
lls for rebellion, like the one launched by Chrestos. But they get killed or ex
iled by Claudius, the Beast.
It is remarkable that Paul in his letter to the Romans (Ro. 13) tries to convinc
e them to be submissive to the authorities and to pay the taxes (13:6). This le
tter should have been written in 56 AD, shortly after Claudius death (54 AD). As
Seneca suggests, the young Nero inspired a new hope in Rome, also for the Jews,
who started returning there. This does not mean that the plans for the final c
onfrontation had been abandoned: For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven aga
inst all wickedness (Ro. 1:18). in the meantime Paul was in Rome as a (well-treate
d) prisoner. Probably Peter also came to Rome and was there during the fire.
If the Christian Jews set the fire to Rome, this had to be prepared by Paul and
Peter in great secret. In Thess. 2:1-12, Paul alludes to the thesis of the Apoc
alypse that Jesus cannot come back because he is impeded by the Antichrist, viz.
the Roman Empire; and that his coming must be preceded by rebellion. But the e
nd will come soon, during Paul s own lifetime. The strategy had been changed: the
y would pay taxes and honour Caesar; but this did not change the fundamental att
itude and the hostility against Rome, which was still to be destroyed.
If the hypothesis is accepted that Nero and some senators knew that the destruct
ion of Rome was predicted, as Suetonius suggests, then of course during the ten
years of Nero s reign, there was some rumour against the Christians, who were pers
ecuted. The 1st Letter of Peter (1 Petr. 3:13-17; 4:11-19; 5:9) mentions these
difficulties between 60 and 64 AD. Peter too tries to obtain obedience to the e
mperor (1 Petr., 2:13; 4:17). It is easy to distinguish two periods after 45 AD
, the presumed date of publication of the Apocalyps: the first one a period of t
roubles in Rome and elsewhere till the banishment of the Jews in 49 AD; a second
period (54-64 AD) when Peter and Paul preach submission to the Law, announcing
that the end is coming soon. In the meantime the Christians have difficulties a
nd are criticized, they have to behave prudently, they should not provoke reacti
ons: that is the doctrine of Peter and Paul, in contradiction with the doctrine
of the Apocalyps.
The contradiction between the Apocalypse (not to pay taxes, to die instead) and
the directives of Paul and Peter is a normal evolution: when there is sufficient
repression, the outward behaviour normalizes, though the inner rage remains. I
f we suppose that Jesus (active) life ended around 54 AD, along with his fanatic
revenge against the emperor, who impeded his coming in glory, it is possible tha
t Peter and Paul took charge of the Christian community and gave it a new direct
ion. And because it could not be a long time before Jesus would come back ( the t
imes are now decisive , Paul writes to Timothy (2 Tim. 3:1)), it was not very usef
ul to sacrifice a number of lives by objecting to the taxes and resisting the ne
w emperor openly. So they preferred the secret subversion: Rome had to be destr
oyed, because it impeded the second coming of Jesus. It has been forgotten for t
oo long that the first Christians were true anarchists.
The period of ten years before the fire was one of caution. After the fire, the
opposition to Rome of the entire Jewish community was at its apogee: in 66 AD t
here was a revolution in Jerusalem, and in Alexandria thousands were killed. Un
til 135 AD, the revolutionary fire would rage in Jerusalem.
Given the opposition between the doctrine of Peter and Paul and the doctrine of
the Apocalyps, it would be extremely improbable that the Apocalyps came later th
an the letters of Paul and Peter. In the year 90 AD the taxes were more than 50
years old, the worship of the emperor was an old tradition; the indignation cou
ld not be so fresh as when Gaius prepared his statue for the temple in Jerusalem
and when the commercial taxes were newly imposed. The real sequence is: indign
ation, troubles, revolution, repression, outward submission, inner rage, secret
subversion. It fits the developments between 40 and 64 AD.
The Apocalypse is therefore the first document of Christianity. In the light of
these problems one can ask if the logion of Jesus: Give unto Caesar what is Caesa
r s , has not been added later as a part of the Church s strategy to convince the Chri
stians to pay taxes, or to convince Rome that they were no longer subversive.
The consequences of this change in perspective are important. The Apocalypse is
the bridge between the real public life of Jesus and the letters of Paul, and l
ater the Gospels as texts. That the cited logion is probably a later addition i
s strongly supported by the fact that in the trial of Jesus before Pilate the ac
cusation against Jesus is: that he preaches revolution against Caesar, that he f
orbids to pay taxes and that he pretends to be the Messiah, the King. And this
is confirmed by the Apocalypse, which incites to revolution against Rome and Cae
sar in order to burn Rome, and which forbids to pay taxes (to take the mark of t
he beast). Luke (22:2) simply mentions the accusations, but not the acts of Jes
us that might have led to them. When the Gospels are published, Jesus is presen
ted as a taxpayer and a loyal subject of Caesar, and this is in accordance with
the official strategy of the Church (Rom., 1 Petr.).
Given the evidence of the Apocalypse and of the allegation during Jesus trial, we
have to admit that the historical Jesus did indeed preach the revolution agains
t Rome and forbade at least his own disciples to pay taxes. In the Gospel discu
ssions about the subject are mentioned (Mk. 12:13-17). While the anti-Roman thru
st may have been secondary as long as Jesus lived in the Jewish milieu in Palest
ine, it came centre-stage when he fled his homeland after the resurrection and f
ound himself constantly exposed to the Pagan culture that was so repulsive to hi
s Jewish sensibilities.
3.10. The author of the Apocalypse
The Apocalyps is certainly the most primitive document. Is it also a paraphreni
c document?
The general opinion of the exegetes about the Apocalyps is that it is a literary
work of the genre of the apocalyptic literature (Ezekiel, Daniel, Henoch, etc.)
, which contains prophecies about the end of time, predicting catastrophes, with
visions, angels and cryptic symbolic expressions, not always well understood to
day.12
We may at once remark that this is an improper use of the term literary genre . On
e could call the poem, or the novel, or the comedy, literary genre . But Apocalypse
does not belong in a formal classification of literature, and refers to the cont
ents. In different genres, you could have an apocalyptic play, an apocalyptic p
oem, etc.
The psychopathological examination of the texts leads to conclusions far removed
from current theological opinions. Ezekiel, Daniel and Henoch were mental pati
ents, schizophrenics and paraphrenics, showing all typical symptoms of these dis
eases: receiving revelations, seeing visions, believing they are the elected one
s, predicting catastrophes. The apocalypse is not an exception. Characteristic
of the Apocalypse is the megalomaniac atmosphere, the horrible aggressiveness a
nd the boundless narcissism. Symptomatic are the loud voices, crying; symbolic,
idiosyncratic, pedantic expressions; zoopsy (seeing monsters and beasts); the h
allucinatory state; the sense of impending catastrophe, the typical systematic e
laboration of assimilated earlier predictions (Henoch, Ezekiel and Daniel had. b
een digested into the delusion).
The abnormality of the mental processes can easily be shown. A number of expres
sions are inspired by an enormous Ego-inflation: glory and power to him, omnipot
ence, everybody will see his power, he will destroy the earth and all peoples, h
e is the Son of Man. This is coupled with an enormous narcissism: all will ador
e him, everybody has to sing his glory because he alone has power and wisdom (5:
12), he alone is worthy to receive the glory, only the Lamb is worthy to open th
e book with the seven seals, he is the king of kings, the Lord of Lords.
All events are cosmic: stars fall, angels occupy the four corners of the earth,
events are accompanied by thunder and lightning and earthquakes; all voices are
loudly crying, some with the voice of the thunder.
All punishments are terrible: blood streams abundantly, Rome will be destroyed i
n one hour or one day (18:8-9), all kings, all soldiers, all their horses will b
e eaten by the birds, the beast will be burnt alive (that is why Nero burnt the
Christians alive), all others will be killed by Christ himself (19:17-21), all l
iving beings in the sea will die (16:3), etc.
All these catastrophes are the effect of God s anger. Rome is described as the gr
eat whore and the Roman Empire is identified with Satan himself. All this anger
, all these catastrophes are due to the fact that all others are supposed to be
the enemies of Jesus (the majority of humanity did not even know who Jesus was),
and are therefore guilty and worthy to be destroyed. Only those who are the el
ected ones will reign with the Christ for 1000 years. Those who died, will resu
rrect when Jesus comes back to reign for 1000 years (cfr. also the prediction of
Paul: 1 Thess. 4:13-19).
This immense, irrational aggressiveness is a consequence of the enormous inflati
on of the Ego. The pathological character of these mental processes is well-kno
wn. The hypothesis that the source of this text is a megalomania cal paraphreni
c is highly plausible, if one considers the original part of the content, as dis
tinct from the assimilated part. The latter consists of a few borrowed notions,
esp. the notion of the resurrection: according to Ezekiel (37:1-14), the bones
of the slain warriors of Israel shall be raised from the grave, and covered with
sinews and muscle and skin, and quickened with breath. As the Jehovah s witnesse
s correctly maintain, the Bible does not teach an afterlife but a physical resur
rection; the Apocalypse specifies that it will take place at the time of Jesus se
cond coming, and will only concern the saved ones.
It deserves repetition that among religious believers, there are a great many ta
kers for the prophetic pretences of such revelations. Schizophrenics such as He
noch and Ezekiel, both authors of apocalyptic writings, have the revelation to b
e elected by God, they understand suddenly all mysteries of the world, they trav
el from one end of the world to the other, they are always at the centre of imme
nse events, they predict catastrophes. The delusions of paraphrenics are genera
lly more systematically evolved, but share often the same cosmic dimensions. As
most of these delusions are religious and genetic, it is clear that their conte
nt was ready to be believed as the word of God. Mysterious, grandiose, futurist
ic, these revelations seemed to contain higher divine truth and so became the st
uff of Sacred Scripture. In fact they were reports of the schizophrenic or prap
hrenic delusions of mental patients.
Let us now take a closer look at the condition of the author of the Apocalypse.
A precise examination of the style of the Apocalyps reveals: 1) a typical Jewis
h, non-Greek, style, including an excessive use of conjunctions and a scarce use
of particles; 2) a non-Johanneic style, as compared with the Gospel and the Epi
stles of John. The author is definitely non-Greek, probably Jewish, and definit
ely not John the Evangelist.
In Apo.1:9, John has a vision and hears a voice and then he sees an angel, who d
ictates to him what was earlier called the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God
gave him to show his servants what must soon take place (Apo. 1:1). In john s narr
ative, there is a direct communication of the visions. According to our criteri
a, and going by the factual validity of the angels appearing in other New Testam
ent stories, the angel is only there in order to hide or to embellish the truth.
It is Jesus who speaks and orders to write to the Churches in a typical author
itative style as in the Gospels ( He spoke with authority , say Mt. 7:29, Mk. 1:22,
Lk. 4:32), and with the same expressions: those who have ears to hear , developing t
he same themes: Those who believe in me , I shall come
The other visions are attributed to John, but at the end the angel comes back, a
nd while the angel is speaking Jesus speaks again (Apoc. 21:12) I Jesus, I have s
ent my angel . There is a constant osmosis of the angel and Jesus. These inconsi
stencies together with the recurring observation that the angel is merely there
in order to conceal the truth, lead to the hypothesis, that a secretary just not
ed the visions of Jesus and gave a literary form to them. This scribe could hav
e been John, but that is not certain. These names are sometimes pseudonyms, jus
t, as in the Proto-Gospel of James . Given all these elements, we can formulate th
e hypothesis that the real inspiring author of the Apocalypse was the surviving
Jesus himself in a later stage of his illness. With this hypothesis in mind, th
e Apocalypse, formerly a poorly understood text, becomes a dear manifesto of ear
ly Christianity.
It is quite astonishing that the style of expression of Jesus in the Gospels cor
responds precisely with the style of the expressions of Jesus in the Apocalyps.
In the Gospel, he posits himself as authority: I say to you The same I - style can b
e found in the Apocalypse: I shall give you I know I shall come I shall confess their
names I knock at the door . Other expressions, like: I shall confess their names be
fore my father and the angel (Apo. 3:5); We shall eat together (Apoc. 3,20); I shall
come as a thief (Apo. 3:3), are common to the Apocalypse and the Gospels (Mk. 8:
38; Mt. 10:32; Lk. 9:26; Lk. 12:36; 22:29-30; Jn. 14:23; Mk. 8:38; Mt. 24:42-44;
Mk. 13:33).
Identical is also the egocentric point of view, e.g. in the Gospel: those who rem
ain faithful to me (Jn. 8:31, 12:44); in the Apocalypse: those who remained faith
ful to me (Apoc. 2:3, 2:13, 3:8). The same doctrine with regard to suffering and
death for the faith in Jesus: He who loses his life because of me (Mk. 8:35); Do n
ot fear what you are about to suffer be faithful till death (Apo .2:10; cfr. also
6,11).
The character of the similarities is rather convincing: they are all idiosyncrat
ic features (the egocentric authoritative style, the insistence on faith to Jesu
s till death), not stereotypes or vague generalities. It is difficult to imagin
e that an independent author would have so well crystallized the idiosyncracies
of Jesus in the Gospel and used them so naturally. Thus, the expression: those w
ho have ears to hear is not that frequent in the Gospel (Mt. 13:9; 13:43; Mk. 4:1
2), but here this expression is used quasi-systematically. We cannot suppose th
at the expression was so striking, that an independent author would have imitate
d that expression so systematically.
Another idiosyncratic feature is the insistence that the faithful should lose th
eir lives for Jesus, because the only important thing is the faith in Jesus. A
number of letters of apostles are known; there is not one that is so extraordina
rily filled with allusions to the Gospels and the Old Testament, and none of the
m is so extravagantly characterized by an ego-inflated style. The suspicion tha
t the Gospel and the Apocalyps belong to the same inspiration is therefore well-
founded. One can see clearly that the so-called literary genre hypothesis does
not hold: the Apocalypse is not merely one in a series of books that propagate a
view of the end of time, with prophecies of catastrophes, etc. It is a very pe
rsonal account of the imaginary life of a paraphrenic.
The intertextual elements in the Apocalypse, i.e. the references to other literary
sources, equally provide an indication that Jesus and the seer of the Apocalyps
e are one and the same person. The source of inspiration, apart from the person
al visions, is still the prophetic tradition; but while in the Gospel it was mor
e Henoch and Isaiah, here it is more Daniel and Ezekiel. The theme remains the
Son of Man who shall return to avenge himself because of unbelief and because th
e people had slaughtered him like a lamb.
The Apocalypse seer is already an old hand at hearing voices: Then I had a vision
. I saw a door in heaven standing open, and the voice, loud as a trumpet, which
I had heard speak to me before, called: Come up there, then I shall show you what
must happen after this. (Apo. 4:1)
The central images of the Apocalypse signify the visionary himself (a self-centr
edness through diverse personae, which is a feature even of ordinary dreams), in
his self-pity and vengefulness, in his frustrated and hurt narcissism: the slau
ghtered Lamb which will be glorified into an object of universal adoration, and
the woman in labour pains, who is about to give birth to the Son of Man.
The enemy of the woman in labour is the Beast, i.e. all worldly rulers who usurp
the Son of Man s God-given rights, and esp. the Roman Empire, which divine interv
ention is about to destroy under the rule of the next emperor. In these pages o
f fire and brimstone, the paraphrenic delusion has been cosmically elaborated wi
th unbridled visions of catastrophe, full of horrible revenge and hatred. The f
act that the seer s own enemy, the Beast, is the enemy of the woman in labour pain
s, gives a clue to the identity of the woman, viz. the seer himself. This trans
-gender self-image can be compared with Freud s famous case of Justice Schreber, w
ho thought he would be turned into a woman, get impregnated by a god, and become
the mother of a new human race.
The woman in labour pains is one motif that is not represented in the Gospel, bu
t of which the appearance in the Apocalypse fits a logical development. The ful
l confidence of being the Son of Man, soon to be covered with glory, has, after
the shock of surviving his glorious execution, and after years of impotent anger
 against the world s skepsis, evolved into a vision of the near future, when he wi
ll become the Son of Man, after the ongoing painful stage of expectation, descri
bed as labour pains. After he survives the crucifixion, his Kingdom does not st
art. Instead of shattering his delusion, this gets explained, and the Kingdom i
s put off to a later date. We see this in all the predictions of the end of the
world: for every failed prediction, there is an explanation that prevents utter
disillusionment, and the believers persist in their slightly amended expectatio
n, in spite of all the refutations of their belief by reality. In people afflict
ed with a delusion, this capacity of rationalizing experiences that are logicall
y disturbing to the delusion, is virtually unassailable.
One could characterize the Apocalyps as the hymn of the wrath, of the anger and
the hate, exactly the contrary of the (later) doctrine of Jesus in the Gospels.
Nothing in the Apocalyps is love or mercy, all is self-glory, revenge, wrath, p
ower, cruelty. The Apocalypse is in stark contradiction with the more theologic
ally elaborated books of the New Testament, esp. John and Paul. In those books
, Jesus has been humanized in order to make him more acceptable to the faithful.
The hypothesis that the Apocalypse is Jesus own swan song, is based on psycho-pat
hological parallelism, taking into account the time factor: further development
of the delusion into a form at once more extreme and yet incorporating a comprom
ise with unresponsive reality, viz. the fact that his glorification as the Son o
f Man has so far failed to come about. This hypothesis has the immense advantag
e that it requires only one theory to explain both the Gospel and the Apocalypse
, not the string of dozens of little separate explanations which the theologians
offer. In fact, it is the first-ever coherent explanation of the Apocalypse, a
text with which the theologians have never come to terms.

Footnotes:
1For an assessment of Nietzsche s view of Christianity, in the light of recent Bib
le scholarship, see Henk Van Gelre: Friedrich Nietzsche en de Bronnen van de Wes
terse Beschaving (Dutch: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Sources of Western Civilizat
ion ), vol. 1, Ambo, Baarn 1990.
2Sigmund Freud: Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlung
en (1939), republished in vol. 13 of The Penguin Freud Library.
3Ch. Binet-Sanglé: La Folie de Jésus (French: Jesus Madness ), Paris 1908-12; W. Hirsch:
Religion und Civilisation, Munchen 1910., G.L. de Loosten: Jesus Christus vom S
tandpunkt des Psychiaters (German: Jesus Christ from the Psychiatrist s Viewpoint ),
Bamberg 1905.
4A. Schweitzer: Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu, Tubingen, 1913.
5Excerpts in Elke Schlinck-Lazarraga: De vraag naar de psychischgeestelijke gezon
dheidstoestand van Jesus (Dutch: The question of Jesus psycho-mental health conditi
on ), in Teksten Kommentaren en Studies, December 1981.
6Hermann Werner: Der historische Jesus der liberalen Theologie - ein Geisteskrank
er? , in Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift 22 (1911), p.347-390, quoted in Elke Schlinck
-Lazarraga: op.cit.
7With these quotes from John s Gospel, it should be kept in mind that they are par
t of the most theological Gospel, the one most unscrupulously tailoring stories to
fit the emerging Christian theology and also the Church s missionary programme, w
hich rejected Christianity s Jewish roots and therefore exaggerated the opposition
between Jesus and the Jews Nonetheless, even if John concocted these incidents, t
his proves that he expected his audience to accept them as realistic.
8The classic on the magician s role which Jesus played or was considered playing,
and at the same time a very informative work on the role of the missionary/polem
ical context in which the Gospels were written, is Morton Smith: Jesus the Magic
ian, Victor Gollancz Ltd., London 1978.
9In Anglo-Saxon textbooks of psychopathology, paraphrenia will be subsumed-under
the larger category paranoia. This should, according to Dr. Somers, be conside
red a recrudescence and loss of an essential distinction.
10The number 666 has also some numerical properties, e.g. it is the triangular n
umber of 36 (= sum of all numbers from 1 to 36); but then, many numbers have rem
arkable properties, so this is not sufficiently distinctive. Incidentally, Jesu
s name in Greek, Iesoys, has the numerical value 888; and 8 was a sacred number f
or early Christians, signifying the eighth day , the completion of the 7-day Creati
on, viz. the Resurrection. See C.F. Dumermuth: Number Symbolism: a Biblical Key , i
n Asia Journal of The Theology, 1/1990.
11Suetonius mentions the measures against the Christians among Nero s praiseworthy
reforms, and calls this sect a new superstition involving the practice of magic .
12E.g. M.J. Lagrange: Le Messianisme chez les Juifs, Paris 1909; id.: Le Judaism
e avant Jésus-Christ, Paris, 1931; and E. Schillebeeckx: Jesus, het verhaal van ee
n levende, Brugge 1975.
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CHAPTER FOUR
REACTIONS TO PSYCHO-CHRISTOLOGY
4.1. Catholic reactions
In Flanders, the Catholic-dominated press has kept very quiet about Dr. Somers ap
proach to Jesus. Most theologians have kept mum. The Vatican has not reacted.
It had put some Jesuits to work on this theory, but they did not publicly speak
out. Perhaps they are aware of its explosive potential. Perhaps they are, on
the contrary, not worried at all, because earlier psychopathological studies abo
ut Jesus had also not toppled Christianity.
But those earlier theories had been put forward by staunch atheists who had been
a bit intemperate and triumphalistic in the presentation of their case, which m
ade it sound less scientific and less convincing. Moreover, psychology then was
not what it is now. Then, there was an Albert Schweitzer to write an in-depth r
eply which had convinced many believers that there was nothing to worry, that th
is was just another of those far-fatched hypotheses that anti-Christian skeptics
used to come up with.1 But now, no man of the stature of Albert Schweitzer has
come forward with a reply. And this time, the psycho-analysis of Jesus is being
presented sobrely by a man who was a faithful servant of the Church for most of
his life, and who knows not only psychology, in a more advanced form, but also
the philological and theological aspects of Bible research.
A comment on Dr. Somers work was written by the KUL (Catholic University Leuven)
theologian Leo Kenis, who denounced the book as assuming the Bible text to be hi
storical, and as not understanding the Biblical language game, etc.2 A leftist w
eekly has collected a few more reactions, notably those of Prof. Etienne Vermee
rsch, another ex-Jesuit, now staunch opponent of Church and religion; and of Pro
f. Edward Schillebeeckx, the famous Flemish theologian teaching in Nijmegen, Ho
lland. Let us have a brief look at their objections.
1. Paraphrenia does not exist. It is an outdated category in psychopathology, no
t even mentioned in American manuals of psychiatry.
It is a fact that in the US, the paraphrenia syndrome has been subsumed under th
e more general category of paranoia. But in continental Europe, the fine distin
ction between the two is certainly being maintained. Even otherwise, it would o
nly be a change in name-tag: the diagnosis of at least a psychopathological cond
ition of the paranoia family would remain in place. The symptoms remain symptom
s, even if the condition they indicate gets a less precise definition or another
name.
2. This approach forces modern categories on ancient cultural phenomena. What wo
uld now be considered a disease was something divine in those days. Vincent Van
Gogh was considered a madman in his time, but a genius today.
Just like physical diseases have been diagnosed on the leftovers of people who d
ied one hundred or ten thousand years ago, because physical diseases have remain
ed the same all along, mental afflictions can also be diagnosed because they hav
e also remained the same. In fact, terms like epilepsy and paranoia were coined by
Greek doctors, so these diseases were known in their time, and were considered a
s diseases. They were not that precisely defined and only known to very few ini
tiates (not to Jesus audience), but at least they indicate that human psychopatho
logy has not fundamentally changed over the millennia. The fact that the same p
sychological phenomena were interpreted differently, not as disease but as ghost
-possession or god-inspiration, only goes to confirm the thesis that what was de
emed a sign of divinity by Jesus (and other prophets ) followers, may in reality ha
ve been a pathological symptom.
The best proof that the diagnosis remains the same in spite of cultural differen
ces, is the fact that contemporaries of Jesus considered him mentally disturbed.
The pharisees say: Now we know that you are possessed by a devil (John 8:52). A
ccording to the Gospel of the Hebrews, an apocryphal text (i.e. kept out of the
Church canon, not because of unreliability but because of theological inconvenie
nce), Jesus family wants him to get baptized, because they hope that this ritual
may purify him from the impure spirit that troubles him. And the canonical Gosp
els confirm that Jesus own family members considered him mentally afflicted: when
they hear that his public life has started they want to take him back home, beca
use they thought he had gone out of his mind (Mark 3:21). One could ask: but why
have the Gospel editors not scrapped this hint at a mental affliction? The answ
er is that they had to counter precisely this allegation from their audiences, s
o they roundly admitted that people could consider mad what was in fact divine.
As for Van Gogh, if he was a mental patient in the 19th century, he would still
have been one today. It so happens that there is a lot of debate about the corr
ectness of the diagnosis of Van Gogh.3 At any rate, his condition did not preven
t him from being a genius in painting. The point is that between functioning no
n-mad people and non-functioning mad people, you have shades of gradual mental a
ffliction, which allow people to be somewhat mad and yet function. This unease
may even act as an incentive to remarkable achievements, like a peculiar inspire
dness in painting, or a kind of charisma in a wandering god-man. Nevertheless,
the revelations such people get, no matter how creatively they integrate them, are
at any rate the products of their own minds, not messages from God.
3. The Bible stories do not give a historical report about Jesus doings and saying
s. Therefore, no diagnosis of a historical character can be extracted from them
.
This stand, taken by modem theologians like Schillebeeckx, is in fact dangerousl
y undermining the foundations of the Christian faith. As Prof. Vermeersch, anot
her ex-Jesuit who renounced Christianity, commented on Prof. Schillebeeckx react
ion: if all these Bible stories are only stories, do you think that the common f
aithful will remain Christians if they are told the truth about these mere storie
s ? The crux of the Christian faith is precisely that God has intervened in histo
ry, by sacrificing his Only-begotten Son and resurrecting Him. If the report in
the Gospels is not history, then the Christian myth is at best of the same orde
r as all the Pagan myths, and Christianity must forsake its claims to uniqueness
and finality.
What is worse from the scholarly angle: this hiding behind the postulated non-hi
storical character of the Gospel stories fatally leaves important features of th
e Gospel unexplained. Quite a few episodes cannot possibly be explained as post-
paschal glorification or any other of the difficult concepts which the exegetes k
eep on inventing. They can only be understood as the report (even if distorted
and reworked) of a historical reality.
Prof. Schillebeeckx has said that Dr. Somers should study literary genres and narra
tivity before he can speak about Gospel interpretation. As a negative authority
argument this is quite ludicrous, since dr. Somers is a Ph.D. in theology with a
lot of research publications to his credit, plus a number of other academic tit
les and achievements besides, and he can talk circles around most theologians, w
ho are a class of specialists not taken seriously by most fellow academics. He
rejects narrativity not because of ignorance, but because on the contrary he has f
ound that classifying the Gospel episodes as different types of narrative does n
ot add up to any explanation and understanding worth the name. In contrast to t
he theologians, a number of psychiatrists have declared they could not find any
fault with Dr. Somers methodology and conclusions.
4.2 Shock and disbelief
For many people, Dr. Somers research findings have come as a shock.
Being shaken in your most cherished beliefs can be hard. The first reaction is
outright rejection. When I was 6 and my sister told me that Saint Nicolas (a sa
int popular in the Low Countries, deformed in America to Santa Claus), the saint
who rides the rooftops on his white horse and brings toys through the chimneys,
does not exist , I was sincerely indignant that she dared to say such scandalous t
hings. My indignation lasted only a minute, I was still young and flexible; but
when you have spent decades nurturing a certain belief and making it the corner
-stone of your world-view and value-system, seeing it swept away can be painful.
Dr. Somers has testified how for him too, discovering the untenability of the be
lief system to which he had devoted his life had been a long-drawn-out painful e
xperience. But what can we do? We all have to grow up one day, and accept that
Saint Nicolas does not exist.
Many Christians have never had any scruples to disrupt the entire culture, not m
erely the beliefs but also the entire way of life, of non-Christians. Actual di
sruption has happened on a large scale in many countries, but verbal blackening
has been truly universal among believing Christians. The Old Testament speaks i
n the most hateful terms about the Gentiles, the New Testament is very harsh on
the Jews and the Pagans. Christians are spoonfed this attitude to unbelievers s
imply by hearing and reading their revered Scriptures.
To Christians shocked by the psychopathological approach to some of their great
religious figures, we may point out that Christian polemists have always accused
a similar prophet, Mohammed, of being something else than a genuine spokesman o
f God. Either he had to be an impostor, who didn t believe in his own prophethood
but fooled the masses. Or he had to be ghost-possessed: that was the perception
of Mohammed s contemporaries, against which he had to defend himself a dozen time
s, and which Christian polemists have borrowed and repeated numerous times.4
Though Mohammed s adversary Utba investigated the matter and gave Mohammed a certi
ficate of complete sanity (according to Muslim sources), Christian polemists hav
e kept on using the charge of a psychopathological disturbance against their arc
h-rival Mohammed until in the 20th century, secular-minded diagnoses of Jesus ma
de them realize that this approach would damage Jesus along with Mohammed.
The campaigns they have waged against the gods and religious figures of non-Abra
hamic religions have been along different lines, but usually just as insulting.
So, Christian polemists are in no position to protest when Jesus is put to psyc
hopathological scrutiny.
Being confronted with facts and insights that jeopardize your cherished beliefs
may be painful for many, but for many others the experience comes as a liberatio
n. Dr. Somers relates how after the publication of his first book on Jesus, he
received a grateful letter from a woman who had been going through divorce proce
edings before a Church Court. For Catholics, divorce is strictly forbidden even
if the marriage is a complete disaster, unless a Church Court declares the marr
iage invalid. For people who believe that Church-ordained morality is based on
a revelation through God s Only-born Son, the thought of trespassing against the d
ivorce prohibition is extremely heavy to bear. In the case of this lady, the new
s that Jesus was just a human person, whose self-proclamation as Son of God was
merely a delusion, reduced the questions of morality she was facing to the human
level where they properly belong. By accepting the failure of her marriage, sh
e would not be trespassing against a divine law, nor would she go to hell.
More generally, the suffocating grip of Church dogma over human decisions has be
en eliminated at the source. Many theologians have tried to amend Church dogma
or Biblical prescriptions by superficially glossing over the implications of suc
h reforms. Either Jesus revelation is forever valid, and then no changes are pos
sible in the entire theological edifice logically constructed upon this basic be
lief; or changes are possible, but then the divine and unique character of Jesus
mission and message is undermined. In Dr. Somers approach, by contrast, we have
a contradiction-free solution: forget the prophets claims of divine authority, fo
rget Jesus claims of a divine nature, and start the human quest for meaning and f
or an ethical code all over on a different basis.
4.3. Prophetic monotheism and Sanatana Dharma
In the past century, people belonging to the Hindu-Buddhist cultural sphere have
 started projecting the characteristics of their own spiritual masters on the mo
notheist prophets. Thus, when Jesus says: The Kingdom of God is among you , meanin
g I, Jesus, am the Kingdom of God , these good-natured Orientals take it to mean: Th
e Kingdom of God is inside of you, waiting to be discovered through meditation. T
hey have started to say that the prophets were a kind of yogis who taught their
followers a way to attain a divine state of consciousness.
In fact, prophecy is radically different from yoga: it means allowing an outside
entity, which in the case of monotheism is called Yahweh/God/Allah, to blow cer
tain consciousness contents into your mind. Consciousness is not turned inward,
but is (or believes it is) communicating with another Being. Moreover, the min
d is not being emptied of its contents and made to rest in itself, as it is in y
oga; on the contrary, it is being filled with a message beyond one s control. The
prophet receives a certain information: prophecy is like talking, though with a
n unusual partner via an unusual channel; but yoga is silence. Lastly, if it is
correct that prophethood is a mental aberration and a delusion, then that makes
it the very antithesis of yoga, which is an undisturbed and realistic awareness
of pure consciousness.
Yoga is not an erratic and disturbing experience which befalls you and drives yo
u to tirades of doom and to outbursts against your fellow men. It is a systemat
ic discipline and makes the practitioner calm and serene. The word yoga means d
iscipline, control (it is also translated as uniting : not the soul with an outside
r called God, but the mind with its object, i.e. concentration). Since its fiel
d of working is consciousness, it is not interested in outward experiences such
as recognition and glorification, or martyrdom. There is nothing dramatic about
yoga, in stark contrast to the dramas enacted and encountered by the prophets.
The most remarkable difference between the prophets discourse and that of the ris
his, is certainly this. The prophets all talk about themselves a lot. They thi
nk they are very special, this one person in this one body is different from the
rest and has an exclusive relationship with the Creator. But the rishis talked
about a universal way, a world order in which we all participate, a state of co
nsciousness we can all achieve. If God is defined as that which transcends all
worldly differences, the One above the Many, then this universalism is far more
divine than the prophets exclusivism.
What Hindus who have been trapped in a sentimental glorification of Jesus and ot
her prophets will have to learn, is that the essence of Hindu Dharma is not toler
ance , or equal respect for all religions , but Satya, truth. The problem with Chris
tianity and Islam is superficially their intolerance and fanaticism. But this i
ntolerance is a consequence of these religions untruthfulness: if your belief sys
tem is based on delusions, you have to pre-empt rational inquiry into it and shi
eld it from contact with more sustainable thought systems. The fundamental prob
lem with the monotheist religions is not that they are intolerant, but that they
are untrue, (Asatya or Anrita).
At this point many Hindus will be sincerely shocked, they will object, and Chris
tian polemists will express the same objection: By denouncing some religions as u
ntrue, you are making a pretentious claim to knowing the ultimate truth. In the c
ase of Christians who know and believe the essence of their religion, this objec
tion is highly insincere, as they themselves are confidently claiming to possess
the ultimate, God-given truth. Otherwise, the objection against absolute truth
-claims may be valid. The point is that by denouncing the defining beliefs of C
hristianity (and similarly, Islam) as untrue, we are not making a claim to know
the final truth. The quest for the final truth remains open. When scientists f
ind that a certain hypothesis is empirically disproves, they henceforth treat it
as untrue and move on to more promising hypotheses; this does not imply a prete
ntious claim to ultimate truth. It is simply that once a belief is found to be
untrue, we should not burden ourselves with it anymore, so that we can keep ours
elves free for something more true.
There are other respects also in which Christianity and Sanatana Dharma are radi
cally different. Christianity worships a suffering convict on the cross, and co
nsequently glorifies suffering. To a woman who was heavily suffering, mother Te
resa wrote: You should be grateful for this suffering. It is Christ s way of kissi
ng you.
In a sense, there is something to it that hardships are the spice of life, they m
ould the perfect man . Even so, the unabashed glorification of happiness is a far
healthier attitude than the glorification of suffering. Hardships will come an
yway, but it is morbid to focus the mind on them unnecessarily. When Christians
hear Chinese people wish each other much wealth or in fact much money , on New Year s
day, they find it rather shocking. When they see depictions of Lakshmi or Ganes
h, with all their opulence and well-being and endless generosity, they find some
thing is very wrong. At any rate, it is a kind of iconography which you will no
t find in any church.
Like Christianity, several Sanatana traditions, esp. Buddhism, focus on sufferi
ng. But they have an unambiguous verdict: suffering is the problem, we offer a
way out of it. The common-sense position of mainstream Hindu sources like the B
hagavad Gita is that suffering is a fact of life, that we have to bravely face i
t, that enduring it makes us stronger; but not that we should glorify it. In Ch
ristianity, a straightforward remedy against suffering is always resented as a b
it selfish; since we are sinners, suffering is what we deserve.
This attitude to suffering is symptomatic of the single most harmful characteris
tic of Christianity: its lack of balance. In traditional Pagan and secular syst
ems of ethics, the principle of the Golden Mean is duly emphasized (Aristotle, C
onfucius, Buddha); by contrast, Christianity fosters a sentimental extremism.
The only Bible books that consist of lucid observations about life, are non-prop
hetic books like Proverbs and Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). They belong to a section
of the Old Testament called Ketuvim, Writings , for which no divine source is claim
ed. Their source is just human and normal, rather like any collection of quotat
ions or Collected Proverbs from the Middle East . These sayings range from the tri
vial and uninspired to the witty and the profound. Some good, some not so good,
a few gems: your average human product. These human sayings have some good adv
ice to offer on how to conduct life; in the prophetic revelations, it is hard to
find any such good advice.
Prophetism has caused innumerable hardships without giving anything valuable in
return. Not one of the valuable things in the cultures dominated by it, can be
traced to their prophetic-monotheistic component. Its source has more often tha
n not been mental darkness. Today, there is no justification for keeping humani
ty in the mental prison of prophetism any longer.

Footnotes:
1A. Schweitzer: Die Psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu (German: The Psychiatric Eval
uation of Jesus ), Tubingen 1913.
2Review of Jezus de Messias, under pseudonym Joris Christiaansen, in Kultuurleve
n, December 1986.
3According to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Van G
ogh really had Ménière s disease, an ailment which can cause hallucinations and a ring
ing in the ear. Perhaps he cut his ear off as a way of relieving this suffering.
But dr. Alan D. Kornblut, chief editor of the Ear, Nose and Throat Journal, rej
ects this diagnosis.
4See Quran 15:6, 23:25, 23:70, 26:27, 34:8, 34:46, 37:36, 44:14, 51:39. 52:29, 6
8:2, 68:51, 81:22. People also call him enchanted , according to Quran 17:47, 25:8
.
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