The Ministry and Crucifixion of Jesus
A study in Enthusiasm, Envy and Manic-Depression
RAYMOND LLOYD
ARGUMENT
In all probability Jesus Christ was crucified while suffering from apsychosis, from a total loss of mood control known as a manic reaction.The following essay is taken up for the most part in adducing theevidence for such a hypothesis.This particular manic-depressivepsychosis would seem to have been generated over the long term byother people's envy of the ability and goodness of Jesus (and, above all,of the enthusiasm enhancing these characteristics), and by the lack onthe part of Jesus of the emotional and social wherewithal to coperealistically with this envy. During the potential healing crisis which apsychosis may represent, Jesus began unconsciously to assert himselfto something like his inherent stature, to assume a Son of God authoritywhich a very large number of people have since attributed to him ashis due. At the time, this self-assertion was out of touch with socialand political reality. Whether eventually he would have obtained theemotional insight necessary to exploit his great gifts in society withoutstress is something we cannot know, because the psychosis was interrupted by the crucifixion. To persons who consider Jesus only as theSon of God, these unrealised possibilities may not matter. In a secularage we may nevertheless do well to consider more openly, with a viewto eventual catharsis, the type of human envy, which drastically cutshort such an outstanding life.
1. INTRODUCTION
The possibility that Jesus became psychotic was suggested initially by the juxtaposition in the Synoptic Gospels of two unusual incidents, the curse on a fig tree for not bearing fruit in advance of the season, and the physical disruption of the moneychangers' activities in the Temple. On further examination the hypothesis was borne out in three ways, by the straightforward description of Jesus’ character and activities, by striking parallels in the later Marcan record with the classical symptomatology of a manic-depressive reaction, and by a psychodynamic analysis of the teachings of Jesus, both in particular and taken as a whole.
The first two of these three lines of evidence will be examined in the sections entitled 'The Personality of Jesus' and 'The Psychosis of Jesus'. The third aspect of the evidence will be given under the heading 'A Psychodynamic Interpretation', and that will be followed by a section entitled 'Towards an Existential Understanding' which will attempt to see from the perspective of Jesus himself whether there were other courses of action available in the family, social and political circumstances of his time. To begin with, several points should be made with regard to methodology, both in psychodynamics and New Testament studies.
This essay, under the title Cross and Psychosis, appeared in 1970 in FAITH and FREEDOM Vol 24 Nos 70-71, then published at Manchester College Oxford England. Raymond Lloyd read philosophy, politics and economics at Exeter College Oxford where he graduated in 1956. He later became deeply interested in problems of human behaviour. From 1961 (to 1980) he was on the staff of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at its headquarters in Rome. At this stage (in February 2000) the only changes to the original essay have been minor ones in style and paragraph layout.
Psychodynamics
The particular hypothesis put forward here may be original, and it aims also to be comprehensive, but this kind of inquiry has a long, if interrupted, history. That Jesus was psychologically different has been suspected by many people, explicitly by his own family and many of his contemporaries and implicitly by modern theologians such as Professor Rudolf Bultmann who, in his 1961 Heidelberg lecture translated in Braaten and Harrisville's The Historical Jesusand the Kerygmatic Christ, acknowledges as certain that Jesus suffered the death of a political criminal, and states that, as this death can scarcely be understood as an inherent and necessary consequence of his activity, 'we may not veil from ourselves the possibility that he suffered a collapse'.
More particularly there were several books written on the psychology of Jesus, in the early years of this century, by doctors such as de Loosten, Binet-Sangle and Hirsch, stating in general that Jesus suffered from paranoia. The authors, however, wrote with two disadvantages. First, they were out of touch with contemporary New Testament scholarship, and so based their diagnosis primarily on the questionably historical 'I am' discourses of St. John's Gospel. Such evidence was effectively refuted by Albert Schweitzer in the dissertation he wrote for his medical doctorate in 1913, The PsychiatricStudy of Jesus. Secondly, these doctors, and Schweitzer himself, were writing at a time when not only psychoanalysis, but even systematic clinical descriptions of disturbed emotional states, were in their infancy. Thus, much of Schweitzer's psychiatric evidence for refuting the diagnosis of paranoia was later in effect discounted by Dr. Winfred Overholser, in his otherwise sympathetic foreword to the second English translation of Schweitzer's thesis published in 1948.
As we shall see later, Schweitzer himself may have come nearer the truth in pointing out that the Gospel record is probably best understood in the light of Jesus’ apocalyptic expectations, but without Schweitzer realizing that these might signify a manic reaction. Other German theologians had been troubled by the ecstatic nature of these expectations, particularly Oskar Holtzmann, whose War Jesu Ekstatiker? was published in 1903, but he could bring only ethical and not psychological tools to their analysis. Nor has there been much serious psychological study since, and this perhaps for three reasons. First, until a short time ago, modern theologians had shown a singular lack of interest in the historical Jesus, in preference for the Christ of the Kerygma; and while a new quest has recently begun, the idea of studying personality has usually been considered, in the words of Dr James M. Robinson, as notbeing, a factor of real relevance to theology today'. Second, the practice of psychoanalysis, which can certainly throw new light on the subject, has been limited to a surprising degree to persons brought up in a Jewish milieu, who either know little, or are not interested, or are too tactful to throw light on the ethico-emotional basis of the teachings and life of the founder of Christianity. And third, to anticipate, manic-depressive psychosis itself has not received as much attention from analysts as neurosis or paranoid schizophrenia, partly because manic-depressive psychosis usually clears itself up spontaneously (if often superficially), and partly because analysts, in their capacity as researchers and scientists, tend to possess personalities out of tune with the manic-depressive.
This bring us to a second point in psychodynamics: are labels such as 'paranoid' or 'manic-depressive' really useful, as applied to Jesus or anyone? If they are taken to mean states completely distinct from each other and from normality, such labels are not useful. Rather, the various psychological disturbances are very probably successive lines of retreat after normal methods of coping have broken down, so that a person may fall back successively on neurosis, manic-depressive psychosis, and schizophrenia, each line of retreat coinciding with emotional patterns of infancy, but with the particular line along which an individual retreats during psychosis usually having been pre-selected as emotionally the most congenial during earlier periods of lesser non-psychotic stress. But, even with this qualification, categories of psychological types and disturbances are still useful, because there seem to be some ways of rationalizing and idealizing the emotions which are open either exclusively or typically to the manic-depressive or cycloid, but not to the schizophrenic or schizoid. As will be shown later, the general tenor of the idealizations in the Gospels would classify Jesus as a manic-depressive. But what is also important is that the quality of idealization depends on the level of an individual's intelligence and the sophistication of family or social ethics. In the case of Jesus both his personal intelligence and contemporary Jewish ethics were at a very high level, which is perhaps the basic reason why so many have been unable to grasp, or have refused to acknowledge, that Jesus might have become psychotic.
A third question, which may be raised in the field of psychodynamics, is whether psychological labels can legitimately be applied to the dead. In the sense that, say, the 'mad' George III is not around for doctors to test the diagnosis of porphyria recently suggested by Dr. Richard Hunter and Dr. Ida Macalpine, then – despite the record of his urine samples - there will be a smaller number of persons than otherwise who think that this hypothesis throws light on eighteenth-century political history. Also the main purpose of psychodynamics is to test and retest observations with a living person, inthe hope that their validity will enable him eventually to come to better terms with his emotional self. But psychiatrists who are in principle against using analysis in history are both poor historians and poor analysts - poor historians because the fascination of history is to know why things happen (and here the new studies of personal behaviour may throw as much light on political events as do economics and sociology), and poor analysts because the most meaningful understanding of emotional disturbance can be gathered primarily from what a person says, whether viva voce or, as in the case of Jesus, recorded in 1900-year-old historical documents. Moreover, with regard to Jesus, the psychodynamics of a historical figure are far from being an academic subject, because his ethical and spiritual teachings are a live issue for many people and institutions today. So it is imperative for us to examine the emotional origins of those teachings, whether or not we come to the conclusion that he was fully integrated, normal, or latently psychotic or, as is argued in this essay, that he actually underwent a psychosis.
The last point on psychodynamics to be made at the outset is whether or not a psychosis is a bad or unhealthy thing. In the absolute moral sense, there is nothing discreditable in a psychosis, for a person isunlikely to transgress the moral law any more or less than he has done in a non-psychotic state (except perhaps where he is subjected to new kinds of provocation and restraint). But in the social sense, a psychosis is still usually regarded as a bad thing, to a large extent evoking the kind of fear or envy, which is produced by any other kind of non-conforming behaviour. Whether it is absolutely a bad thing socially depends on whether or not a society is itself already like a plane off course and whether (to continue a parable of Dr Ronald Laing’s) a psychotic breaking out of formation in such a society would be considered by an ideal observer to be trying to get back on course or breaking further away. If the society itself is off course, a psychotic may have a sociobiological function that we have not realized, the manic inparticular being the psychological type able to bend events to better or worse social purposes after the enthusiasm of others to tackle genuine problems has long drained away. It may indeed be partly anunwillingness deliberately to break out of social formation which is delaying a contemporary reappraisal of the historical Jesus in the light of psychodynamics, for many people already realize that there are serious emotional contradictions in the Gospel portrait. Thus when Canon Ronald Preston, in the first of his two essays inthe 1966 Vindications, states that 'there is force in the old contention that if Jesus was not right he was either mad or bad', he may unwittingly be perpetuating the widespread and understandable social fear lest the psychotic in fact be both right and good. As we may see in this essay, Jesus was very probably all three.
But whatever their moral excellence or social function, there is no point in pretending that latent or actual psychotics represent personality ideals for a healthy civilization. Unfortunately too many people still get lost in their psychoses or, because alternatives do not exist or are financially or socially too costly, people are dragged out by drugs and other treatment and are put back (or have to go back) into essentially the same family and social conditions that produced the breakdown. It may therefore be largely a matter of chance whether a person can win through after a psychosis to full emotional maturity and integration and, if he is articulate, advance our knowledge of the human condition. This seems to have been the case with many saints who after ecstasy went through a long dark night of the soul, or, very possibly, some degree of manic-depressive psychosis. With Jesus, a potential healing crisis was cut short by the crucifixion: nevertheless a psychodynamic and existential study may yet enable us to perceive more accurately the emotional and social realities which are necessarily encountered by teachings such as those of the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God.
New Testament Studies
Within the limits of this article we cannot summarize or assess the past hundred years of New Testament studies with regard to the chronology, historicity and originality of the teachings and actions of Jesus. But the general view of the Gospels today, of the Synoptics as well as John, is that they are primarily a theological proclamation rather than a chronological record. This emphasis is not disputed, but the one does not exclude the other. The point to be made here is that the Synoptic Gospels, especially from the transfiguration on, show an amazing coincidence with a person's psychodynamic development, which would give renewed credence to the earlier view of their being some kind of chronological record. Indeed, there are independent pieces of evidence to support this argument, such as comparisons with the Mishnah, local topography, and a series of quotations (which will be found typical of manic-depressive recall and idealization) from the readings of the Law and the Prophets which, according to the triennial cycle of such readings, would have been made on the Sabbaths in the two months just preceding Passover in Nisan (April).
Because most New Testament scholars today will repudiate totally any chronological approach to the Gospel record, it may be worth our while here, irrespective of attitudes to the main thesis of this essay, to take a critical look at one example of the present historical scepticism, namely the cleansing of the Temple, not least because it would appear from a straightforward reading of Mark 1: 18 (and John 2: 17) that it was this action which led the religious authorities to make away with Jesus.
In the 1963 Pelican commentary on Mark, Professor D. E. Nineham apparently endorses a theory cautiously put forward in 1916 by Professor F. Crawford Burkitt that the cleansing took place, not prior to Passover in April, but in December, at the Feast of Dedication, which commemorated the re-cleansing of the Temple by Judas Maccabaeus in 165 BC. However, in the accounts of both Mark and John, Jesus is described as overturning the tables of the moneychangers, the receivers of the qolbon, or fee for changing other currencies into Temple currency. The only time these persons were allowed within the Temple precincts was to receive the annual pre-Passover Temple tribute enjoined by Exodus 30: 13 which, according to the Mishnah (Shekalim 1: 3) was between 25 Adar and 1 Nisan, that is, the third week before Passover. Jesus must therefore have been in Jerusalem at least fifteen days before his final Passover, and there is nothing in Mark to discount this. The teaching about a final Passover week is deduced from the report in John 12: 1 of the arrival of Jesus in Bethany 'six days before the Passover', and the actual dating of the entry into Jerusalem from 'the next day' in John 12: 12. It is possible, as Professor C. H. Dodd implies, that 'the next day' is a somewhat artificial formula of transition, but in any case the cleansing of the temple in John's account has been separated from the entry into Jerusalem and moved to the beginning of the ministry. There are probably theological reasons for this change, but it could also have been made because John knew that Jesus would not have found the moneychangers in the Temple in the final Passover week. Yet there seems little interest in modern commentaries on how such independent details can explain these and other chronological puzzles: for example, how it is that in Mark 14: 49 Jesus could state that 'day after day' he was in the Temple without the authorities' arresting him, implying that he was there longer than the traditional Passover week.
Generally speaking the view followed in this essay is that of Professor C. H. Dodd, who in Chapter 1 of his New TestamentStudies states that 'there is reason to believe that in broad lines the Marcan order does represent a genuine succession of events, within which movement and development can be traced'. It is possible to follow his argument with Professor Nineham through book, article and footnote, the latter admitting in his Studies in the Gospels that he cannot 'disprove that Mark's order was historical, for there may be arguments quite different from Professor Dodd's for believing that it was'. The hypothesis presented here may be such an argument.