I am presently in the process of writing a book, which I am calling “The Gospel According to Jesus.” It is the gospel story told from the perspective of Jesus, as a teacher of nonduality. In involves me very slowly studying the Gospel of Mark, both in English translation and the Greek text. Then comparing the passages to parallel accounts in the other gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. This process enables me to see things that I might not ordinarily see, and ponder things that I would not normally ponder.
Recently one passage caught my attention. It is the story that takes place early in Jesus’ ministry where Jesus’ family comes Capernaum to find Jesus and take him home because they thought he had “lost his senses,” as one translation puts it. Today we would say he was mentally ill. A parallel passage in John’s gospel says that “he has a demon and is insane.”
People were saying that Jesus was demon-possessed, which was the explanation in the first century for all sorts of mental and physical illnesses, from schizophrenia to epilepsy. According to the story scribes from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.”
It got me thinking, “Was Jesus mentally ill?”
I am presently in the process of writing a book, which I am calling “The Gospel According to Jesus.” It is the gospel story told from the perspective of Jesus, as a teacher of nonduality. In involves me very slowly studying the Gospel of Mark, both in English translation and the Greek text. Then comparing the passages to parallel accounts in the other gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. This process enables me to see things that I might not ordinarily see, and ponder things that I would not normally ponder.
Recently one passage caught my attention. It is the story that takes place early in Jesus’ ministry where Jesus’ family comes Capernaum to find Jesus and take him home because they thought he had “lost his senses,” as one translation puts it. Today we would say he was mentally ill. A parallel passage in John’s gospel says that “he has a demon and is insane.”
People were saying that Jesus was demon-possessed, which was the explanation in the first century for all sorts of mental and physical illnesses, from schizophrenia to epilepsy. According to the story scribes from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.”
It got me thinking, “Was Jesus mentally ill?”
I am presently in the process of writing a book, which I am calling “The Gospel According to Jesus.” It is the gospel story told from the perspective of Jesus, as a teacher of nonduality. In involves me very slowly studying the Gospel of Mark, both in English translation and the Greek text. Then comparing the passages to parallel accounts in the other gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. This process enables me to see things that I might not ordinarily see, and ponder things that I would not normally ponder.
Recently one passage caught my attention. It is the story that takes place early in Jesus’ ministry where Jesus’ family comes Capernaum to find Jesus and take him home because they thought he had “lost his senses,” as one translation puts it. Today we would say he was mentally ill. A parallel passage in John’s gospel says that “he has a demon and is insane.”
People were saying that Jesus was demon-possessed, which was the explanation in the first century for all sorts of mental and physical illnesses, from schizophrenia to epilepsy. According to the story scribes from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.”
It got me thinking, “Was Jesus mentally ill?” That question came up again in a phone conversation with an old friend who is also a Baptist minister. We went to seminary together. He was saying that he thought a lot of the prophets in the Old Testament were mentally ill. I replied that if they had anti-depressives in biblical times, then we would probably not have half of the Bible. Then we talked about Jesus, and this passage where his family thought Jesus was mentally ill.
This phone conversation was prompted by a blog post that I put on recently entitled “Living in a Philip K. Dick World.” In the piece I said that American politics – especially my political party - has gone crazy. People are believing all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories. I talked about the science fiction writer, Philip K Dick, who likely was mentally ill, but he wrote marvelous stories and novels that contain a lot of spiritual truth. I mentioned George Orwell and compared the political propaganda of our day to his 1984 doublespeak.
That is how I starting thinking about Jesus and mental illness. In the gospel story it says that Jesus was teaching in a house in Capernaum when some members of his family extended family – probably cousins, uncles and aunts – came down from Nazareth to retrieve him and take him home because they thought he was out of his mind. You can just imagine the conversation that his family had that resulted in that decision. When Jesus refused to go with them, but a little later his mother and brothers showed up also concerned about him and wanting to take him home.
So the question is: Was Jesus’ family correct? They knew him better than anyone. They knew him for thirty years, and we don’t know hardly anything about him during those decades. Were there other things that happened in his life that would lead them to think he had psychological problems? Was Jesus mentally ill?
When I ran this idea past my wife, she was not happy that I was even entertaining the idea. She insisted that of course Jesus was not mentally ill – and that was that! And that I should not write or speak on that possibility! End of discussion. Well, obviously, I am not so sure. As I study the life of Jesus, I see him quite stressed on occasion, needing to get off by himself repeatedly just to stay sane. Jesus was very emotional, and some of those emotions were on the edge.
For example there is the scene when he got violent in the temple and drove the moneychangers out with a whip. What would happen if a preacher did something like that today? He would be arrested and probably put in the psych ward for a few days for observation. It would be all over social media. The account of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane says that he was so emotional he sweated drops of blood. That is a known physical condition called Hematohidrosis, which occurs under conditions of extreme physical or emotional stress.
Jesus was an intensely emotional person. Was Jesus mentally ill? Why rule that out? As I quote in my blog, "Twixt truth and madness lies but a sliver of a stream." He certainly was paranoid, thinking the authorities were out to get him. And he was right. Once again, as they say, “It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.” And he did think he was God!
Mentally ill people see the world differently than most people see it. What if what people call “the real world” is the delusion? What if we all are living in a socially accepted delusion and those who see the world differently are the sane ones? That is the premise of most of Philip K Dick’s stories. At the end of my blog I quote Orwell in 1984, “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” That is what I was exploring in the blog post and I am exploring it again here now.
Jesus saw a spiritual reality that no one else could see. He was a minority of one. He saw the physical world as illusion and the Kingdom of God as reality. So do I. So have a lot of spiritually minded people in history. More and more people now are waking up this spiritual reality like never before in history. I am not sure why, although I suspect it is because of the ease of communication. We have access to spiritual teachers and preachers through the internet from all over the world, whereas before the access to such teaching was rare.
For some reason people are waking up to a spiritual reality that only a few mystics and saints and founders of religions used to see. They are seeing the world differently than the common consensus of reality. If they are right that means that 99 percent of the earth’s population are deluded. Jesus called this true reality the Kingdom of God, which he said is within us and around us and is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it. Does that make Jesus mentally ill? Does that make him delusional or insane?
I think not. If it does, then you can count me in the same boat. I think Jesus was the only sane one of this generation. I have to agree with my wife here. From the world’s perspective – and his family’s perspective Jesus was crazy – but in reality he was the sanest of humans. I think there are only a few truly sane people in each generation, although I think that is changing. In one sense the world is getting crazier and nuttier – especially when it comes to politics and religion - while at the same time more and more people are spiritually waking up and becoming whole – becoming sane, you might say.
I interpret Jesus’ ministry of exorcism, which dominates the Gospel of Mark, as Jesus helping people wake up to sanity. That is how I am rendering it in this book. He was not really driving out demons; there are no such spiritual entities. There are no little devils wandering the ether seeking to enter into you and possess you. Demons are the first century explanation for mental illness and some physical illnesses.
In what the Bible describes as “casting out evil spirits” what Jesus was really doing was healing people of mental illness. He was restoring people to wholeness and sanity. He was bringing inner peace to people who were in psychological distress. This is much needed today, which has an epidemic of anxiety and depression and other emotional forms of distress.
It is a misunderstanding of scripture to take it literally and believe in evil spirits, and therefore drive demons out of people, like some preachers and faith healers do today. To tell people that mental illness is caused by demons is religious abuse in my opinion. Mental illness is a physical illness, because the brain is part of the body. Mental illness is a medical problem that needs to be treated medically.
Yet spiritual wholeness can relieve emotional suffering, which is what Jesus was doing. Mental illness is a serious issue these days, and Jesus was addressing emotional suffering in his ministry. What Jesus calls salvation or eternal life or the Kingdom of God, and which others call awakening or enlightenment or liberation – is the wholeness of body, mind and spirit. It is waking up to the reality of our true wholeness, which is peace, shalom.
That doesn’t mean that after seeing the Kingdom, all psychological problems magically disappear. But they will no longer be our issues. They will be the psyche’s issues, and we see that we are not the psyche. Psychological issues may be present to some degree until the psyche dies when the body dies. But entering the Kingdom will alleviate a lot of the suffering associated with them.
When we live out of our divine nature, then the power of the psyche is broken. We are freed from suffering. We see what we really are - that we are not the suffering psyche. We are One with God, the True Self, which is Christ. In that knowledge and awareness is peace. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.” This is the peace of God that transcends human understanding.