Psychology of Prophets: Who's craziest?

[MikeSun5]

As usual Hans, you bring the goods.

Yet Paul claims no less than to have laid waste to the church. What the hell? In 3 provinces? Working alone and without any real authority? How does he do that? Exactly how delusional is this guy?

Actually, his authority was Jesus. It's pretty clever if you think about it: if someone objects to anything, he can put his hands up and just claim it's not his will, but Jesus'. (to quote an old comedian, "My name's Paul, and this is between y'all.")

So he could have been completely insane, or maybe just a little bit crazy coupled with ergotism? It's ironic you mentioned Paul was at it for 20 years or so, when I actually had just been reading about ergotism the other day. It was an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that mentioned a severe case of ergotism that resulted in hallucinations and daily migranes for 20 years after the initial ergot poisoning! So your ergot hypothesis remains plausible for Paul. Of course, the man had to be incredibly persuasive to get everyone to sign on to his "Jesus-teachings" and not just to label him crazy.

I would guess that since pious figures were so revered back then, most people wouldn't really question people who "had visions" or "received prophecy." I haven't studied extensively, but I do remember that Jewish practices were being suppressed by the rulers of the time. I'd imagine there was some sort of underground movement by the Jews that Paul probably added fuel to.

 

[RebeccaBradley]

I don’t think Paul was crazy--I think he was a clever businessman, with a brilliant grasp of first-century PR. And he was a classic messiah-successor: he was to Jesus as Brigham Young was to Joseph Smith, as Stalin was to Lenin, as the Khalifa was to the Mahdi, as Joshua was to Moses, etc etc.

Here’s how I think it works. A cult-founding messiah doesn’t start out as crazy, but as a charismatic sociopath able to take total control over his followers and build up a profitable organization. However, he (and it is usually a he) gradually loses touch with reality and begins to believe his own hype; he ends up not just crazy, but an actual danger to the organization.

Several things can happen here. The messiah can bring on a disaster and get himself jailed or killed along with so many of his followers that the movement falls apart or self-destructs - think Jonestown, Waco, the Temple Solaire, or the Anabaptists at Munster. OR, as the messiah gets crazier, he may be increasingly sidelined by more businesslike heads in his inner circle, becoming an icon, or figurehead. Think of L. Ron Hubbard, drug-addicted and nutty as a fruitcake in his latter years, sidelined to a Scientology compound in California by an inner circle of committed young Scientologists, who began taking over in the 1970s.

A third way is for the messiah (now crazy) conveniently to die or get himself martyred in such a way that the organization can rationalize his loss and survive without him. This works best if a hardheaded successor (often the messiah’s chief sidekick or “business manager”) can emerge from the inner circle and assume the dead messiah’s authority, but NOT his divinity. That is, the successor carries on in the dead messiah’s name, as chief worshipper and number-one fan. I think Christianity is a good example.

Jesus died a public death, and was buried in a tomb. Epic fail. But his traumatized disciples, suffering from a bad case of denial and cognitive dissonance, denied that he was dead. In fact, they rationalized that his trial and apparent death were all part of a cunning plan--Jesus was not a failure at all, but a huge success. He was the king, just like he said he’d be, but in heaven, not earth. And so the whole enterprise, like the Millerites after the Great Disappointment, intensified efforts to recruit and convert, and morphed into a Jewish cult focused on the afterlife and the Kingdom of Heaven; while the founding messiah syncretized into one of those cyclically-sacrificed-but-regularly-resurrecting god figures that were a common motif in the Middle East; or a just-sleeping-not-dead hero, like Barbarossa or King Arthur or the Hidden Imam.

But the story doesn’t end there. The first rationalizers were the members of his inner circle, including his brother James. They were based in Jerusalem, and their focus was the Jews. However, an enthusiastic convert wanted to expand the organization, repackage its appeal, and pass it on to the Gentiles—a move that was not very welcome to the Jerusalem chapter. This was the Apostle Paul, and he was more instrumental in routinizing this common-or-garden little 1st century messiah than any of the original disciples, and more influential in adapting the message. Without him, a tiny Jewish sect in Jerusalem, one among many, could well have died out; when he internationalized it, he saved it.

Makes you wonder what might have happened with, say, the People’s Temple if it hadn’t imploded so early in its life-cycle. As years passed, the inner circle or a routinizing successor may have taken over as Jones slowly killed himself with drugs; and the People’s Temple may have become just another harmless weirdo sect, instead of a byword for suicidal fanaticism. And in 50 years...perhaps a perfectly respectable religion, with Jones fondly remembered as the revered founder.

 

[Delvo]

I know very little about the dozen prophets with books near the end of the Old Testament, but my impression is that most of them talked mostly about either relatively mundane stuff from living life in this world, or common standard religious ideas about God and morality and such. If so, then the one that stands out from the group is Daniel, who seems to have been writing his LSD trips. Babbling about stuff that doesn't make sense and isn't connected to anything in the real world in any way, but acting like it's all urgently important to everybody whether they know it or not so they all need to listen to the raving, is just about the quickest way to make sure everyone around you thinks "CRAZY!" as soon after seeing/hearing you as possible. I don't even get why that wasn't the immediate reaction to him even back then, unless his symptoms developed gradually after years of normal behavior.

And Josiah or a priest working for him seems to have invented Deuteronomy, while claiming to have discovered it somewhere. That book is mostly a list of those famous silly old laws, so I guess that makes him some kind of control freak, in fact apparently the original control freak who began the whole control freak streak in Judaism, although I don't know the clinical term for control freaks.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Actually, his authority was Jesus. It's pretty clever if you think about it: if someone objects to anything, he can put his hands up and just claim it's not his will, but Jesus'. (to quote an old comedian, "My name's Paul, and this is between y'all.")

1. I'm talking before Paul's conversion.

2. He says he persecuted (or depending on how you translate that word, prosecuted) the church and laid waste to it. That takes a bit more authority than "because my heretical imaginary rabbi told me to." A one-man inquisition strolling into town and starting to root out a heresy nobody else had heard about, should eventually raise a few eyebrows. You'd get people asking "who the heck is this guy?"

3. In 3 provinces? That takes a lot more manpower than 1 guy, regardless who he has as an imaginary friend.

4. In Samaria, Judaea and Galilee? Samaria and Judaea were at each other's throat over religion, kinda like the catholics and huguenots in 16'th century France. Imagine a rabbi strolling into Teheran and starting to do his own inquisition. That's kinda the lack of authority that Paul would have there. That's what I'm talking about.

So he could have been completely insane, or maybe just a little bit crazy coupled with ergotism? It's ironic you mentioned Paul was at it for 20 years or so, when I actually had just been reading about ergotism the other day. It was an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that mentioned a severe case of ergotism that resulted in hallucinations and daily migranes for 20 years after the initial ergot poisoning! So your ergot hypothesis remains plausible for Paul. Of course, the man had to be incredibly persuasive to get everyone to sign on to his "Jesus-teachings" and not just to label him crazy

Well, he wrote letters for some 20 years. But according to the traditional chronology, the time between his hallucination+conversion and his last epistle is more like a bit over 30 years. So, yeah, a pretty bad case.

I would guess that since pious figures were so revered back then, most people wouldn't really question people who "had visions" or "received prophecy."

Well, you can see it even in Paul himself. The fact is that a bunch of people were following a guy who got his message in a vision, instead of sending him to a psychiatrist

I haven't studied extensively, but I do remember that Jewish practices were being suppressed by the rulers of the time. I'd imagine there was some sort of underground movement by the Jews that Paul probably added fuel to.

Well, the religious persecutions only started much later for both, but there were a bunch of people who were anywhere between disillusioned and dissatisfied, and it was really the perfect mix for starting a religion... or several. I mean, Mithranism happened at the same time, the solar cult that later Elagabalus would make official is already mentioned in 102 AD, even Emperors were joining religions like the mystery cult of Eleusis or the Stoic reincarnation beliefs, Middle- and then Neo-Platonic proto-gnosticism was doing the rounds like it's the latest fashion (and it actually influenced Christianity too), etc. Plus a slew of prophets and miracle workers.

I don't think anyone knows for sure everything that is behind that explosion of woowoo, but exotic religions were all the rage all of a sudden.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I don’t think Paul was crazy--I think he was a clever businessman, with a brilliant grasp of first-century PR. And he was a classic messiah-successor: he was to Jesus as Brigham Young was to Joseph Smith, as Stalin was to Lenin, as the Khalifa was to the Mahdi, as Joshua was to Moses, etc etc.

Yes, well, that Paul was a manipulative sociopath and probably lied his rear off about half the story would be my first guess too. The whole exercise was under the rules of the OP, or how I understand them, i.e., taking the non-supernatural parts of the story as true and Paul as actually believing it. I.e., please don't take it as a complete analysis of Paul, as the given constraints don't really allow that.

 

[RebeccaBradley]

I know very little about the dozen prophets with books near the end of the Old Testament, but my impression is that most of them talked mostly about either relatively mundane stuff from living life in this world, or common standard religious ideas about God and morality and such. If so, then the one that stands out from the group is Daniel, who seems to have been writing his LSD trips. Babbling about stuff that doesn't make sense and isn't connected to anything in the real world in any way, but acting like it's all urgently important to everybody whether they know it or not so they all need to listen to the raving, is just about the quickest way to make sure everyone around you thinks "CRAZY!" as soon after seeing/hearing you as possible. I don't even get why that wasn't the immediate reaction to him even back then, unless his symptoms developed gradually after years of normal behavior.

And Josiah or a priest working for him seems to have invented Deuteronomy, while claiming to have discovered it somewhere. That book is mostly a list of those famous silly old laws, so I guess that makes him some kind of control freak, in fact apparently the original control freak who began the whole control freak streak in Judaism, although I don't know the clinical term for control freaks.

It's the scholarly consensus that Daniel was written in the second century BC, considerably later than the period where it's set; that the "prophecies" are therefore post-facto; and what the author is really talking about, in suitably veiled and safely symbolic terms, is the dire political situation with Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid ruler. Contemporary readers in the second century would understand the allusions - later readers (like, say, 21st-century fundamentalists) would proceed to spin crazy things off them. Similarly, the redactors of the Pentateuch had real-world political motives, and weren't crazy either. Tim Callahan, who posted earlier in the thread, covers this sort of thing in his book Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment?, which is a lot of fun. (Hoping TC doesn't mind me mentioning it.)

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

So he could have been completely insane, or maybe just a little bit crazy coupled with ergotism? It's ironic you mentioned Paul was at it for 20 years or so, when I actually had just been reading about ergotism the other day. It was an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that mentioned a severe case of ergotism that resulted in hallucinations and daily migranes for 20 years after the initial ergot poisoning!

Hmm, you know, it just occurred to me that you may be onto something there.

Paul himself says in 2 Corinthians 12:7-9: "To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." (NIV)

It seems to say just that. Together with the revelation, Paul got ridden with some kind of recurring pain.

 

[TimCallahan]

Hmm, you know, it just occurred to me that you may be onto something there.

Paul himself says in 2 Corinthians 12:7-9: "To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." (NIV)

It seems to say just that. Together with the revelation, Paul got ridden with some kind of recurring pain.

What's really interesting about Paul's "thorn in the flesh" are number of spins interpreters put on it. Your after-effects of ergotism theory sounds quite plausible compared to some of the others I've heard. Among other explanations I've heard are that Paul was a leper or that his thorn in the flesh was his struggle with homosexual urges.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, Paul is... cryptic, as usual, so I can see how that would leave room for interpretation. Still, yeah, leprosy or homosexuality are stretching it quite a bit.

Still, more interested if taken literally, is that Paul didn't have only one hallucination. He pleaded with Jesus 3 more times on this topic alone, and got an actual answer. I mean he doesn't say "I guess Jesus wanted me to keep it" or anything, but he has ghostly Jesus actually tell him a rationale for it.

Of course, though, he could also be adlibbing in the name of Jesus.

 

[RebeccaBradley]

Well, Paul is... cryptic, as usual, so I can see how that would leave room for interpretation. Still, yeah, leprosy or homosexuality are stretching it quite a bit.

Still, more interested if taken literally, is that Paul didn't have only one hallucination. He pleaded with Jesus 3 more times on this topic alone, and got an actual answer. I mean he doesn't say "I guess Jesus wanted me to keep it" or anything, but he has ghostly Jesus actually tell him a rationale for it.

Of course, though, he could also be adlibbing in the name of Jesus.

How about three Ted-Haggard moments?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

How about three Ted-Haggard moments?

Considering that that was written two decades after the alleged death of Jesus, that would have been a very embarrassing Ted Haggard moment indeed