JR39: John, Paul, and James: The Lunatic, the Liar, and the Lord
“Jesus said: No prophet is accepted in his own village. No physician heals the people who know him well (Gospel of Thomas 31).” Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.
A: By now people will have noticed that you and I aren’t apologists for conservative or evangelical Christianity. I was thinking again today about C.S. Lewis’s “Trilemma” argument that claims to prove the divinity of Jesus — the “lunatic, liar, or lord” argument (presented in his book Mere Christianity). For Lewis, and for countless other conservative Christians, you — Jesus — have to be lord. Why?
J: Orthodox Western Christianity can’t survive in its present form if there’s no Saviour. The Saviour myth — Jesus as Saviour, Jesus as Lord — provides the perfect camouflage for all the lunatics and all the liars who have shaped orthodox Christianity over the centuries. This applies to both the Roman Catholic church and to mainstream Protestant denominations. Nobody wants to rattle all the “lunatic, liar, and lord” skeletons in the closet.
A: How many skeletons are there?
J: Too many for me to list here. But I can tell you who the earliest ones were.
A: Okay.
J: The earliest “lunatic” was John — by that I mean John the Baptist, who reinvented himself as John the chosen apostle after my death. John was seriously mentally ill, and I make no apologies for being honest about this fact. The word “lunatic” is too harsh, of course, and I wouldn’t use this word in the context of mental health discussions today. There’s far too much stigma around mental health issues already. But pretending that mental health issues don’t exist and pretending that mental health issues don’t touch all families is naive and cowardly. Mental health issues have always been a reality in human society. They’ve always been a reality in religious organizations. Religious organizations are never been exempt from these realities. Pious theologians hurt regular people when they go through contortions to try to “redeem” apocalyptic texts such as Revelation. The book of Revelation was written by John when he was floridly psychotic. This book hurts people. It scares people. It should come with a warning tag on it, but it doesn’t.
The honest truth is that some mentally ill people end up trying to hurt others, especially if psychosis has set in. Not all mentally ill people by any means. But some mentally ill people. Mental health professionals are trained in risk assessment, and they know that only a small percentage of mentally ill individuals are at risk of harming others. This is a reasonable, responsible, and appropriate approach to mental health. The church should take this approach in reassessing the writings of its own theologians — starting with John. They should look at what John actually said instead of pretending that John was so mystically elevated compared to his peers that regular people couldn’t understand his symbolic, mystical messages. The reason they couldn’t understand him is because he was having hallucinations and delusions.
A: Ever the honest fellow, aren’t you?
J: Lies don’t help anyone.
A: Speaking of lies . . . .
J: Nobody who’s been reading this site or your Concinnate Christianity site will be surprised to learn that the earliest “liar” in the church was Paul himself. I won’t go into detail on the Paul question today. If people are interested, they can check out some of our earlier posts about his motives.*
A: Okay. So what’s with the “lord” thing? How does that tie in with the “lunatics and liars”?
J: Well, this brings me to my older brother, James. James and I had . . . well . . . a very complicated relationship. He didn’t believe I was the Saviour as such — not in the way Paul described me. In fact, James despised Paul, and did everything he could to confront Paul’s teachings. But contrary to what scholars such as Bart Ehrman and Barrie Wilson think, my brother James was not a follower of my teachings. He taught his own version of reformed Judaism that undercut my central teachings. He liked me only slightly more than he liked Paul. Unfortunately, he and Paul had a lot more in common than either one realized.
A: In what way?
J: Quite honestly, both were pompous narcissists.
A: That’s not a very nice thing to say about your brother.
J: Maybe not, but it’s true. James was the eldest child and the eldest son born to an elite family of Jewish aristocrats. His maternal grandfather had at one time been a member of the Sanhedrin — the ruling council in Jerusalem. He wasn’t raised to be compassionate and trusting towards God. He was raised to be pious and fearful of God. He was considerably older than I was. He was — like so many eldest children — conservative, highly responsible, obedient, cautious, and “certain” of his role in life. He believed in law, and in particular in the laws of Moses. He was a devout Sadducean Jew.
A: I thought the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. How did James reconcile himself to the strange events that occurred around your crucifixion and “resurrection”?
J: He didn’t. He tried very hard to downplay the rumours that swirled around my “death” and temporary reappearance. He, along with Peter and John, worked very hard to spread counter-rumours. It was he who came up with the idea of saying my body had been stolen from the tomb by my disciples (Matthew 27:62-66). Of course, my body hadn’t been stolen because I wasn’t even dead. Yet. James had more reason than anyone alive to know that I was a real human being and not a god-in-human-form who’d been resurrected from the dead. James, along with Peter and John, and with the help of my older brother Judas, were the ones who had me arrested in the first place.
A: Why?
J: For the simplest of human reasons — pride. Pride and “family honour” and that most terrible of dysfunctional human behaviours — the narcissistic rage reaction. I pushed all my brother’s buttons, and he had a narcissistic rage reaction. If you’ve ever been standing in the way of such an event, you’ll understand what I mean when I say the rage becomes all-consuming and self-absorbed in a way that’s difficult to describe. It’s like the entire universe shrinks to one spot of pure, blind, selfish hatred, and nothing else matters but revenge. There’s no logic to it. Not from anyone else’s point of view, anyway. But from the narcissist’s point of view the logic is diamond-hard. He (or she) becomes fanatically convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong. If he’s a religious man, this is the time when he’ll start saying that God is on his side and God demands revenge. Such a person is capable of the most murderous acts imaginable.
A: Including acts against one’s own family.
J: Especially against one’s own family. The people at greatest risk from an extreme narcissist are the people closest to him (or maybe, as I’d like to emphasize, her). Family members and group associates are the ones most likely to observe the mistakes, hypocrisies, memory failures, and lies made by a narcissist — none of which a narcissist wants to hear about. Those who make the mistake of pointing out a narcissist’s errors in judgment (including errors by proxy) may well find it’s the last mistake they make. Extreme narcissists can and do kill when they feel their “honour” has been “unjustly” attacked. My brother James was such a person.
A: He convinced himself that he was doing the right thing in having you arrested.
J: Absolutely. I was attacking the cultural and religious belief systems that gave him great status. I was attacking his right to be called “lord.” All along I was at greatest risk not from the Romans and not from the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem (where I spent very little time), but from my own family and friends. They were the ones who had the most to lose if I continued teaching my new brand of Judaism.
A: Where there are no lords.
J: And where “lunatics” are healed and liars are called to account for their lies.
A: Sounds like a place of rainbows to me.
* Please see Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom
