But doesn't it work both ways? Are you now not saying that Christianity definitely wasn't influenced by pervasive Roman or Greek religious cults? Aren't you also judging them through the lens of Christianity and then arguing that they're too different to be an influence?
I don't know enough about ancient cult religions to offer more, but for me it feels like a definite possibility.
In a similar way, from what I hear about Christian theology, much of it sounds like it has been lifted from Plato. It's not exactly the same, but for me it has enough striking similarities to be likely to have come from the same source.
Of course, I wouldn't expect a believer to join me in this speculation, I have no way of proving it one way or the other.
That many of the Church fathers of the second and third centuries were educated in Platonic philosophy and used Platonic concepts to express their beliefs is not in doubt.
Every so often you get someone, either a far-conservative or a far-liberal proposing to purge Platonic influence from Christian theology. I think it would be a mistake myself.
The question of the divinity of Jesus is quite complex because the Christology grows considerably within the New Testament itself. In Romans 1.1-4, Paul says that Jesus is declared Son of God by his rising from the dead. Son of God in this context doesn't necessarily mean equality with God. In Acts 2.22, Peter describes Jesus as "a man attested to you by God with deeds of power." In verse 33 he says, of him, "Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit." I don't see any of this as indicative of a community who believed Jesus to be the eternal God. They believed in the resurrection, certainly, and saw Jesus as having some sort of divine status conferred on him by the Father, but the second person of the Trinity is a big leap from there.
John's "I am" statements are certainly of a much higher Christology, but that gospel in its present form didn't appear until the end of the century when a much higher Christology had grown up around the memory of Jesus. I would never suggest that John doesn't contain some older, even eye witness account, of the events of Holy Week, but the long theological discourses that are entirely absent from the synoptic gospels come across as meditations on the theology of the gospel rather than memories of what was said.
I apologise if this is a tangent from Lewis's trilemma, it's just part of why I struggle so much with Christ's divinity and the concept of the Trinity.
I think the earliest evidence for what is sometimes referred to as a high Christology is found in Colossians 1.15-20, and in Philippians 2.5-11 (with its intertextual connection with Isaiah 45.23). In both cases there is internal evidence to suggest that the passages are quotations from pre-existing hymnic or liturgical texts.
Okay, you've found one counter-example--but still, this is not a guy who claimed to BE Zeus, which would have been far more unthinkable.
One example which made it into the history books because of surrounding circumstances. I suppose it's possible that the very first time a Jew complied with Antiochus IV's religious mandates happened to be the time that Mattathias ben Johanan was standing right there ready to assassinate the offending Jew, but this seems unlikely. To take another example, American merchants peacefully complying with the Townsend Acts in Charleston or New York don't get noted in history. Some guys in Boston going crazy over it five years after implementation do get noticed by historians. Which is one of many reasons why I tend to dismiss the stereotyping inherent in claims along the lines of "no member of group X would ever even think Y". It feels much too "planet of hats" to be a serious analysis of real societies.
But doesn't it work both ways? Are you now not saying that Christianity definitely wasn't influenced by pervasive Roman or Greek religious cults? Aren't you also judging them through the lens of Christianity and then arguing that they're too different to be an influence?
I don't know enough about ancient cult religions to offer more, but for me it feels like a definite possibility.
One obvious cultural influence of Greek and Roman societies on Christianity is the practice of marital monogamy (i.e. only one spouse at a time). This was not the rule for first century Judaism, though for purely demographic reasons plural marriages were less common. I don't think it's going too far to suggest that the reason Christianity adopted marital monogamy as a standard is because it developed within a maritally monogamous Roman culture.
It’s a tangent, but i would suggest it was a combo of Jesus’ teaching on marriage (where he speaks of a single pair, very much as if it were the norm) and also the whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church thing, which doesn’t lend itself To polygamy.
It’s a tangent, but i would suggest it was a combo of Jesus’ teaching on marriage (where he speaks of a single pair, very much as if it were the norm) and also the whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church thing, which doesn’t lend itself To polygamy.
Uhhhh, you do realize that "the church" is more than one person, right? "The whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church" thing lends itself much more easily to traditional polygyny than it does to monogamous marriage.
I'm no expert but it seems to me that there are two equal and opposite pitfalls we can fall into here.
One is to act as if 1st century Judaism was hermetically sealed from any external cultural influences. Heck, some of the Proverbs in the Hebrew scriptures had Hittite and Egyptian antecedents.
The other is to act as if it was entirely porous and that they readily imbibed ideas of human divinisation from Alexander the Great and Roman ideas of imperial divinity.
However we cut it, though, the idea of Christ's divinity does seem to have developed early. We don't have to be a 'biblical fundamentalist' or its sacramental equivalent, a 'Church fundamentalist' to hold that.
It’s a tangent, but i would suggest it was a combo of Jesus’ teaching on marriage (where he speaks of a single pair, very much as if it were the norm) and also the whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church thing, which doesn’t lend itself To polygamy.
Uhhhh, you do realize that "the church" is more than one person, right? "The whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church" thing lends itself much more easily to traditional polygyny than it does to monogamous marriage.
Nope—it’s a singular bride, not many brides. I admit the corporate aspect is hard to understand.
How early though? Before those church leaders who were trained in Platonism got to it?
I'm not aware of anything in Platonism or Neo-Platonism that makes the idea of Christ's divinity or the incarnation any more plausible.
That Jesus is being accorded divine honours in the New Testament seems to me hard to deny. The NT shows little sign of having been influenced by any Greek philosophical school. The worked-out theory ,- that the only way to reconcile giving divine honours to a human being with monotheism was to express it through the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation - was argued out between people who knew Platonic philosophy.
Also, there's the intriguing example of Philo, who appears to be an early (possibly BCE) connection between pious Judaism and Plato. Apparently unloved by his fellow Jews, his writings were saved by early Christians who thought he was a Christian.
From my point of view, if more developed understanding of truth came in via Plato, awesome. I don't see why one should assume that this "taints" Christian faith at all.
Only that there's an apparent logical discontinuity in saying that it is unthinkable to believe that Roman religion influenced Judiasm and early Christianity when it seems fairly clear that in the same time period there was a interactions between Judiasm, Platonism and early Christian thinking.
If everyone accepts that Plato's philosophy made a big impact on Christianity why couldn't also Plato's religion have an impact?
Only that there's an apparent logical discontinuity in saying that it is unthinkable to believe that Roman religion influenced Judiasm and early Christianity when it seems fairly clear that in the same time period there was a interactions between Judiasm, Platonism and early Christian thinking.
If everyone accepts that Plato's philosophy made a big impact on Christianity why couldn't also Plato's religion have an impact?
I didn't say it didn't. Though from my point of view, the quote from Lewis above (myth becoming fact) makes perfect sense.
It’s a tangent, but i would suggest it was a combo of Jesus’ teaching on marriage (where he speaks of a single pair, very much as if it were the norm) and also the whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church thing, which doesn’t lend itself To polygamy.
Uhhhh, you do realize that "the church" is more than one person, right? "The whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church" thing lends itself much more easily to traditional polygyny than it does to monogamous marriage.
Nope—it’s a singular bride, not many brides. I admit the corporate aspect is hard to understand.
Well, the NT does 'telescope' the corporate and the individual in much of its imagery. There's the 'new man' image that the Apostle Paul uses in Ephesians, I think, which is probably the key epistle for a corporate ecclesiology, if I can put it that way.
So if the Church, made up of individuals, can be described as a 'Body' - and not just any body but the Body of Christ - then it's not a big jump to there being a single 'Bride' made up of separate individuals.
God is always personal. But Christianity is not an individualistic faith.
It’s a tangent, but i would suggest it was a combo of Jesus’ teaching on marriage (where he speaks of a single pair, very much as if it were the norm) and also the whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church thing, which doesn’t lend itself To polygamy.
Uhhhh, you do realize that "the church" is more than one person, right? "The whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church" thing lends itself much more easily to traditional polygyny than it does to monogamous marriage.
Nope—it’s a singular bride, not many brides. I admit the corporate aspect is hard to understand.
Although it's pre-figured in the Old Testament with the portrayal of Israel as a bride, so as a concept it wouldn't be completely alien to C1.
The achilles heel of blessed clives argument is it's assumption that johns gospel verbatim records the sayings and claims of jesus. Personally I don't have a problem with this and will go as far as saying that the relevant passages in the fourth gospel act as an exposition and clarification of the sayings and acts found in the synoptic record- forgiving sins, healing, jesus personally being the locus through which gods kingdom is breaking through and the explicit authority he uses in teaching. In essence drop john and you still have to come to terms with the very early traditions paul draws on as per @BroJames and the whole thrust of the other gospels (not to mention the cultural context as @Lamb Chopped has cover that ground).
Regarding plato an element is that he set the shape of intellectual conversation at that time. Just as our debates are shaped by various more contemporary ideas and thinkers (whether we acknowledge it or not).
@KoF Talking of the influence of Plato, it's unlikely that Jesus would have had any concept of people dying and going to heaven. To the Hebrews, body and soul were inseparable in life. That's why if anyone were ever to return from the dead, it would have to be a new body reunited with their soul on earth. This idea, which appears in Maccabees, was what the Pharisees believed and taught. Prior to that, there was little belief in an afterlife.
When Christianity spread into the Greek world of Platonic thought, which included immortality of the soul, the idea of the soul carrying on after the death of the body was incorporated into Christianity. None of that could have come from Jesus or his original followers.
Indeed. Disputes about the resurrection of the dead were a major fault line between the Pharisees and Sadducees, a dispute pre-dating Jesus. This was not a question or idea that originated with Christianity.
I did say that belief in the resurrection goes back at least as far as the Maccabees, and was a commonly held belief of the Pharisees of Jesus' time. But it was an earthly resurrection. I apologise if I worded that badly. What I meant is that the idea of our souls going to heaven when we die was a Greek idea that got incorporated into Christianity.
@Doublethink:I think this is wrong because I don’t think it is true that you can not be a good moral teacher if you are mentally ill
Well, Lewis wouldn’t have worried much about that but he was very aware of Jesus’ iconic status and claims. The issue for him, I suspect, was whether that status was deserved for whatever reason and if the claims were credible. In the end, his aphoristic summary is genius at putting the issues at stake into nutshell form. I think Lewis did have what we would call ‘lived’ experience behind his faith which stood the test of suffering in the form of his wife’s tragic cancer story and his brother’s alcoholism.
Lewis was also a WW1 vet who stood by a promise to a fallen comrade that the survivor would take care of his friend’s parents. He was a lovely human being as well as a super brain. @Martin54:
Nope mate. To be convinced you’d have to be willing to plough up preconceptions that you refuse to go near such as the nature of the Bible and the story told by the rocks that you are convinced do not lie.
@Doublethink:I think this is wrong because I don’t think it is true that you can not be a good moral teacher if you are mentally ill
Well, Lewis wouldn’t have worried much about that but he was very aware of Jesus’ iconic status and claims. The issue for him, I suspect, was whether that status was deserved for whatever reason and if the claims were credible. In the end, his aphoristic summary is genius at putting the issues at stake into nutshell form. I think Lewis did have what we would call ‘lived’ experience behind his faith which stood the test of suffering in the form of his wife’s tragic cancer story and his brother’s alcoholism.
Lewis was also a WW1 vet who stood by a promise to a fallen comrade that the survivor would take care of his friend’s parents. He was a lovely human being as well as a super brain. @Martin54:
Nope mate. To be convinced you’d have to be willing to plough up preconceptions that you refuse to go near such as the nature of the Bible and the story told by the rocks that you are convinced do not lie.
Oh FFS don't try to raise the ridiculous deceased clown that is YEC. If we have to believe in that to accept the basic truth claims of Christianity then we're truly fucked because, frankly, it occupies the same plausibility space as a Flat Earth - something I've become increasingly aware of on social media recently, seeing exactly the same tactics used by FEs as I've observed for decades used by YECs. Hardly surprising - conspiracy theory science denial is conspiracy theory science denial wherever it wastes everyone's time.
Fortunately, as the vast majority of Christians in the modern world are well aware, we don't have to accept that load of old bollocks.
@Doublethink:I think this is wrong because I don’t think it is true that you can not be a good moral teacher if you are mentally ill
Well, Lewis wouldn’t have worried much about that but he was very aware of Jesus’ iconic status and claims. The issue for him, I suspect, was whether that status was deserved for whatever reason and if the claims were credible. In the end, his aphoristic summary is genius at putting the issues at stake into nutshell form. I think Lewis did have what we would call ‘lived’ experience behind his faith which stood the test of suffering in the form of his wife’s tragic cancer story and his brother’s alcoholism.
Lewis was also a WW1 vet who stood by a promise to a fallen comrade that the survivor would take care of his friend’s parents. He was a lovely human being as well as a super brain. @Martin54:
Nope mate. To be convinced you’d have to be willing to plough up preconceptions that you refuse to go near such as the nature of the Bible and the story told by the rocks that you are convinced do not lie.
That Wikipedia page is quite interesting. John Duncan said in the 1850s
"Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."
Deluded seems like a more acceptable suggestion than madness.
Assuming you are using “madness” as a synonym for mental illness - delusions are a symptom of some forms of mental illness.
(If not, what do you mean by “madness” ?)
To me the trilemma reads as if Lewis said Jesus was either God, the Devil or disabled - and he couldn’t possible have said anything wise or worth hearing if he were disabled so obviously that option can’t be right. Which I think is bollocks.
Thought I'd wait until it went quieter and summarize my reactions, if I may. @Doublethink's 1st & 2nd posts with @la vie en rouge's show the heart of the issue of those posts for me, it all hinges on delusion, as, as far as I'm concerned, Jesus was none of the trilemma's options. Not bad, not 'the Devil of Hell' in Lewis' absurdity. And not 'a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg' or even pathologically delusional. He just had 'a belief based on false or incomplete information'. His mother similarly, although her lived experience may have included stress triggered hallucination. As did his at times. After nearly starving himself to death in the first instance.
Any Jew of his time and background WOULD be either a lunatic or wicked to make such claims if they weren’t true—and it’s obvious from the Gospels that he is neither.
To which @Kof perfectly validly said, and reiterated, "So why can't he be "sincere, sane but wrong"?". As @Thomas Rowans later said, it's a false problem. Because he would have known the truth of what @Lamb Chopped said, but from at least the age of 12, and obviously as soon as could internalize what his mother told him, he knew otherwise. He deludedly knew that it was true that he was the son of God. He was an exceptionally gifted enlightened empathic person, like his mother, and learned, from her secretive ways, to hide what he was thinking from age twelve for eighteen years. He inherited many centuries of belief based on false or incomplete information.
@Lamb Chopped reprises the same point later. So do I. He was sane, good and not the Son of God.
@Lamb Chopped's “now that I’ve been forced to consider the possibility, i can see all sorts of ways this explanation (that Jesus is God) makes sense of a bunch of other phenomena.”, seconded by @betjemaniac, is logical based on the predicate. Of being forced to consider that Jesus is God. I have lost that compunction. Only scientific proof could bring it back. I wish it would. I do not regard the brilliant and decent people here, and people of my acquaintance like Rob Bell or Steve Chalke or John Polkinghorne as morons for not having lost it. If I believed still I'd be at Greenbelt desperate to meet my hero Brian McLaren. God. I weep for the loss. As a non believer I would still want to shake him by the hand, and burden him with my loss. He gave such substance to my faith. And I love Tony Campolo. I just encountered the love of man in my hall users. I raved at God after they'd gone. Unlike Him, they'll be back. Yes, it's all compelling as @Gamma Gamaliel says. And not enough to fix my multiply broken heart. Woe is me eh?
To @Lamb Chopped's "This particular delusion could not exist in the head of a first century Jew in Judea / Galilee in the first century without some pretty severe psychopathology undergirding it." multiply fallacious non sequitur, I say again, he was sane, good and not the Son of God, entirely natural, of his time, of a confluence of cultures the like of which, the intensity of which, was the greatest in history.
We are as good as we are evil, always have been. The evil is foul beyond belief. And the good obviously is too, that it has to be attributed to the supernatural as well. He was as good as we get, in his time. Which is far from perfect. Last year I read Philipp Meyer's astounding 'The Son'. It does the thin silver lining of good on our cumulonimbus of bad, on nature, all too well. When I say far from perfect I mean Jesus himself of course. He could only transcend his culture so far, even though it was further than any had gone before in any culture.
But I digress. We then get in to the why's and wherefor's of that cultural influence; I cut through that Gordian knot with goodwill. Not as deep red and down to the bone as Bart Ehrman does your preconceptions about the bible @MPaul. In my cultic days we ignorantly raged at the Shah of Persia for blasphemously entitling himself King of kings. Like Augustus' Son of God. Human trapping Jesus clothed himself in, in his belief based on false or incomplete information. What are my preconceptions that I refuse to go near mate? And please don't ruin that as you already have with yours about science. I'll turn a blind eye to that delusion if you can show me mine in my knowledge.
Well, I was going to wait until the thread was quiet, but it shows no signs of quiescing. So here I am.
He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."
There's clearly the implication of mental illness.
I'm not an expert on vocabulary from 1850s England but I'm not sure being deluded necessarily implies that one is mad on the level of imagining yourself to be a spoon.
It quite possible to get an isolated fixed delusion, e.g. that you are partially made of glass. It is also possible to have a complex delusional system and still function in everyday life. I work in mental health and have worked with people with both types of problem. To be fair, I have never met anyone who thought they were a poached egg. Delusions tend to have some connection to mood and to the culture to which you have been exposed. The mind can only really make up stuff from its own pre-existing contents.
Delusions are not really random and they tend to have some level of personal meaning. When people are manic, they often have connotations of believing yourself to be special in some way. Anyone who has worked in inpatient mental health is likely to have met someone claiming to be a god or in communication with a god at some point.
It also strikes me that understanding of mental illness have considerably expanded since the 1850s. In 2024 we can see that there are degrees of mental instability and illness.
I don't think we would assume today that a deluded person was seriously and severely mentally ill, although I also see that claiming to be a god is quite a big claim to make.
Just wanted to add, in discussing this, please can we be mindful that mental health problems are very common and more than one in four of us will hear voices at some point in our life. Lewis’s language is of his time, but terms like madness and lunacy can be very stigmatising in the here and now.
We have many members of our SoF community with lived experience of mental health issues.
I was just remembering someone I once knew who had a diagnosed mental illness which included delusions. They were well loved, loving and capable of great insights. A really beautiful person, gone too soon.
I think we run into two equal and opposite errors with Lewis if we aren't careful. We either treat him as some kind of oracle or else shove him away in a draw marked '1950s'.
We tend to harness him for whatever our particular 'cause' might be. He's almost a Saint to some evangelicals even though he wasn't an evangelical by any manner of means.
The Orthodox co-opt him even though he wasn't Big O Orthodox either. As I've said, I'd like to see us extend the same courtesy to other Western Christian writers.
'Shadowlands' is a terrific drama but the reality of Lewis's relationship with Joy Davidson was far more prosaic, and indeed somewhat problematic from the position of traditional Christian ethics/morality, as understood in certain quarters.
His relationship with his fallen WW1 comrade's mother was almost certainly 'questionable' from the standpoint of traditional Christian morality. Most biographers seem to agree it was a sexual one.
I think his war-time promise was to look after his comrade's parent (singular), his mother, not parents (plural). She was a widow if I remember rightly.
Lewis also liked a pipe and a pint. He'd regularly sink 3 or 4 pints of ale at lunchtime then walk it off before resuming his afternoon engagements.
I say all this not to be salacious or Puritanical but to debunk some of the mythology that surrounds Lewis. Davidson came to the UK with the prime intention of engineering a relationship with Lewis whom she'd fallen in love with through his writings.
If a younger, vivacious and intelligent woman crossed the Atlantic to engineer a relationship with me, I'm not sure I'd have the willpower ro resist.
Ok. So what does this have to do with the 'trilemma'?
Not a great deal except that I suggest that there's a certain aura and 'authority' that's grown up around Lewis's writings that mirrors the mythology that's grown up around his life in popular hagiography.
I say that from within a Tradition that has oodles of popular hagiography.
With the best will in the world, I think @MPaul has fallen into the first trap. He's imbibed the popular mythology and the idea that Lewis was some selfless Saint. He was certainly an admirable man but like the rest of us he didn't float several inches above the ground.
Enough of this already.
Enough of the Young Earth Creationism too. I can't imagine Lewis went in for that.
Originality doesn’t matter. Lewis’s rep doesn’t matter. What i come back to again and again is the issue of Jesus’ mental health (and yes, i have my own problems, including cPTSD and a form of OCD.)
If Jesus was convinced he was God in that culture, and was wrong, the delusion cannot be called anything but all-pervasive and life threatening. It clearly impacted every area of his life, and it appears to have been there from the beginning—no change or growth can be seen over the three years of records we have. He related to people in public teaching and in private healing and comfort as if he were God and the son of God the Father. He made public challenges like “Who of you accused me of any sin?” Of he is deluded, this is not an isolated delusion in an otherwise healthy life. This is clearly the master delusion of his whole existence.
I do not believe it is possible for any person to be that thoroughly deluded on a subject of such pervasive and overwhelming importance without showing signs of illness in the rest of good life—his teaching, his interactions with others, his actions. Specifically i consider it impossible to imagine a mere man who was at once so ill that he thought he was God (in first century Judaism) and at the same time conceived of his role as God as being consistently that of servant, caregiver, healer, and rescuer of others at the cost of his own life. That is a degree of light I wouldn’t expect to find in a perfectly healthy person, let alone one so intensely deluded—so wrong—as some of you are postulating.
And I, too, have worked with people under delusion. Obviously not to the extent a professional has. Their delusions never left them more functional than the rest of humankind.
@KoF Talking of the influence of Plato, it's unlikely that Jesus would have had any concept of people dying and going to heaven. To the Hebrews, body and soul were inseparable in life. That's why if anyone were ever to return from the dead, it would have to be a new body reunited with their soul on earth. This idea, which appears in Maccabees, was what the Pharisees believed and taught. Prior to that, there was little belief in an afterlife.
I did say that belief in the resurrection goes back at least as far as the Maccabees, and was a commonly held belief of the Pharisees of Jesus' time. But it was an earthly resurrection. I apologise if I worded that badly. What I meant is that the idea of our souls going to heaven when we die was a Greek idea that got incorporated into Christianity.
The beliefs of the ancient Hebrews and the beliefs found in Second Temple Judaism were not the same. Influences, including those about the soul and an afterlife, came in during the exile in Babylon as well as from the Greeks.
The concept of Abraham’s Bosom as a place where the righteous dead await judgment could be found in Second Temple Judaism. That concept is mentioned in Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In that parable, Lazarus is described as being taken by the angels to Abraham’s Bosom, even though his body presumably remained to be buried. It is perhaps worth noting that it is Lazarus’s possible return from Abraham’s Bosom to the world of the living that is described as “rising from the dead.”
Influences from Babylonian, Greek and other cultures were definitely at play in Second Temple Judaism. And even before that, there is the story of the woman of Endor, who summoned Samuel from the dead for Saul. Given that Saul cannot see Samuel, it seems clear that Samuel appears as a spirit, not as a resurrected body.
So I think the claim that it's unlikely that Jesus would have had any concept of people dying and going to heaven, because to the Hebrews, body and soul were inseparable, is itself an unlikely claim. Such ideas could be found both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Jewish understandings of his time.
That said, and going back to how this started, I agree with @Lamb Chopped that it seems to me to be highly unlikely that a First Century Jew who, by all accounts, was observant and a student of the Torah and the prophets would claim to be divine as a result of some kind of syncretism.
Jesus had no mental health issues apart from transient, normal, ones. And his non-clinical delusion, i.e. his conviction, his enculturated and maternally nurtured belief, certainly killed him, he meant it to, he committed suicide by proxy, and it underpinned every breath he took. I don't go with your fallacy of non-belief in the slightest. Especially to oppose rational non-belief.
I too have worked with, and more, people under delusion. I've been one. But not in any clinical sense. Was married to one. Clinical. I certainly have clinical issues, which is why I have a clinical psychologist. But they have no bearing here, apart from every female in my family history (except my mother of course, who made me look like an introvert) saying "You're on the spectrum/autistic", "You have ADHD" (as does my son, diagnosed) from my daughter who is becoming a professional. And yep, I tick OCD & PTSD boxes big time.
Jesus didn't tick any of them or any other. He was one of the sanest people who ever lived. One of the best. One of the most emotionally intelligent. The best, the most we know of in fact. If he was for real, which I grant in all good will.
It quite possible to get an isolated fixed delusion, e.g. that you are partially made of glass. It is also possible to have a complex delusional system and still function in everyday life. I work in mental health and have worked with people with both types of problem. To be fair, I have never met anyone who thought they were a poached egg. Delusions tend to have some connection to mood and to the culture to which you have been exposed. The mind can only really make up stuff from its own pre-existing contents.
Delusions are not really random and they tend to have some level of personal meaning. When people are manic, they often have connotations of believing yourself to be special in some way. Anyone who has worked in inpatient mental health is likely to have met someone claiming to be a god or in communication with a god at some point.
I agree. I don’t think Jesus was deluded but I do know that it is possible to have a severe delusion and carry on with your everyday life around it. I once spent a week having the delusion that I had murdered someone yet still managed to live a perfectly normal life, caring for my young sons, teaching my online students, etc. My husband didn’t even realise I was having a delusion. As doublethink says, my delusion was related to context; I had read a new story the day before and it became my story. I have also worked in mental health and have friends who have delusions due to various mental health challenges.
Oh, and I have ‘special powers’ when manic!
I am reluctant to repeat here delusions about which I know as a result of patient care - as I can’t be certain they are unidentifiable - but I am absolutely sure that people can continue to function in everyday life with pervasive delusions, and that those can include a need to die to save the world.
Conversely, I have also met people who experienced and communicated spiritual insights that occurred to them in the midst of their most acute phases of illness.
A non-clinical delusion is a contradiction in terms.
So a delusion can only be clinical?
There is no usage outside that?
the action of deluding or the state of being deluded:
"the banality and delusion of this lifestyle is illustrated with great wit" · "the lines between reality and delusion are blurred"
(When people call some thing non-clinical a delusion they are basically saying, this is so outrageous it must be a product of mental illness - so either simile or metaphor really and mildly ableist.)
Comments
I don't know enough about ancient cult religions to offer more, but for me it feels like a definite possibility.
In a similar way, from what I hear about Christian theology, much of it sounds like it has been lifted from Plato. It's not exactly the same, but for me it has enough striking similarities to be likely to have come from the same source.
Of course, I wouldn't expect a believer to join me in this speculation, I have no way of proving it one way or the other.
Every so often you get someone, either a far-conservative or a far-liberal proposing to purge Platonic influence from Christian theology. I think it would be a mistake myself.
One example which made it into the history books because of surrounding circumstances. I suppose it's possible that the very first time a Jew complied with Antiochus IV's religious mandates happened to be the time that Mattathias ben Johanan was standing right there ready to assassinate the offending Jew, but this seems unlikely. To take another example, American merchants peacefully complying with the Townsend Acts in Charleston or New York don't get noted in history. Some guys in Boston going crazy over it five years after implementation do get noticed by historians. Which is one of many reasons why I tend to dismiss the stereotyping inherent in claims along the lines of "no member of group X would ever even think Y". It feels much too "planet of hats" to be a serious analysis of real societies.
One obvious cultural influence of Greek and Roman societies on Christianity is the practice of marital monogamy (i.e. only one spouse at a time). This was not the rule for first century Judaism, though for purely demographic reasons plural marriages were less common. I don't think it's going too far to suggest that the reason Christianity adopted marital monogamy as a standard is because it developed within a maritally monogamous Roman culture.
Uhhhh, you do realize that "the church" is more than one person, right? "The whole Christ-as-the-bridegroom-of-the-church" thing lends itself much more easily to traditional polygyny than it does to monogamous marriage.
One is to act as if 1st century Judaism was hermetically sealed from any external cultural influences. Heck, some of the Proverbs in the Hebrew scriptures had Hittite and Egyptian antecedents.
The other is to act as if it was entirely porous and that they readily imbibed ideas of human divinisation from Alexander the Great and Roman ideas of imperial divinity.
However we cut it, though, the idea of Christ's divinity does seem to have developed early. We don't have to be a 'biblical fundamentalist' or its sacramental equivalent, a 'Church fundamentalist' to hold that.
Nope—it’s a singular bride, not many brides. I admit the corporate aspect is hard to understand.
That Jesus is being accorded divine honours in the New Testament seems to me hard to deny. The NT shows little sign of having been influenced by any Greek philosophical school. The worked-out theory ,- that the only way to reconcile giving divine honours to a human being with monotheism was to express it through the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation - was argued out between people who knew Platonic philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philo
I can't offer anything else on this, all I know about it is what I just read in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
If everyone accepts that Plato's philosophy made a big impact on Christianity why couldn't also Plato's religion have an impact?
I didn't say it didn't. Though from my point of view, the quote from Lewis above (myth becoming fact) makes perfect sense.
Oh, sorry!
Well, the NT does 'telescope' the corporate and the individual in much of its imagery. There's the 'new man' image that the Apostle Paul uses in Ephesians, I think, which is probably the key epistle for a corporate ecclesiology, if I can put it that way.
So if the Church, made up of individuals, can be described as a 'Body' - and not just any body but the Body of Christ - then it's not a big jump to there being a single 'Bride' made up of separate individuals.
God is always personal. But Christianity is not an individualistic faith.
Although it's pre-figured in the Old Testament with the portrayal of Israel as a bride, so as a concept it wouldn't be completely alien to C1.
Regarding plato an element is that he set the shape of intellectual conversation at that time. Just as our debates are shaped by various more contemporary ideas and thinkers (whether we acknowledge it or not).
When Christianity spread into the Greek world of Platonic thought, which included immortality of the soul, the idea of the soul carrying on after the death of the body was incorporated into Christianity. None of that could have come from Jesus or his original followers.
Lewis was also a WW1 vet who stood by a promise to a fallen comrade that the survivor would take care of his friend’s parents. He was a lovely human being as well as a super brain.
@Martin54:
Nope mate. To be convinced you’d have to be willing to plough up preconceptions that you refuse to go near such as the nature of the Bible and the story told by the rocks that you are convinced do not lie.
Oh FFS don't try to raise the ridiculous deceased clown that is YEC. If we have to believe in that to accept the basic truth claims of Christianity then we're truly fucked because, frankly, it occupies the same plausibility space as a Flat Earth - something I've become increasingly aware of on social media recently, seeing exactly the same tactics used by FEs as I've observed for decades used by YECs. Hardly surprising - conspiracy theory science denial is conspiracy theory science denial wherever it wastes everyone's time.
Fortunately, as the vast majority of Christians in the modern world are well aware, we don't have to accept that load of old bollocks.
I'm not following. Are you saying that the intention of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis's_trilemma is not the words used in it?
One can be a lovely person and wrong.
Deluded seems like a more acceptable suggestion than madness.
(If not, what do you mean by “madness” ?)
To me the trilemma reads as if Lewis said Jesus was either God, the Devil or disabled - and he couldn’t possible have said anything wise or worth hearing if he were disabled so obviously that option can’t be right. Which I think is bollocks.
After them comes @Lamb Chopped
To which @Kof perfectly validly said, and reiterated, "So why can't he be "sincere, sane but wrong"?". As @Thomas Rowans later said, it's a false problem. Because he would have known the truth of what @Lamb Chopped said, but from at least the age of 12, and obviously as soon as could internalize what his mother told him, he knew otherwise. He deludedly knew that it was true that he was the son of God. He was an exceptionally gifted enlightened empathic person, like his mother, and learned, from her secretive ways, to hide what he was thinking from age twelve for eighteen years. He inherited many centuries of belief based on false or incomplete information.
@Lamb Chopped reprises the same point later. So do I. He was sane, good and not the Son of God.
@Lamb Chopped's “now that I’ve been forced to consider the possibility, i can see all sorts of ways this explanation (that Jesus is God) makes sense of a bunch of other phenomena.”, seconded by @betjemaniac, is logical based on the predicate. Of being forced to consider that Jesus is God. I have lost that compunction. Only scientific proof could bring it back. I wish it would. I do not regard the brilliant and decent people here, and people of my acquaintance like Rob Bell or Steve Chalke or John Polkinghorne as morons for not having lost it. If I believed still I'd be at Greenbelt desperate to meet my hero Brian McLaren. God. I weep for the loss. As a non believer I would still want to shake him by the hand, and burden him with my loss. He gave such substance to my faith. And I love Tony Campolo. I just encountered the love of man in my hall users. I raved at God after they'd gone. Unlike Him, they'll be back. Yes, it's all compelling as @Gamma Gamaliel says. And not enough to fix my multiply broken heart. Woe is me eh?
To @Lamb Chopped's "This particular delusion could not exist in the head of a first century Jew in Judea / Galilee in the first century without some pretty severe psychopathology undergirding it." multiply fallacious non sequitur, I say again, he was sane, good and not the Son of God, entirely natural, of his time, of a confluence of cultures the like of which, the intensity of which, was the greatest in history.
We are as good as we are evil, always have been. The evil is foul beyond belief. And the good obviously is too, that it has to be attributed to the supernatural as well. He was as good as we get, in his time. Which is far from perfect. Last year I read Philipp Meyer's astounding 'The Son'. It does the thin silver lining of good on our cumulonimbus of bad, on nature, all too well. When I say far from perfect I mean Jesus himself of course. He could only transcend his culture so far, even though it was further than any had gone before in any culture.
But I digress. We then get in to the why's and wherefor's of that cultural influence; I cut through that Gordian knot with goodwill. Not as deep red and down to the bone as Bart Ehrman does your preconceptions about the bible @MPaul. In my cultic days we ignorantly raged at the Shah of Persia for blasphemously entitling himself King of kings. Like Augustus' Son of God. Human trapping Jesus clothed himself in, in his belief based on false or incomplete information. What are my preconceptions that I refuse to go near mate? And please don't ruin that as you already have with yours about science. I'll turn a blind eye to that delusion if you can show me mine in my knowledge.
Well, I was going to wait until the thread was quiet, but it shows no signs of quiescing. So here I am.
There's clearly the implication of mental illness.
I'm not an expert on vocabulary from 1850s England but I'm not sure being deluded necessarily implies that one is mad on the level of imagining yourself to be a spoon.
Delusions are not really random and they tend to have some level of personal meaning. When people are manic, they often have connotations of believing yourself to be special in some way. Anyone who has worked in inpatient mental health is likely to have met someone claiming to be a god or in communication with a god at some point.
I don't think we would assume today that a deluded person was seriously and severely mentally ill, although I also see that claiming to be a god is quite a big claim to make.
We have many members of our SoF community with lived experience of mental health issues.
I was just remembering someone I once knew who had a diagnosed mental illness which included delusions. They were well loved, loving and capable of great insights. A really beautiful person, gone too soon.
I think we run into two equal and opposite errors with Lewis if we aren't careful. We either treat him as some kind of oracle or else shove him away in a draw marked '1950s'.
We tend to harness him for whatever our particular 'cause' might be. He's almost a Saint to some evangelicals even though he wasn't an evangelical by any manner of means.
The Orthodox co-opt him even though he wasn't Big O Orthodox either. As I've said, I'd like to see us extend the same courtesy to other Western Christian writers.
'Shadowlands' is a terrific drama but the reality of Lewis's relationship with Joy Davidson was far more prosaic, and indeed somewhat problematic from the position of traditional Christian ethics/morality, as understood in certain quarters.
His relationship with his fallen WW1 comrade's mother was almost certainly 'questionable' from the standpoint of traditional Christian morality. Most biographers seem to agree it was a sexual one.
I think his war-time promise was to look after his comrade's parent (singular), his mother, not parents (plural). She was a widow if I remember rightly.
Lewis also liked a pipe and a pint. He'd regularly sink 3 or 4 pints of ale at lunchtime then walk it off before resuming his afternoon engagements.
I say all this not to be salacious or Puritanical but to debunk some of the mythology that surrounds Lewis. Davidson came to the UK with the prime intention of engineering a relationship with Lewis whom she'd fallen in love with through his writings.
If a younger, vivacious and intelligent woman crossed the Atlantic to engineer a relationship with me, I'm not sure I'd have the willpower ro resist.
Ok. So what does this have to do with the 'trilemma'?
Not a great deal except that I suggest that there's a certain aura and 'authority' that's grown up around Lewis's writings that mirrors the mythology that's grown up around his life in popular hagiography.
I say that from within a Tradition that has oodles of popular hagiography.
With the best will in the world, I think @MPaul has fallen into the first trap. He's imbibed the popular mythology and the idea that Lewis was some selfless Saint. He was certainly an admirable man but like the rest of us he didn't float several inches above the ground.
Enough of this already.
Enough of the Young Earth Creationism too. I can't imagine Lewis went in for that.
Aye, as I covered somewhere hereabouts recently. Lewis wasn't original by 83 years and more.
If Jesus was convinced he was God in that culture, and was wrong, the delusion cannot be called anything but all-pervasive and life threatening. It clearly impacted every area of his life, and it appears to have been there from the beginning—no change or growth can be seen over the three years of records we have. He related to people in public teaching and in private healing and comfort as if he were God and the son of God the Father. He made public challenges like “Who of you accused me of any sin?” Of he is deluded, this is not an isolated delusion in an otherwise healthy life. This is clearly the master delusion of his whole existence.
I do not believe it is possible for any person to be that thoroughly deluded on a subject of such pervasive and overwhelming importance without showing signs of illness in the rest of good life—his teaching, his interactions with others, his actions. Specifically i consider it impossible to imagine a mere man who was at once so ill that he thought he was God (in first century Judaism) and at the same time conceived of his role as God as being consistently that of servant, caregiver, healer, and rescuer of others at the cost of his own life. That is a degree of light I wouldn’t expect to find in a perfectly healthy person, let alone one so intensely deluded—so wrong—as some of you are postulating.
And I, too, have worked with people under delusion. Obviously not to the extent a professional has. Their delusions never left them more functional than the rest of humankind.
The concept of Abraham’s Bosom as a place where the righteous dead await judgment could be found in Second Temple Judaism. That concept is mentioned in Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In that parable, Lazarus is described as being taken by the angels to Abraham’s Bosom, even though his body presumably remained to be buried. It is perhaps worth noting that it is Lazarus’s possible return from Abraham’s Bosom to the world of the living that is described as “rising from the dead.”
Influences from Babylonian, Greek and other cultures were definitely at play in Second Temple Judaism. And even before that, there is the story of the woman of Endor, who summoned Samuel from the dead for Saul. Given that Saul cannot see Samuel, it seems clear that Samuel appears as a spirit, not as a resurrected body.
So I think the claim that it's unlikely that Jesus would have had any concept of people dying and going to heaven, because to the Hebrews, body and soul were inseparable, is itself an unlikely claim. Such ideas could be found both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Jewish understandings of his time.
That said, and going back to how this started, I agree with @Lamb Chopped that it seems to me to be highly unlikely that a First Century Jew who, by all accounts, was observant and a student of the Torah and the prophets would claim to be divine as a result of some kind of syncretism.
Jesus had no mental health issues apart from transient, normal, ones. And his non-clinical delusion, i.e. his conviction, his enculturated and maternally nurtured belief, certainly killed him, he meant it to, he committed suicide by proxy, and it underpinned every breath he took. I don't go with your fallacy of non-belief in the slightest. Especially to oppose rational non-belief.
I too have worked with, and more, people under delusion. I've been one. But not in any clinical sense. Was married to one. Clinical. I certainly have clinical issues, which is why I have a clinical psychologist. But they have no bearing here, apart from every female in my family history (except my mother of course, who made me look like an introvert) saying "You're on the spectrum/autistic", "You have ADHD" (as does my son, diagnosed) from my daughter who is becoming a professional. And yep, I tick OCD & PTSD boxes big time.
Jesus didn't tick any of them or any other. He was one of the sanest people who ever lived. One of the best. One of the most emotionally intelligent. The best, the most we know of in fact. If he was for real, which I grant in all good will.
I agree. I don’t think Jesus was deluded but I do know that it is possible to have a severe delusion and carry on with your everyday life around it. I once spent a week having the delusion that I had murdered someone yet still managed to live a perfectly normal life, caring for my young sons, teaching my online students, etc. My husband didn’t even realise I was having a delusion. As doublethink says, my delusion was related to context; I had read a new story the day before and it became my story. I have also worked in mental health and have friends who have delusions due to various mental health challenges.
Oh, and I have ‘special powers’ when manic!
Conversely, I have also met people who experienced and communicated spiritual insights that occurred to them in the midst of their most acute phases of illness.
So a delusion can only be clinical?
There is no usage outside that?