Abstract
Louise Lawrence has produced a thoughtful and helpfully disturbing metacritical study of scholarly New Testament interpretation of topics and characters often associated with forms of madness, insanity. She is not, that is to say, in this book, interested in what the New Testament has to say about, or how it portrays mental illness and associated conditions; she is interested in ‘transgressing the archive’, questioning the way that interpretations of the New Testament texts by contemporary scholars contribute to reinforcing stereotypes about mental health, which in turn serve to define what is ‘normal behaviour’. She aims, that is to say, ‘to interrogate and expose the ways in which contemporary biblical interpretation can be positioned within broader Western cultural narratives, politics, ideologies and dynamics surrounding sanity, insanity and mental illness.’ She continues, ‘I aim to question under what structures and power conditions, certain individuals are defined as mad, irrational or insane and to ask whose interests such labelling serves.’ (pp. 3–4)
After an introductory chapter, Lawrence offers various case studies: of the policing of New Testament studies by categorising scholars as psychologically abnormal (Morton Smith); of the use of notions of autism in relation to Nicodemus; of madness narratives relating to the Canaanite Woman and the Pythian slave girl; of ‘gate-keeping’ strategies used to protect Jesus and Paul from being stigmatised as mad or insane; and of readings of Mark with a Hearing Voices Network Group who take an affirmative stance towards their auditory experiences. The book concludes with reflection on ‘keeping open[ing]minds in biblical interpretation’.
An example may help to show how revealing such case studies may be, how she answers her own (Foucauldian) question about power and interest; and why New Testament scholars more interested in the first century than in their own social and cultural entanglement in the 21st century should perhaps think again.
The chapter on ‘gatekeeping’ looks at the ways Jesus and Paul as normative figures for Christians are portrayed as ‘normate’ or, at least, protected against possible negative stereotyping. Gatekeeping is a term taken from media and communication studies which looks at the management processes by which individuals are presented to the public. It refers specifically to the ‘strategies of selecting and constructing information for others’, including the moulding of an audience’s worldviews about an individual: ‘information that gets through all the gates can become part of people’s social reality, whereas information that stops at a gate generally does not’. Where psy-discourses are concerned:
constructions of ‘abnormal experience, cognition and behaviour’ as disease and/or disorder, both medical and/or metaphorical are pejoratively projected onto figures presumed deviant, errant or tyrannical to underscore and account for their perceived social, religious, cultural and political aberrations.[…] Such projections often serve to distinguish ‘negative’ forms of identity from more positive modes which, at least in the West, have traditionally prized rationality, logic, sanity, control, propositional knowledge and pragmatism.’ (pp. 97–98).
Lawrence looks first at Albert Schweitzer’s little noticed The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, which is an attack on psychiatric studies of Jesus of the early 20th century. Schweitzer strongly rejects the view that Jesus’ exorcisms, messianic expectancy and hopes for the dawning of the kingdom, were evidence of psychological disturbance justifying labelling him as a ‘psychic degenerate’, a ‘paranoid psychotic’ and a ‘religious paranoid’. They were rather typical of beliefs and behaviours in his own day and therefore, ‘in no rational sense evidence of mental disease’. Thus Jesus emerges as ‘a sane man, well-balanced and able to give direction and guidance.’ (Marshall and Poling, quoted p. 104). Schweitzer’s attack successfully kept such works of psychobiography at bay for most of the century.
More recently, though, in a neo-liberal age, other works have appeared which attempt to give an account of Jesus’s psychology, which present him as familiar with some of the mental health problems which are familiar to many: stress, depression, anxiety—familiar, yet possible to overcome. John Miller’s Jesus at Thirty, draws freely on notions of ‘mid-life crisis’. He claims that Joseph’s death in Jesus’ youth had a profound effect on Jesus’ identity leading to tensions within the family, which were finally resolved as Jesus eventually achieved ‘peace and wholeness, recognising he had found a heavenly father’. The model explicitly used here is Daniel Levinson’s The Seasons of a Man’s Life, which identifies 30 as an ‘age of transition, where anxiety and self-doubt arise, though also as one where self-recognition and sufficiency are developed.’ As Lawrence comments, ‘Levinson’s theory placed the neo-liberal male body (productive, effective and profitable) within a cycle of wider events in the individual’s life.’ And it is this model of age-related crisis, predicated on a neo-liberal vision of the body and mind, which is ‘overtly plotted onto Jesus. Jesus, inflected in this framework, becomes representative of “common” human psychological experiences in able(ist) neoliberal bodies and minds. Most crucially, Jesus ultimately does not submit to psychopathology: rather, he triumphs as a functioning, neoliberal ideal male, emerging from his crisis point as a much stronger individual.’ (p. 106)
It has long been said that those who write lives of Jesus often project their own ideas of selfhood onto him: ‘looking down the well of history and seeing their faces reflected at the bottom’. And it is hard, in one way, to see how a historian can avoid the use of contemporary ideas of selfhood in attempting to bring a figure from the first century to life for her contemporary readers. Anthropological studies, looking at contemporary societies which are radically different from ours and arguably closer to those of first-century rural Galilee may help to suggest alternative models, but the interpretative task remains. How to relate such accounts to the world of the contemporary interpreter. What Lawrence’s study seeks to unmask is the way in which such interpretations reflect and often re-enforce contemporary social and political projects which seek to shape society in the interests of a particular group.
Thus her book offers a valuable service to contemporary interpreters. It should help to sensitise us all to the ways in which we may, wittingly or unwittingly, serve the interests of those who have their own projects for shaping and controlling our world. And such knowledge in turn may open interpreter’s eyes, if need be, to the counter-cultural elements in the Jesus’ tradition. Schweitzer’s portrayal of Jesus as messianic prophet, exorcising and looking for a radical renewal of the world, hardly points to a portrayal of him as someone who neatly fits in with the contemporary rational norms of his society, at least as these were purveyed by the Romans and their collaborators in first century Palestine. The rub, inevitably, comes when we attempt to draw out the implications of such analogies as we may find between, say, millenarian figures in colonial Polynesia, what we can construct of Jesus’ role in first-century Palestine and contemporary forms of revolt and resistance to neo-liberal forms of post-colonialism. The great virtue of the book is that it pushes us to continue to ask these questions, to move beyond a ‘purely’ historical reconstruction of the lives and aims of first-century figures like Paul and Jesus and to keep seeking for interpretations which can challenge contemporary notions of selfhood and identity.