Was Jesus Crazy When He Claimed to Be the Son of God?

When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Christ, chapter 8. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.

In my last post, we saw that there is convincing evidence that even the earliest material about Jesus showed that he was claiming to be God incarnate. That naturally raises the question whether Jesus was crazy when he made those assertions.

It’s true that people with psychological difficulties will claim to be someone they’re not - Jesus himself or the president of the United States or someone else famous - but psychologists don’t just look at what a person says. They’ll go much deeper than that.

They’ll look at a person’s emotions, because disturbed individuals frequently show inappropriate depression, or they might be intensely or violently angry, or perhaps they’re plagued with anxiety.

But look at Jesus: He never demonstrated inappropriate emotions. For instance, He cried at the death of His friend Lazarus - that’s natural for an emotionally healthy individual. But He got angry at times. True, but it was a healthy kind of anger at people taking advantage of the downtrodden by lining their pockets at the temple. He wasn’t just irrationally ticked off because someone was annoying Him; this was a righteous reaction against injustice and the blatant mistreatment of people.

Other deluded people will have misperceptions. They’ll think people are watching them or trying to get them when they’re not. They’re out of touch with reality. They misperceive the actions of other people and accuse them of doing things they have no intention of ever doing. Again, we don’t see this in Jesus. He was obviously in good contact with reality. He wasn’t paranoid, although He rightfully understood there were some very real dangers around Him.

Or people with psychological difficulties may have thinking disorders - they can’t carry on a logical conversation, they’ll jump to faulty conclusions, they’re irrational. We don’t see this in Jesus. He spoke clearly, powerfully and eloquently. He was brilliant and had absolutely amazing insights into human nature.

Another sign of mental disturbances is unsuitable behavior, such as dressing oddly or being unable to relate socially to others. Jesus’ behavior was in line with what would be expected, and he had deep and abiding relationships with a wide variety of people from different walks of life.

Furthermore, He was loving but didn’t let His compassion immobilize Him; He didn’t have a bloated ego, even though He was often surrounded by adoring crowds; He maintained balance despite an often demanding lifestyle; He always knew what He was doing and where He was going; He cared deeply about people, including women and children, who weren’t seen as being important back then; He was able to accept people while not merely winking at their sin; He responded to individuals based on where they were and what they uniquely needed.

What about the people who were directly interacting with Jesus? From their much closer vantage point, what did they see? John 10:20 tells us many Jews thought He was “demon possessed and raving mad.” First, that’s hardly a diagnosis by a trained mental health professional. Look at what prompted those words - Jesus’ moving and profound teaching about being the Good Shep-herd. They were reacting because His assertions about Himself were so far beyond their understanding of the norm, not because Jesus was truly mentally unbalanced.

And notice that others immediately challenged their comments in verse 21: “these are not the sayings of a man possessed by a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?” That’s significant because Jesus wasn’t just making outrageous claims about Himself; he was backing them up with miraculous acts of compassion like healing the blind.

If you claimed to be president that would be crazy - you'd have none of the trappings of the office, no Secret Service, no authority. But when the president claims to be the president, that’s not crazy, because he is the president and there would be plenty of confirming evidence of that.

Some challenge Jesus’ miracles as psychosomatic, the placebo effect. Often, psychosomatic healings take time; Jesus’ healings were spontaneous and immediate. Many times a person healed psychologically will have his symptoms return a few days later, but we don’t see any evidence of that here. And Jesus healed conditions like lifelong blindness and leprosy, for which a psychosomatic explanation isn’t very likely. On top of that, He brought people back from the dead - and death is not a psychologically induced state! Plus you have all of his nature miracles - the calming of the sea, turning water into wine. They defy naturalistic answers.

British author Ian Wilson raised the question whether Jesus convinced the weddings guests at Cana that he had transformed the water into wine through hypnosis. In fact, he discusses the possibility that Jesus may have been a master hypnotist, which could explain the supposedly supernatural aspects of His life. Perhaps Lazarus wasn’t dead but in a hypnotically induced trance. He could have even effectively conditioned the disciples to hallucinate his appearances for a predetermined period after his death. This even helps explain the reference in the gospels to Jesus’ inability to perform many miracles in His hometown of Nazareth - conceivably because the people would know He was no miracle worker and His “voodoo” would be ineffective on them.

While it’s a clever argument, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, there’s the problem of a whole bunch of people being hypnotized - not everyone is equally susceptible to hypnosis. Stage hypnotists will talk in a soothing voice to the audience and watch for people who seem to be responding. In a big group many people are resistant. When Jesus multiplied the bread and fish, there were 5,000 witnesses. How could He have hypnotized them all?

Second, hypnosis doesn’t generally work on people who are skeptics and doubters. So how did He hypnotize His brother James, who doubted Him but later saw the resurrected Christ? How did He hypnotize Saul of Tarsus, the enemy of Christianity who never even met Jesus until he saw him after His resur-rection? How did He hypnotize Thomas, who was so skeptical he wouldn’t believe in the Resurrection until he put his fingers in the nail holes in Jesus’ hands?

Third, concerning the Resurrection, hypnosis wouldn’t explain the empty tomb.

Fourth, look at the miracle of turning water into wine. Jesus never addressed the wedding guests.

Fifth, there was a healing by hypnosis for a boy with reptilian skin - it took five days after the hypnosis for the skin to fall off the boy’s left arm, and several more days for the skin to appear normal. The hypnotic success rate for dealing with other parts of his body over a period of several weeks was 50 to 95 percent. Compare that with Jesus healing ten lepers in Luke 17. They were instantaneously healed 100 percent. That’s not explainable merely by hypnosis. And neither is the man with a shriveled hand in Mark 3. Even if people were in a trance and merely thought his hand had been healed, eventually they would have found out the truth. Hypnosis doesn’t last a real long time.

Finally, the gospels record all sorts of details about what Jesus said and did, but never once do they portray Him as saying or doing anything that would suggest He was hypnotizing people.

Jesus was an exorcist. He talked to demons and cast them out of the people they supposedly possessed. But is it really rational to believe that evil spirits are responsible for some illnesses and bizarre behavior? Generally speaking, as Christians, from our theological beliefs, we accept that demons exist. And we live in a society in which many people believe in angels. They know there are spiritual forces out there, and it’s not a stretch to conclude that some might be malevolent.

Where you see God working, sometimes those forces are going to be more active, and that’s probably what was going on in the time of Jesus. There are psychologists/psychiatrists in clinical work that have said they have sometimes seen this, and these are skeptical people, not folks inclined to see a demon behind every problem.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote a bit about this in his book People of the Lie. People who deny the supernatural will find some way, no matter how far-fetched, to explain a situation apart from the demonic. They’ll keep giving medication, keep drugging the person, but he or she doesn’t get better. There are cases that don’t respond to normal medical or psychiatric treatment.

At the same time, we don’t want to be too quick to jump to a demonic conclusion when faced with a intractable problem. As C.S. Lewis put it, there are two equal and opposite errors we can fall into concerning demons: “One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased with both errors.”