St Paul's DArk Secrets

Psychosis and Religious Delusions

By: Suresh A. Shenoy

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

When I published Paul’s Cracked Mirror: A Faction as ebook, it was clear to me through close-reading of the Epistles of Paul that he was gravely ill with paranoia querulans, or with vexatious paranoia. It is only on completing the research for my ebook Nero’s Minions that implications of Paul’s paranoia querulans became clearer to me. Nero’s Minions took me through a circuitous route. From Flavius Josephus in his Judaean War, I had learnt how important it was for a subversive author to resort to structural irony without being noticed and penalized for it. Josephus expressed his attitudinal disjunction towards his benefactors, the Flavians, whom he despised secretly, by using the strategy of ‘genres disjunction’ in his War narrative. This strategy allowed Josephus to use the genre of classical history in the foreground text praising the Flavians as heroes and a five-Act Senecan tragedy in the background text condemning them as villains. Genres disjunction was also discovered in the Gospels, with the Gospel genre in the foreground text while in the background classical histories and the Homeric monomyths. I was aware that there was more than structural irony in the Gospels. It took me into the ironic subtext in the foreground texts in the Gospels themselves. What I discovered there was startling. Mark undermined the divinity of Christ, the miracles and the resurrection as untrue. He targeted the Apostles and the disciples as unworthy of their calling. Matthew in addition rejected the incarnation, the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection and the ascension. Luke wrote a parody of the Gospel and John continued to attack the Apostles as mercenary shepherds. Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians suggested why the Corinthians had rebelled against the ‘Bishops and the Deacons’, ignoring they were successors of the Apostles. The Evangelists shared with the Corinthians the rebellion against their contemporary ‘Bishops and Deacons’ and attacked their alleged source of power and authority in the Church, the Apostles and Jesus Christ himself. This transference of the current problems into the past life of Jesus was the strategy of narrative analepsis well-known in the first century. The Evangelists condemned the abusive practices of ‘the Bishops and Deacons’ and questioned their legitimacy as the leaders. Their Church made up of the Gentile Christians as the foundation of Paul of Tarsus was seen as illegitimate. Further Clement’s Epistle indicated that the deaths of Peter and Paul were due to factional rivalry between Peter’s Judaic Christians and Paul’s Gentile Christians. Luke in the Acts had described the hostility of James towards Paul, and Paul’s aggression towards Peter. By character, Paul was vengeful. Moral bounds did not matter to him. This is where his vexatious paranoia came into play. On the murder of James in A.D. 63, Paul a free man in Rome in 62 decided to settle scores with Peter. In July of 64, the Great Fire destroyed sections of Rome set off by Nero’s henchmen. Nero was looking for scapegoats whom Paul and his faction supplied. Tacitus told us in his Annales that Christians framed other Christians for the arson. By linking Paul’s Epistles, the Acts of Apostles, Clement’s Epistle and the Annales of Tacitus we have the evidence that Paul had his revenge on Peter and his Christians. Luke told us a deal about Paul’s mental health in his nine discourses placed on Paul’s lips. Luke also told us what Procurator Festus had thought of Paul as ‘mad’ and ‘insane’. Luke’s cues in the nine discourses in the Acts and the five personal Epistles of Paul prove that he was psychotic. Paul’s paranoia affected more than his mental health. His faith, the idea of God, the divine Jesus Christ, of celibacy, of misogyny, of infallibility, of fundamentalism and the rest were not merely tainted by paranoia. They were the expressions of psychosis as so many delusions.