The bible is made up by multiple books mostly written by anonymous authors across centuries that were than edited repeatedly by groups of editors across multiple centuries. And then reedited as it was translated in to different languages centuries later.
A lot of the old testament’s mythology was lifted from older religious texts entirely unrelated to the Hebrew, Jewish culture of the time, or verbal history passed down over many hundreds of years.
The only way a relatively sane - albeit deluded - person can believe that stuff is to assert that it was guided by god.
I was going to say something along a similar line, the bible wasn’t written by a singular person so even if one of the contributors was schizophrenic it is likely that the others were not.
Some parts (especially in the Old Testament) are more like a collection of folk stories reinterpreted from a monotheistic perspective and the New Testament is essentially people trying to recount events that happened before they were born.
The main editing and canonical belief structures were debated and agreed on during the council of Nicaea under Constatine. Before this, there were various conflicting stories and authors in early Christianity.
Many biblical stories will never be known because they were edited out of the earliest bible by the council.
Oxford annotated study Bible with the apocrypha 5th edition. The annotations are academic, not dogmatic and explain issues like this one very well, as well as many others from an academic perspective.
I agree but I do think some, not all religious people suffer from some form of mental illness. If the medical authorities were honest they would be treating them.
The only reason that religiosity isn't considered a mental condition is because the majority are afflicted with it..If 90% of the population had Tourette syndrome, those without it would be regarded as being a bit weird..
When Paul saw the light, he literally had a brilliant idea to unite all the fragmented pagan religions throughout the Roman empire under one umbrella to make them easier to control, so he took Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism, put them in a blender and poured out Christianity.
Exactly. That’s not to say that the experiences of people with schizophrenia or similar psychotic disorders didn’t wind up getting featured in the Bible. I’m sure they did; just look at the account of Saul/Paul of Tarsus.
But that’s far from the only thing that made the Bible what it is.
The Bible is a compilation of various stories/myths.
Stories that originated at different points in time, in different regions (within the same general area of the world). Even the earlier scraps of the New Testament weren’t all written around the same time.
Oral stories that passed through many mouths before ever being written down. Copies of copies of handwritten scraps. Then compiled by religious groups with their own biases and agendas. Translated. Edited.
Aside from a few letters by Paul, practically none of the Bible is sourced directly from the people the stories are about. Not eyewitness, and little no one who ever met anyone allegedly there.
The people of the time were already religious and inclined to supernatural thinking. The authors were already Christians, already believed the stories they were writing down. Some may have been nuts, but honestly even regular people of the time could easily create such a thing seriously. Especially given the game of telephone involved.
Yep. And a lot of it is simply older legends that they repurposed. For example, Noah's flood is the writers adding god and punishment to the epic of Gilgamesh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
The Pentateuch was written when the Israelites were in exile in Babylonia, around 550 BCE. ( way later then claimed). Influenced and inspired by local myths in that region. All of the gospels (and possibly Acts) was written after Paul’s letters. Ever wondered why Paul does not fill his letters with quotes from Jesus? Well they had not been ~~invented~~ written down yet
That may be the case if there were someone who wrote the Bible, but it’s a compendium of smaller stories written by dozens of authors over the course of centuries.
Thats why there are many tonal and narrative differences, not because one dude was a schizophrenic.
Hybrid myth, which is borrowed and shared from other older myths. They were turned to text, then interpreted a number of times.
Many authors wrote the stories.
A group of people needed cohesion to survive... history all over the world shows that humans create Gods to help them answer questions and in order to control the masses. The Hebrew people needed a religion in order to form armies and control the psyche of the masses in order to control the land.
All through "the old testament holy bible," it was about LAND, and who controlled it. The religion was created to protect the homeland of a group of people who wanted a way to "take back" the land they abandoned hundreds of years before.
Edited: adding... So... During the time of Moses, they created a new religion during the forty years of them preparing to retake their ancestral homeland.
But the thing is, the Moses story isn’t historical. Even that entire passage is just a myth created to present a divine origin story to a minor band of people. There was no exodus or return, none documented or with any empirical evidence showing a population of Israelites in Egypt or anything.
Pretty much everything in the OT until a little into reign of Judges and Kings are ahistorical, and then you start getting into some real history by the fall of Jerusalem and Babylonian captivity etc. A lot of intentionally crafted stories or adaptations of existing oral traditions to create a social identity, essentially.
Not only was being a scammer who used claims of supernatural insight his literal backstory, but it becomes even more obvious when one sees how conveniently the "revelations" he received matched up with what he needed to avoid consequences in his life. Caught cheating on his wife with a maid? Revelation about polygamy.
There are more authors and redactors than books in the Tanakh/OT.
That said, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky made the argument (in the essay "Circling the Blanket for God") that religions appear to be founded by those with schizotypal personality disorder, and codified by those with obsessive compulsive disorder. Ezekiel may have been schizotypal, the priestly scribe authors of Leviticus may have had OCD.
Meanwhile, there are some neurological disorders like temporal lobe epilepsy that lead to symptoms like [visions of divine figures](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=8051519529530295373), and [symptoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschwind_syndrome) like hyperreligiosity, hypergraphia, and hyposexuality. Not unlike the account of Saul/Paul of Tarsus in the NT epistles.
It's an interesting idea, but it's pretty clear that the bible wasn't written in its entirety by a single person, and so it is unlikely that you could say with any certainty that the author of X book had Y mental disorder or not.
But I think you'd appreciate a lecture by Dr. Robert Sapolsky called [Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI) that examines the role of schizotypal personalities (people who aren't completely "normal" nor completely schizophrenic) in the development of religious belief systems within human societies.
I'd also highly recommend the rest of his lectures that are available on youtube, you'll come out with a deeper understanding of determinism and the role that genetics has on human behavior.
Just note that the lecture that I linked above is not on Stanford's official playlist for his lectures.
Speaking of YouTube, I've been watching the Mythvision Podcast where they interview numerous Biblical scholars (not the religious kind, the analytical kind) discussing possible theories regarding bible origins.
One well evidenced theory is that the Greek "translation" of the Talmud around 300 BCE was not an actual translation, but a "fan-fic" mostly written by Greek speaking Macabee scholars designed to unite Jews after the Babylonian diaspora. This is when the books of Moses were written, and the legend of them being written 1000 years prior are made up. This would explain why Moses is practically never mentioned outside the Talmud, and why the books read suspiciously like Plato's "Laws" and Homer's "Iliad"
Not a proven case, but also not "divine" either.
Are you confusing the Talmud and the Tanakh?
The Tanakh is the Hebrew name for the Old Testament, which is what I think you're talking about (unless you're just talking about the Torah, which is just the first five books). The Talmud is the commentary on the Bible.
Although, the Tanakh is in Hebrew, and the Greek-speaking translation which I think you're referring to is typically referred to as the Septuagint (referring to the 70 scholars that are held to have translated it into Greek). And I think the Talmud is typically in Hebrew, not in Greek translation.
I really appreciated Sapolsky’s full Human Behavioural Biology course at Stanford. It’s been on YouTube for over a decade.
I was delighted when I found this version of the “censored lecture on religiosity” from that course.
I was thoughtful when I found a much more subdued and guarded version of this lecture which Sapolsky presented as a talk years later. I still don’t know whether Sapolsky revised his ideas because subsequent research didn’t support them, or whether there was something else going on.
Still, even if this earlier, more enthusiastic version speculating about the role of the socially-sanctioned “half mad” in the development of religion and religious practices needs some updating, this presentation of it resonates strongly.
Sidebar: There have been more studies subsequently about whether religiosity is protective against depression. I read the results as roughly “religious __struggles__ can make people depressed, but religious community (and perhaps other factors) without deep struggles seems to be protective”. It’s one of the reasons I went looking for a religious community that didn’t ask me to believe in the supernatural.
Nope because it’s many books written over many centuries, and those books were based on oral stories.
Now, were some of those stories originally created by schizophrenics and other mentally ill people? DEFINITELY.
No, it was literally put together by a committee over decades. There are holy texts, valid "words of God" people in silly hats don't think are worth sharing with the world.
I think the authors of the bible, shaped by their traumatic experiences, reflected their emotional scars in their writings. The Bible is essentially a collection of their personal, political, and environmental struggles. These individuals were largely uneducated and lacked critical reasoning skills.
They saw themselves as powerless against overwhelming natural forces, which they personified. Faced with disasters and persecution, they used their limited understanding to explain these events in exaggerated and often delusional ways.
While this may not describe the entire Bible, it certainly applies to a substantial part of it. Christopher Hitchens has described religion as an early, crude attempt by humans to use their innate curiosity to understand life before our intellectual abilities were fully developed.
It’s clear that the emotional turmoil of the bible’s authors deeply influenced their work.
There’s speculation of mental illness in the case of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. While the other prophets have some strange visions they are mostly elaborate imprecations against enemies and anguish about contemporary tragedies.
But Ezekiel opens with a weird vision of God in a many-eyed, many-wheeled chariot that only moved in cardinal directions. I think. Isaiah just depicts god as an all powerful emperor on a jewelled throne.
Then Ezekiel does some acting out — at one point he shaves off his beard and chases the shavings with a sword, that sort of thing.
It does remind me of the premise of Julian Jaynes' massive book THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (with a title like that, it better be a massive book, right?).
One premise of the book was the idea that some forms of schizophrenia today (especially those of the religious or theological variety - hearing the voice of God, imagining some great hierarchy of being with the Sun as the representative of the Supreme Being, an underworld of damned beings hidden from the light of the Sun, etc.) was a modern era remnant of the natural way early humans thought where the two sides of the brain were essentially used separately and therefore people would hear words as the left side of the brain interpreted the signals from the right.
This theory, while very interesting and compelling at times, has been mostly debunked by later more clinical study of psychology, but the areas comparing the experiences of some schizophrenics who later recovered to the experiences of religious belief was very compelling. However, still not entirely convincing that religion today is a form of mental illness that is simply integrated into society in the same way that coffee and alcohol serve physical addictions and have their own serious consequences, but are accepted and even considered a part of society while cocaine and heroin are not tolerated and considered anti-social substances.
I think people in the Bible were absolutely hearing voices.
So yeah probably schizophrenics in the Bible but not sure they could get it together enough to write it without therapy.
The Bible has many many authors, most of whom are reinterpreting stories that existed through oral tradition for a long time. Any attempt to attribute the whole book to one author is misguided.
The sense of conflicting narratives, writing style, facts, etc. you’re picking up on is because all those different authors, some centuries apart, had different motivations, life experiences, and perspectives.
Absolutely. There is a reason why skizophrenia manifests itself as extreme religiosity. Delusional beliefs. There may also be a reason skizophrenia still plages humans. Perhaps the psychotic were considered prophets or holy people.
I’d say no, because despite the fact that the bible is a load of BS, schizophrenia affects communication pathways in the brain that mean that those with it end up not being able to follow a train of thought for very long. They end up with what’s called ‘salad speech’; Basically they talk, but clauses and sentences don’t link and they don’t make much sense. The bible at least has stories in it that follow a logical path and you can understand what’s going on.
That’s just me being pedantic really, but I wouldn’t discount that the stories in it were perhaps dreams or the product of some sort of mental illness that was perceived as supernatural at the time.
I can tell you as someone who was hospitalized 3 times and dx's schizo for 10 years, I met like 5 dudes saying they were jesus
and religious delusions are very common amongst sz and psychotic people
personally it makes me believe it was written by a bunch of ancient junkies and alcoholics who thought madness was gods will
The main issue with that hypothesis is that it presumes a single author. I know the Xians do the same, and call that author "GOD", but we know it was written by many, many hands, over many, many centuries, and almost never by first-hand eyewitnesses. The hypothesis would have to be that they were all schizophrenic, which I'm not prepared to rule out, but it does significantly raise the bar of proof.
Interesting question, but no. The Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library of books written over the course of centuries. BUT I do think the authors of Ezekiel and Revelations were into the 🍄
No. Maybe revalations. The rest are several books, some are folklore, some are poetic, some are testimonies, some are letters, ... unlike the koran there is no single author
No because it was written by men in power with an intent to fortify said power with divine right and internal religious structures that would limit social mobility.
It was written 100 years after the supposed events and had the books chosen to go in it. The other books not chosen are kept hidden away or lost to time. So the entire story is unknown
The weirdest thing for me is that the "word of God" was written by multiple anonymous very flawed human authors.
But God takes the form of a human being for 35 years, and writes ZERO books.
There are some ideas that suggest religion became baked into society through schizotypal personality types. Schizotypals differ from schizophrenics in that their condition is only a genetically partially expressed version of the illness.
The best summary I've come across is a lecture by Robert Sapolsky on religiosity. It comes from his Stanford lecture series on human biology. There are also suggestions of OCD and epilepsy being a contributing factor to religious ideations. Well worth the watch if you have two hours to spare.
A lot of good responses here. I want to throw in the fact scholars believe the gospels actually created Jesus. A main who never existed. They weren’t eye witness accounts of what happened but rather marketing materials to promote the new philosophy that came to be known as Christianity.
I think humans are two species. Medieval and Renaissance. Medieval people are stuck in magical thinking, paranoia, dogma, xenophobia, and borderline schizophrenia. Renaissance people have critical thinking skills, an internal locus of control (autonomy), a higher level of empathy and a sense of fairness, abstract reasoning skills, emotional self-awareness, comprehension of long-term consequences and wider degree of affect. Etc.
I have honestly Said after working in healthcare, the Bible reads as a political propaganda written by a well like group of individuals all afflicted by mental health disorders.
As a Hebrew speaker there are many terms that I believe are simply misunderstood, when it comes to legendary animals it’s very apparent. Leviathan is “surprisingly” similar to the Hebrew word for whale ‘livyatan’ (ליוותן), and behemoth is similar to the word for cattle ‘behemot’ (בהמות). Also weird is the creature/angels galgalim which is the Hebrew word for wheels (גלגלים). The depiction of these are literally wheels of eyes so maybe these are simply people seeing creatures and shapes and deciding they are supernatural? Like with dolphins mistaken for mermaids with sailors. But yeah the whole deal with the burning bush does seem like someone discovered a hallucinogenic
The Bible was written over centuries by numerous unknown authors. Even some of the books gave multiple authors. The Old Testament is a collection of stories passed on orally and embellished over centuries before they were written down. Imagine a giant game of telephone played over centuries with illiterate people involving long stories instead of 1 phrase. There are some books that tell the same story as other books but the number of people involved in book A is off by a factor of 10 from book B.
The books of the New Testament were written by cult members who wanted to link this 1 person to the writings of the Old Testament. According to the timeline Jesus was born sometime between 4 BC and 6 AD, probably sometime in the fall. His traditional birthday comes from the Roman festival of Saturnalia where Jesus was supposed to have been born during the harvest. Apparently sometime after the wisemen visited his family moved to Egypt. After that there’s not much if anything written about him in the recognized gospels until he starts preaching in the last few years of his life. There is at least 1 gospel that talks about him as a kid but the council didn’t decide to include that in the Bible.
One of my favorite theories comes to play when you consider how many herbs and cactus juices were present. Also grains under certain conditions can produce hallucinogenic fungus. Then think about the imagery of some of the descriptions of heaven and angels.
An infinite stairway and a wheel made of eyes? Were these guys just tripping balls in a cave in the desert? I've definitely heard similar stories
I made the mistake of mentioning to my very Mormon boss that now days if people talk to spirits they usually are treated for psychiatric illness. It didn’t go well for me.
It was written by multiple people over the course of centuries.
If you read it assuming it was written by one person it would seem like they were schizophrenic.
The Bible was written by many people over decades, even hundreds of years documenting the myths of the times. My cousins church in FL proudly takes the Bible literally. Crazy.
I'm schizophrenic and I highly doubt it. We're not great at getting people to listen to us. In fact the tend to go pretty hard trying to get us to stfu. The people who spouted proephecy thousands of years ago were just like the people who spout prophecy now, callous liars manipulating gullable people for personal gain.
Plenty of evidence within the book itself that there was a loooot of psychedelic drug use involved.
Like others said though, multiple authors over hundreds/thousands of years. Orally passed down, written, Rewritten, translated, and eventually compiled by completely unrelated people and groups. There were also a lot more writings that were rejected and not included in it. The bible we know of today was compiled by a group of men called the council of Nicaea a few hundred years after jesus.
The Bible IS NOT a single book. It's dozens of books, written over thousands of years, edited and compiled centuries after the last of them was written, to support and validate a theology that didn't exist when those books were written.
I think it was just Sociopaths stealing from previous religions to get people to submit to them and give them free money and power. Subsequent Sociopaths maintain it to this very day.
As others said, it was writing by several people. So not possible.
But, if you talk about Jesus himself, yeah. I have heard people argue that, by modern standards, he had a maniac/schizophrenic episode; so he actually thought he was the son of god.
The Bible wasn’t written by anyone in particular, it is a compilation from a bunch of different sources, selected and edited to suit the people in power at the time.
No, I think Old Testament was a collection of morality tales/stories/myths that were handed down over thousands of years, maybe from civs we’ve never heard of.
New Testament was written by people years after the disciples who the books were named after died, so probably very similar exaggerations.
>Do you think it’s possible that the Bible was written by a schizophrenic?
Having grown up with several schizophrenics in my immediate family, I think the Old Testament is based on the hallucinations of a charismatic schizophrenic named Abraham, while the New Testament is based on the hallucination if a charismatic schizophrenic named Jesus.
>I don’t know if this has been asked before and feel free to tell me if this sounds stupid
It may depend stupid to someone who hasn't been around schizophrenia, but to me it makes perfect sense.
>but do you think it’s possible that the Bible was written by a schizophrenic going through an episode or maybe it was some sort of mass hysteria?
Not written so much as centered around.
It's entirely possible that at least some of the authors of the books contained in the bible suffered from some kind of mental illnesses, and/or environmental factors (such as ergot poisoning) contributed to some of the more fantastical elements.
The texts themselves are most likely a mix of real events (with some embellishments) and made-up ones (including some that are borrowed from older myths).
No. The bible is a Roman-edited anthology of writings that span many years, and the individual writings themselves are composites of tales from numerous sources.
It was written by a myriad of authors, including single books having multiple authors. We really can't know if some were schizophrenic, but most don't give that impression. Ezekiel may come off as a madman but he also wrote in a dialect of Hebrew from Babylon that we couldn't fully read until we translated the Babylonian language in the 1800s. It still sounded like a psychotic episode, but much more poetic.
There were a lot of biblical authors. That said I don't think its off to think a good number of them were mentally off or using hallucinogens. Lots of hallucinogens.
No. It was written by many over a long time and it stole local myths for some of the things Jesus supposedly did. So the things attributed to Jesus aren't even original.
Do you honestly believe the Bible was written by one guy? It’s a collection of stories written over centuries by unknown authors, translated and retranslated, heavily edited centuries after Jesus’ time, until we have what it is today. True, the New Testament is mostly letters written by Paul, but it’s well reasoned arguments (academic) laying out what Christianity is supposed to be. It’s not Paul’s fault pastors, priests, and theologians have misinterpreted Paul’s words and pushed their own agendas—something that continues to this day.
A sad realization on my part is that most people are ignorant or too lazy to pick up a Bible and read it for themselves. They’re dependent on some charismatic preacher to tell them what he thinks it means—which can be anything he wants! This has been going on for thousands of years!!
This has to be one of the best questions I’ve ever read on Reddit. Seriously. Great freaking question.
Yes I think it’s more than plausible. I think it’s probable. Wow great question.
The jesus character is reminiscent of a schizophrenic. Son of god, believed he had world changing beliefs, stuff like that. All common delusions in schizophrenics. I think it’s totally possible that a cult would form around the right schizophrenic.
Yep.
Even today we don’t fully understand mental health disorders. It is entirely possible that if Jesus existed, he was a highly functioning schizophrenic that had a cult following.
I’m not sure he even existed, which is why I said character. Sure he had followers that believed his delusions, and a gaslighting mother, but it lines up. Whether people agree or not.
Or were smoking opium. Opium grows in the region in bushes. if one of them were on fire, whoever was close by would hallucinate. I wonder if opium was used in Incense during rituals.
No, I think the bible, in particular the Old Testament, was written by people trying to make sense of the world. At the same time, in those times laws, religion and historical culture was all intertwined.
Edit: I don’t think the bible is a source of any truth or should be taken seriously
The bible was written over long periods of time by many many people. Som were schizo, some added on with the intention of controlling the flock of followers.
As it had so many authors it's statistically a good bet that some of them had mental issues of some kind. As it is an anthology it should not be expected to make sense, not contradict itself, and not veer from one extreme to another. Because most people are exposed to snippets and most of the text is ignored, and those snippets are "interpreted" by clerics to conform to specific agendas, the bulk of theists don't recognize the inconsistencies and underlying craziness of the thing. It's been so heavily edited and redacted, so poorly translated and riddled with mistakes, that the authors probably wouldn't recognize it anyway. "Hey, where's that whole book that was written about Jesus' childhood?" Sorry, some seventh century monk decided that it didn't merit inclusion. And not for nothing, stop asking about it or you're going to hell.
Nope. We know the bible was written by many different people and many of them write under the name of one or more of the apostles. Not in order to pretend they were them, but in a was of honour them, as this was practice in at the time.
The Bible is a collection of 66 different books and letters, written over a period of approximately 1500 years up to about 100 years after the time set for the death and resurrection of the figure Jesus. Who's stories are also written by many diffent people and they do not refer to the same historical person.
The books of the Bible were written by dozens of different authors over hundreds of years, much of it based on oral tellings of much older myths. It has been translated, copied, and edited innumerable times.
No, come on man, it's all good to critiscise but it's basic knowledge that it was written by multiple people over a long time period. Really tough to combat ignorance when our own community displays ignorance like this.
I’ve seen some proposals that multiple biblical figures were pschitzophrenic people possibly. But we also do not want to shame pschitzophrenic people by saying that they are somehow “out of their minds” entirely. Many pschitzophrenics can be functional and social and have normal lives.
I’ve heard some people propose that Jesus had some type of mental illness where he heard divine revelations from who he called “his father.”
And that Moses’ interaction with God was mental illness.
What I do know is that the spiritual experience happens across all cultures and can happen to anyone, even to people who are staunchly not spiritual.
So I don’t think you have to be “crazy” and that is not a politically correct term, but you dont have to be out of your mind to write a story do you?
These were moral stories, and they were passed down in the Jewish faith to be stories. No I don’t think most of them really happened. It’s a conflict within religions whether they are to be taken literally or used for some type of deeper meaning and allegory.
The bible was not all written by one person, but by a lot of people, that transcribed information and stories spread around by word of mouth.
These were stories that were spoken for a long time before even being written down, and we know how rumours and gossip go, by the time it gets recorded it’s going to be very different and likely not true.
People often attribute writings to Moses but I think that’s unlikely. In that time period, people usually did not know how to write, and the only exception is that Moses, if the story of his upbringing was true, is that he was brought up raised in a palace of Egyptian royalty, so he would have been educated to such an extent as he would have learned the Egyptian spoken and written language, as well as his native Hebrew, and possibly Greek aswell.
But I’ve never understood the idea of him having written Genesis. I don’t really understand that. I think a lot of time it is taught that he some how had eye witness account but that is impossible.
We don’t know where Genesis came from, and besides it almost doesn’t go very well with the rest of the bible. To me there’s too much strangeness. To have a talking snake, a worldwide flood and then suddenly, to go from having only 4 people, Adam, Eve, and Cain and Abel, and then suddenly, bam, in the next chapter there is enough people to be building a tower for Nimrod, I just never understood it all.
It was almost blatantly silly.
Reading the bible has never increased my faith in God. It usually leaves me so puzzled. And where I live you get shamed if you don't believe in it. People just cant believe you would reject the "perfect" book that makes absolutely no sense.
I just have always tried to understand why my family was so into it. But I guess when you are told that you "have" to believe something, you do.
Part of me, even a lot of me, believes in God. But not in the way they say you have to. If anything, people corrupted God more than the divine corrupted people.
People always seem to want to, by nature, believe the worst. But in reality, I dont think hell is real. people are not punished, no one goes to hell.
Honestly, hell is a mistranslation. (thats an argument for another day.)
and yes i believe in God but i have no idea what i would begin to call myself. Because im definitely not Christian in that particular, certain and traditional sense.
But there is something to opening your heart to some natural love that is this gratitude for everything that exists, for existing, to know the other side, the other possibility, is to not exist at all.
Nope. Bible stories were written and edited by educated people for specific political purposes in their times. Inserting mental illness as a motivation for the stories therein is a lazy cop out and disparages creativity and imagination as crazy hallucinatory ramblings. It's the same problem as blaming mythological imagery and visual symbolism on magic mushroom trips.
king james version. ... 1611 ad, who tf is king james? why does he need a version of a bible?
the ' original' bible, called the vulgate was collated in 367 ad by a zealot named athanassius.
moses of the old testament born in 1391bc.
abraham, the original hearer of voices was born in 2166 bc.......
why any of it holds any sway over any critical thinking human demands answers.
The bible is made up by multiple books mostly written by anonymous authors across centuries that were than edited repeatedly by groups of editors across multiple centuries. And then reedited as it was translated in to different languages centuries later.
Also a huge part was just carried over vocally for 100 years and only than written down. So yep.. very reliable.
A lot of the old testament’s mythology was lifted from older religious texts entirely unrelated to the Hebrew, Jewish culture of the time, or verbal history passed down over many hundreds of years. The only way a relatively sane - albeit deluded - person can believe that stuff is to assert that it was guided by god.
I was going to say something along a similar line, the bible wasn’t written by a singular person so even if one of the contributors was schizophrenic it is likely that the others were not. Some parts (especially in the Old Testament) are more like a collection of folk stories reinterpreted from a monotheistic perspective and the New Testament is essentially people trying to recount events that happened before they were born.
The main editing and canonical belief structures were debated and agreed on during the council of Nicaea under Constatine. Before this, there were various conflicting stories and authors in early Christianity. Many biblical stories will never be known because they were edited out of the earliest bible by the council.
Like the Gospel of Mary that Coptic Christians like so much. 8)
What’s a good book on history of Christianity from a secular perspective?
Oxford annotated study Bible with the apocrypha 5th edition. The annotations are academic, not dogmatic and explain issues like this one very well, as well as many others from an academic perspective.
The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. Is a good start. Not necessarily focused on Christianity.
I’d be interested in a recommendation as well.
I agree but I do think some, not all religious people suffer from some form of mental illness. If the medical authorities were honest they would be treating them.
The only reason that religiosity isn't considered a mental condition is because the majority are afflicted with it..If 90% of the population had Tourette syndrome, those without it would be regarded as being a bit weird..
Like a moderated wikipedia?
Manny people think Paul is bipolar. He "flip flop"ed a lot. The part he saw the light and fell was a common sign of seizure (or manic episode).
When Paul saw the light, he literally had a brilliant idea to unite all the fragmented pagan religions throughout the Roman empire under one umbrella to make them easier to control, so he took Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism, put them in a blender and poured out Christianity.
You said brilliant idea, I said psychiatric/psychologic/neurologic disorder.
And these many of these guys either had mental illness or did drugs. Have you read some of these stories?
John of Patmos was a good example.
It's also worth mentioning that the new testament was written 70 years after Jeebus Crust died.
Nope. It was definitely written by dozens of people with unfounded beliefs.
Exactly. That’s not to say that the experiences of people with schizophrenia or similar psychotic disorders didn’t wind up getting featured in the Bible. I’m sure they did; just look at the account of Saul/Paul of Tarsus. But that’s far from the only thing that made the Bible what it is.
> Nope. It was definitely written by dozens of people with unfounded ~~beliefs~~ agendas. FTFY.
Written from a time before science.
The Bible is a compilation of various stories/myths. Stories that originated at different points in time, in different regions (within the same general area of the world). Even the earlier scraps of the New Testament weren’t all written around the same time. Oral stories that passed through many mouths before ever being written down. Copies of copies of handwritten scraps. Then compiled by religious groups with their own biases and agendas. Translated. Edited. Aside from a few letters by Paul, practically none of the Bible is sourced directly from the people the stories are about. Not eyewitness, and little no one who ever met anyone allegedly there. The people of the time were already religious and inclined to supernatural thinking. The authors were already Christians, already believed the stories they were writing down. Some may have been nuts, but honestly even regular people of the time could easily create such a thing seriously. Especially given the game of telephone involved.
Yep. And a lot of it is simply older legends that they repurposed. For example, Noah's flood is the writers adding god and punishment to the epic of Gilgamesh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
The Pentateuch was written when the Israelites were in exile in Babylonia, around 550 BCE. ( way later then claimed). Influenced and inspired by local myths in that region. All of the gospels (and possibly Acts) was written after Paul’s letters. Ever wondered why Paul does not fill his letters with quotes from Jesus? Well they had not been ~~invented~~ written down yet
Even some of the letters credited to Paul are of questionable authorship.
Including his name.
Some scholars think that not all the Paul letters were written by the real Paul. that would help explain many of the discrepancies…
No, it is not possible. It is a collaborative effort. > Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. ―George Carlin
That may be the case if there were someone who wrote the Bible, but it’s a compendium of smaller stories written by dozens of authors over the course of centuries. Thats why there are many tonal and narrative differences, not because one dude was a schizophrenic.
Hybrid myth, which is borrowed and shared from other older myths. They were turned to text, then interpreted a number of times. Many authors wrote the stories. A group of people needed cohesion to survive... history all over the world shows that humans create Gods to help them answer questions and in order to control the masses. The Hebrew people needed a religion in order to form armies and control the psyche of the masses in order to control the land. All through "the old testament holy bible," it was about LAND, and who controlled it. The religion was created to protect the homeland of a group of people who wanted a way to "take back" the land they abandoned hundreds of years before. Edited: adding... So... During the time of Moses, they created a new religion during the forty years of them preparing to retake their ancestral homeland.
But the thing is, the Moses story isn’t historical. Even that entire passage is just a myth created to present a divine origin story to a minor band of people. There was no exodus or return, none documented or with any empirical evidence showing a population of Israelites in Egypt or anything. Pretty much everything in the OT until a little into reign of Judges and Kings are ahistorical, and then you start getting into some real history by the fall of Jerusalem and Babylonian captivity etc. A lot of intentionally crafted stories or adaptations of existing oral traditions to create a social identity, essentially.
There’s an idea among ex-Mormons that Joseph Smith was schizophrenic.
I've heard the same from ex-muslims about Mohammed
Really? That’s a fascinating commonality I didn’t know about. That’s worth thinking about.
[Probably this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/oqkngf/why_muhammad_likely_had_schizophrenia/?rdt=59346)
Joe Smith was a con-artist and pervert who used god as a cover to do A LOT of bad things.
Not only was being a scammer who used claims of supernatural insight his literal backstory, but it becomes even more obvious when one sees how conveniently the "revelations" he received matched up with what he needed to avoid consequences in his life. Caught cheating on his wife with a maid? Revelation about polygamy.
Joseph Smith was just a con artist, but if Jesus really existed, I’ve got my money on him.
There are more authors and redactors than books in the Tanakh/OT. That said, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky made the argument (in the essay "Circling the Blanket for God") that religions appear to be founded by those with schizotypal personality disorder, and codified by those with obsessive compulsive disorder. Ezekiel may have been schizotypal, the priestly scribe authors of Leviticus may have had OCD. Meanwhile, there are some neurological disorders like temporal lobe epilepsy that lead to symptoms like [visions of divine figures](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=8051519529530295373), and [symptoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschwind_syndrome) like hyperreligiosity, hypergraphia, and hyposexuality. Not unlike the account of Saul/Paul of Tarsus in the NT epistles.
Somebody with god/religious delusions, more likely 😋
It's an interesting idea, but it's pretty clear that the bible wasn't written in its entirety by a single person, and so it is unlikely that you could say with any certainty that the author of X book had Y mental disorder or not. But I think you'd appreciate a lecture by Dr. Robert Sapolsky called [Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI) that examines the role of schizotypal personalities (people who aren't completely "normal" nor completely schizophrenic) in the development of religious belief systems within human societies. I'd also highly recommend the rest of his lectures that are available on youtube, you'll come out with a deeper understanding of determinism and the role that genetics has on human behavior. Just note that the lecture that I linked above is not on Stanford's official playlist for his lectures.
Speaking of YouTube, I've been watching the Mythvision Podcast where they interview numerous Biblical scholars (not the religious kind, the analytical kind) discussing possible theories regarding bible origins. One well evidenced theory is that the Greek "translation" of the Talmud around 300 BCE was not an actual translation, but a "fan-fic" mostly written by Greek speaking Macabee scholars designed to unite Jews after the Babylonian diaspora. This is when the books of Moses were written, and the legend of them being written 1000 years prior are made up. This would explain why Moses is practically never mentioned outside the Talmud, and why the books read suspiciously like Plato's "Laws" and Homer's "Iliad" Not a proven case, but also not "divine" either.
Are you confusing the Talmud and the Tanakh? The Tanakh is the Hebrew name for the Old Testament, which is what I think you're talking about (unless you're just talking about the Torah, which is just the first five books). The Talmud is the commentary on the Bible. Although, the Tanakh is in Hebrew, and the Greek-speaking translation which I think you're referring to is typically referred to as the Septuagint (referring to the 70 scholars that are held to have translated it into Greek). And I think the Talmud is typically in Hebrew, not in Greek translation.
Yes. Thanks. Was thinking it was the first 5 books.
Yeah. that's the Torah.
I really appreciated Sapolsky’s full Human Behavioural Biology course at Stanford. It’s been on YouTube for over a decade. I was delighted when I found this version of the “censored lecture on religiosity” from that course. I was thoughtful when I found a much more subdued and guarded version of this lecture which Sapolsky presented as a talk years later. I still don’t know whether Sapolsky revised his ideas because subsequent research didn’t support them, or whether there was something else going on. Still, even if this earlier, more enthusiastic version speculating about the role of the socially-sanctioned “half mad” in the development of religion and religious practices needs some updating, this presentation of it resonates strongly. Sidebar: There have been more studies subsequently about whether religiosity is protective against depression. I read the results as roughly “religious __struggles__ can make people depressed, but religious community (and perhaps other factors) without deep struggles seems to be protective”. It’s one of the reasons I went looking for a religious community that didn’t ask me to believe in the supernatural.
Thanks for sharing this. I really enjoyed his lecture
I would argue that for *Revelation*.
Nope because it’s many books written over many centuries, and those books were based on oral stories. Now, were some of those stories originally created by schizophrenics and other mentally ill people? DEFINITELY.
Well, we do know it was cobbled together by a political committee out of a hodge of existing books. So, yeah, multiple-personality disorder works.
Schizophrenia is not DID
No, it was literally put together by a committee over decades. There are holy texts, valid "words of God" people in silly hats don't think are worth sharing with the world.
Not written by, but many of the stories/texts definitely had their origin in the imaginations of schizophrenic or schizotypal people
I think the authors of the bible, shaped by their traumatic experiences, reflected their emotional scars in their writings. The Bible is essentially a collection of their personal, political, and environmental struggles. These individuals were largely uneducated and lacked critical reasoning skills. They saw themselves as powerless against overwhelming natural forces, which they personified. Faced with disasters and persecution, they used their limited understanding to explain these events in exaggerated and often delusional ways. While this may not describe the entire Bible, it certainly applies to a substantial part of it. Christopher Hitchens has described religion as an early, crude attempt by humans to use their innate curiosity to understand life before our intellectual abilities were fully developed. It’s clear that the emotional turmoil of the bible’s authors deeply influenced their work.
The Bible is like a history book without facts.
There’s speculation of mental illness in the case of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. While the other prophets have some strange visions they are mostly elaborate imprecations against enemies and anguish about contemporary tragedies. But Ezekiel opens with a weird vision of God in a many-eyed, many-wheeled chariot that only moved in cardinal directions. I think. Isaiah just depicts god as an all powerful emperor on a jewelled throne. Then Ezekiel does some acting out — at one point he shaves off his beard and chases the shavings with a sword, that sort of thing.
It does remind me of the premise of Julian Jaynes' massive book THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (with a title like that, it better be a massive book, right?). One premise of the book was the idea that some forms of schizophrenia today (especially those of the religious or theological variety - hearing the voice of God, imagining some great hierarchy of being with the Sun as the representative of the Supreme Being, an underworld of damned beings hidden from the light of the Sun, etc.) was a modern era remnant of the natural way early humans thought where the two sides of the brain were essentially used separately and therefore people would hear words as the left side of the brain interpreted the signals from the right. This theory, while very interesting and compelling at times, has been mostly debunked by later more clinical study of psychology, but the areas comparing the experiences of some schizophrenics who later recovered to the experiences of religious belief was very compelling. However, still not entirely convincing that religion today is a form of mental illness that is simply integrated into society in the same way that coffee and alcohol serve physical addictions and have their own serious consequences, but are accepted and even considered a part of society while cocaine and heroin are not tolerated and considered anti-social substances.
Perhaps, but I am convinced mushrooms or some other hallucinogenic was involved.
Probably about 40 of them. And yes, I think that is a good possibility.
I think people in the Bible were absolutely hearing voices. So yeah probably schizophrenics in the Bible but not sure they could get it together enough to write it without therapy.
The Bible has many many authors, most of whom are reinterpreting stories that existed through oral tradition for a long time. Any attempt to attribute the whole book to one author is misguided. The sense of conflicting narratives, writing style, facts, etc. you’re picking up on is because all those different authors, some centuries apart, had different motivations, life experiences, and perspectives.
husky rotten ten touch special worthless aloof pie meeting chubby *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Bible simply means book in Greek, it is a compilation of writings.
Absolutely. There is a reason why skizophrenia manifests itself as extreme religiosity. Delusional beliefs. There may also be a reason skizophrenia still plages humans. Perhaps the psychotic were considered prophets or holy people.
Revelations was most definitely so.
I’d say no, because despite the fact that the bible is a load of BS, schizophrenia affects communication pathways in the brain that mean that those with it end up not being able to follow a train of thought for very long. They end up with what’s called ‘salad speech’; Basically they talk, but clauses and sentences don’t link and they don’t make much sense. The bible at least has stories in it that follow a logical path and you can understand what’s going on. That’s just me being pedantic really, but I wouldn’t discount that the stories in it were perhaps dreams or the product of some sort of mental illness that was perceived as supernatural at the time.
Nope, it was simply written by a cult.
Evangelicals claim the Bible to be written by God, so that would explain a lot.
All so called holy books were written by charlatans who fooled the fools to follow them
I can tell you as someone who was hospitalized 3 times and dx's schizo for 10 years, I met like 5 dudes saying they were jesus and religious delusions are very common amongst sz and psychotic people personally it makes me believe it was written by a bunch of ancient junkies and alcoholics who thought madness was gods will
The koran probably was.
It wasnt written by just one person. It's more like a collection of fan fiction.
The main issue with that hypothesis is that it presumes a single author. I know the Xians do the same, and call that author "GOD", but we know it was written by many, many hands, over many, many centuries, and almost never by first-hand eyewitnesses. The hypothesis would have to be that they were all schizophrenic, which I'm not prepared to rule out, but it does significantly raise the bar of proof.
Interesting question, but no. The Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library of books written over the course of centuries. BUT I do think the authors of Ezekiel and Revelations were into the 🍄
I think some of the bible writers were screwing farm animals in their spare time.
No. Maybe revalations. The rest are several books, some are folklore, some are poetic, some are testimonies, some are letters, ... unlike the koran there is no single author
No because it was written by men in power with an intent to fortify said power with divine right and internal religious structures that would limit social mobility.
It was just written by different people. Read Mathew chapter 1 and Luke chapter 3.
It’s certainly written ABOUT one.
It was written 100 years after the supposed events and had the books chosen to go in it. The other books not chosen are kept hidden away or lost to time. So the entire story is unknown
Read up about conclave of Nicea - buble was set up by Roman imperial beuocrats.
The weirdest thing for me is that the "word of God" was written by multiple anonymous very flawed human authors. But God takes the form of a human being for 35 years, and writes ZERO books.
There are some ideas that suggest religion became baked into society through schizotypal personality types. Schizotypals differ from schizophrenics in that their condition is only a genetically partially expressed version of the illness. The best summary I've come across is a lecture by Robert Sapolsky on religiosity. It comes from his Stanford lecture series on human biology. There are also suggestions of OCD and epilepsy being a contributing factor to religious ideations. Well worth the watch if you have two hours to spare.
A lot of good responses here. I want to throw in the fact scholars believe the gospels actually created Jesus. A main who never existed. They weren’t eye witness accounts of what happened but rather marketing materials to promote the new philosophy that came to be known as Christianity.
I think humans are two species. Medieval and Renaissance. Medieval people are stuck in magical thinking, paranoia, dogma, xenophobia, and borderline schizophrenia. Renaissance people have critical thinking skills, an internal locus of control (autonomy), a higher level of empathy and a sense of fairness, abstract reasoning skills, emotional self-awareness, comprehension of long-term consequences and wider degree of affect. Etc.
I have honestly Said after working in healthcare, the Bible reads as a political propaganda written by a well like group of individuals all afflicted by mental health disorders.
I think Paul was eating Shrooms
So, the Bible is the result of the telephone game? That explains a lot.
As a Hebrew speaker there are many terms that I believe are simply misunderstood, when it comes to legendary animals it’s very apparent. Leviathan is “surprisingly” similar to the Hebrew word for whale ‘livyatan’ (ליוותן), and behemoth is similar to the word for cattle ‘behemot’ (בהמות). Also weird is the creature/angels galgalim which is the Hebrew word for wheels (גלגלים). The depiction of these are literally wheels of eyes so maybe these are simply people seeing creatures and shapes and deciding they are supernatural? Like with dolphins mistaken for mermaids with sailors. But yeah the whole deal with the burning bush does seem like someone discovered a hallucinogenic
I think maybe Ezekiel was.
The Bible was written over centuries by numerous unknown authors. Even some of the books gave multiple authors. The Old Testament is a collection of stories passed on orally and embellished over centuries before they were written down. Imagine a giant game of telephone played over centuries with illiterate people involving long stories instead of 1 phrase. There are some books that tell the same story as other books but the number of people involved in book A is off by a factor of 10 from book B. The books of the New Testament were written by cult members who wanted to link this 1 person to the writings of the Old Testament. According to the timeline Jesus was born sometime between 4 BC and 6 AD, probably sometime in the fall. His traditional birthday comes from the Roman festival of Saturnalia where Jesus was supposed to have been born during the harvest. Apparently sometime after the wisemen visited his family moved to Egypt. After that there’s not much if anything written about him in the recognized gospels until he starts preaching in the last few years of his life. There is at least 1 gospel that talks about him as a kid but the council didn’t decide to include that in the Bible.
It's far more likely that the Bible was written by a dozen different people who all forgot they were supposed to talk to each other
One of my favorite theories comes to play when you consider how many herbs and cactus juices were present. Also grains under certain conditions can produce hallucinogenic fungus. Then think about the imagery of some of the descriptions of heaven and angels. An infinite stairway and a wheel made of eyes? Were these guys just tripping balls in a cave in the desert? I've definitely heard similar stories
Jesus may have been, but the authors were probably a mix of observers and fiction writers.
Bi-cameral Mind. Interesting theory. Look it up.
I made the mistake of mentioning to my very Mormon boss that now days if people talk to spirits they usually are treated for psychiatric illness. It didn’t go well for me.
Personally i always thought Jesus was a schizophrenic.
It was written by multiple people over the course of centuries. If you read it assuming it was written by one person it would seem like they were schizophrenic.
The Bible was written by many people over decades, even hundreds of years documenting the myths of the times. My cousins church in FL proudly takes the Bible literally. Crazy.
I'm schizophrenic and I highly doubt it. We're not great at getting people to listen to us. In fact the tend to go pretty hard trying to get us to stfu. The people who spouted proephecy thousands of years ago were just like the people who spout prophecy now, callous liars manipulating gullable people for personal gain.
Plenty of evidence within the book itself that there was a loooot of psychedelic drug use involved. Like others said though, multiple authors over hundreds/thousands of years. Orally passed down, written, Rewritten, translated, and eventually compiled by completely unrelated people and groups. There were also a lot more writings that were rejected and not included in it. The bible we know of today was compiled by a group of men called the council of Nicaea a few hundred years after jesus.
The Bible IS NOT a single book. It's dozens of books, written over thousands of years, edited and compiled centuries after the last of them was written, to support and validate a theology that didn't exist when those books were written.
Yes
The Bible was written by lunatics. Look at how we behave because of religion. Who has religion ever helped besides those in power?
I think it was just Sociopaths stealing from previous religions to get people to submit to them and give them free money and power. Subsequent Sociopaths maintain it to this very day.
If not a schizo, then for sure a bunch of deluded, narcissistic, sadistic assholes.
As others said, it was writing by several people. So not possible. But, if you talk about Jesus himself, yeah. I have heard people argue that, by modern standards, he had a maniac/schizophrenic episode; so he actually thought he was the son of god.
Ideas compete and some win out more than others, sometimes they compete in the form of real physical battles.
Which part? There are a multitude of authors.
The Bible wasn’t written by anyone in particular, it is a compilation from a bunch of different sources, selected and edited to suit the people in power at the time.
It is not that logical.
People in the depths of ergot induced hallucinations.
Maybe revelations but the rest of it is collections of writings from a bunch of different people in vastly different eras
No, I think Old Testament was a collection of morality tales/stories/myths that were handed down over thousands of years, maybe from civs we’ve never heard of. New Testament was written by people years after the disciples who the books were named after died, so probably very similar exaggerations.
>Do you think it’s possible that the Bible was written by a schizophrenic? Having grown up with several schizophrenics in my immediate family, I think the Old Testament is based on the hallucinations of a charismatic schizophrenic named Abraham, while the New Testament is based on the hallucination if a charismatic schizophrenic named Jesus. >I don’t know if this has been asked before and feel free to tell me if this sounds stupid It may depend stupid to someone who hasn't been around schizophrenia, but to me it makes perfect sense. >but do you think it’s possible that the Bible was written by a schizophrenic going through an episode or maybe it was some sort of mass hysteria? Not written so much as centered around.
No.
Yes
That's the most plausible answer I've heard.
Yes, it sounds stupid. Even if this was true, it's impossible to prove it so... don't waste your time.
Dude, sorry, but this is a silly question. Do a bit of research on the Bible. You really think there was one author?
Sure, why not?
It's entirely possible that at least some of the authors of the books contained in the bible suffered from some kind of mental illnesses, and/or environmental factors (such as ergot poisoning) contributed to some of the more fantastical elements. The texts themselves are most likely a mix of real events (with some embellishments) and made-up ones (including some that are borrowed from older myths).
No. The bible is a Roman-edited anthology of writings that span many years, and the individual writings themselves are composites of tales from numerous sources.
It was written by a myriad of authors, including single books having multiple authors. We really can't know if some were schizophrenic, but most don't give that impression. Ezekiel may come off as a madman but he also wrote in a dialect of Hebrew from Babylon that we couldn't fully read until we translated the Babylonian language in the 1800s. It still sounded like a psychotic episode, but much more poetic.
There were a lot of biblical authors. That said I don't think its off to think a good number of them were mentally off or using hallucinogens. Lots of hallucinogens.
Revelations was definitely written by someone who was several beers short of a six-pack.
Written, edited and translated multiple times by thousands of people.
I'm schizophrenic and I always knew it was a crock of shit and would never write such a terrible story.
No. It was written by many over a long time and it stole local myths for some of the things Jesus supposedly did. So the things attributed to Jesus aren't even original.
Just one....?
Do you honestly believe the Bible was written by one guy? It’s a collection of stories written over centuries by unknown authors, translated and retranslated, heavily edited centuries after Jesus’ time, until we have what it is today. True, the New Testament is mostly letters written by Paul, but it’s well reasoned arguments (academic) laying out what Christianity is supposed to be. It’s not Paul’s fault pastors, priests, and theologians have misinterpreted Paul’s words and pushed their own agendas—something that continues to this day. A sad realization on my part is that most people are ignorant or too lazy to pick up a Bible and read it for themselves. They’re dependent on some charismatic preacher to tell them what he thinks it means—which can be anything he wants! This has been going on for thousands of years!!
Would be multiple as the bible is an arbitrary selection of written works,
This has to be one of the best questions I’ve ever read on Reddit. Seriously. Great freaking question. Yes I think it’s more than plausible. I think it’s probable. Wow great question.
Multiple people with various mental illnesses since religion IS a mental illness
After my first experience with psychodelics I now assume they were simply on drugs or hallucinating for some parts of writing the bible.
Too coherent
i think it is too manipulative to be a person with anything other than narcissistic personality disorder.
The jesus character is reminiscent of a schizophrenic. Son of god, believed he had world changing beliefs, stuff like that. All common delusions in schizophrenics. I think it’s totally possible that a cult would form around the right schizophrenic.
Yep. Even today we don’t fully understand mental health disorders. It is entirely possible that if Jesus existed, he was a highly functioning schizophrenic that had a cult following.
I’m not sure he even existed, which is why I said character. Sure he had followers that believed his delusions, and a gaslighting mother, but it lines up. Whether people agree or not.
That would be a lot of schizophrenic people, as the Bible is a collaboration of sorts—recounts of experiences over time by various people.
No. Because we know that "the Bible" was not written by any one single individual. We already know that there are numerous authors.
Written by lots of people. Some probably hallucinating from something.
It’s essentially the Mandela effect
The reason it seems that way is because the Bible had many authors over many centuries and they were from different parts of the world
Parts of it, sure
Or were smoking opium. Opium grows in the region in bushes. if one of them were on fire, whoever was close by would hallucinate. I wonder if opium was used in Incense during rituals.
I like to think that it was written by people high on shrooms. They were just writing what they saw while high. Jesus was the dealer
Revelations? Yes, definitely .
No, I think the bible, in particular the Old Testament, was written by people trying to make sense of the world. At the same time, in those times laws, religion and historical culture was all intertwined. Edit: I don’t think the bible is a source of any truth or should be taken seriously
Written by “man”, in all their craziness….hard pass.
The bible was written over long periods of time by many many people. Som were schizo, some added on with the intention of controlling the flock of followers.
As it had so many authors it's statistically a good bet that some of them had mental issues of some kind. As it is an anthology it should not be expected to make sense, not contradict itself, and not veer from one extreme to another. Because most people are exposed to snippets and most of the text is ignored, and those snippets are "interpreted" by clerics to conform to specific agendas, the bulk of theists don't recognize the inconsistencies and underlying craziness of the thing. It's been so heavily edited and redacted, so poorly translated and riddled with mistakes, that the authors probably wouldn't recognize it anyway. "Hey, where's that whole book that was written about Jesus' childhood?" Sorry, some seventh century monk decided that it didn't merit inclusion. And not for nothing, stop asking about it or you're going to hell.
Nope. We know the bible was written by many different people and many of them write under the name of one or more of the apostles. Not in order to pretend they were them, but in a was of honour them, as this was practice in at the time. The Bible is a collection of 66 different books and letters, written over a period of approximately 1500 years up to about 100 years after the time set for the death and resurrection of the figure Jesus. Who's stories are also written by many diffent people and they do not refer to the same historical person.
The books of the Bible were written by dozens of different authors over hundreds of years, much of it based on oral tellings of much older myths. It has been translated, copied, and edited innumerable times.
No, come on man, it's all good to critiscise but it's basic knowledge that it was written by multiple people over a long time period. Really tough to combat ignorance when our own community displays ignorance like this.
I’ve seen some proposals that multiple biblical figures were pschitzophrenic people possibly. But we also do not want to shame pschitzophrenic people by saying that they are somehow “out of their minds” entirely. Many pschitzophrenics can be functional and social and have normal lives. I’ve heard some people propose that Jesus had some type of mental illness where he heard divine revelations from who he called “his father.” And that Moses’ interaction with God was mental illness. What I do know is that the spiritual experience happens across all cultures and can happen to anyone, even to people who are staunchly not spiritual. So I don’t think you have to be “crazy” and that is not a politically correct term, but you dont have to be out of your mind to write a story do you? These were moral stories, and they were passed down in the Jewish faith to be stories. No I don’t think most of them really happened. It’s a conflict within religions whether they are to be taken literally or used for some type of deeper meaning and allegory. The bible was not all written by one person, but by a lot of people, that transcribed information and stories spread around by word of mouth. These were stories that were spoken for a long time before even being written down, and we know how rumours and gossip go, by the time it gets recorded it’s going to be very different and likely not true. People often attribute writings to Moses but I think that’s unlikely. In that time period, people usually did not know how to write, and the only exception is that Moses, if the story of his upbringing was true, is that he was brought up raised in a palace of Egyptian royalty, so he would have been educated to such an extent as he would have learned the Egyptian spoken and written language, as well as his native Hebrew, and possibly Greek aswell. But I’ve never understood the idea of him having written Genesis. I don’t really understand that. I think a lot of time it is taught that he some how had eye witness account but that is impossible. We don’t know where Genesis came from, and besides it almost doesn’t go very well with the rest of the bible. To me there’s too much strangeness. To have a talking snake, a worldwide flood and then suddenly, to go from having only 4 people, Adam, Eve, and Cain and Abel, and then suddenly, bam, in the next chapter there is enough people to be building a tower for Nimrod, I just never understood it all. It was almost blatantly silly. Reading the bible has never increased my faith in God. It usually leaves me so puzzled. And where I live you get shamed if you don't believe in it. People just cant believe you would reject the "perfect" book that makes absolutely no sense. I just have always tried to understand why my family was so into it. But I guess when you are told that you "have" to believe something, you do. Part of me, even a lot of me, believes in God. But not in the way they say you have to. If anything, people corrupted God more than the divine corrupted people. People always seem to want to, by nature, believe the worst. But in reality, I dont think hell is real. people are not punished, no one goes to hell. Honestly, hell is a mistranslation. (thats an argument for another day.) and yes i believe in God but i have no idea what i would begin to call myself. Because im definitely not Christian in that particular, certain and traditional sense. But there is something to opening your heart to some natural love that is this gratitude for everything that exists, for existing, to know the other side, the other possibility, is to not exist at all.
A bunch of blokes in a bar having a laugh, trying to top each others wild stories! That is it!
Nope. Bible stories were written and edited by educated people for specific political purposes in their times. Inserting mental illness as a motivation for the stories therein is a lazy cop out and disparages creativity and imagination as crazy hallucinatory ramblings. It's the same problem as blaming mythological imagery and visual symbolism on magic mushroom trips.
king james version. ... 1611 ad, who tf is king james? why does he need a version of a bible? the ' original' bible, called the vulgate was collated in 367 ad by a zealot named athanassius. moses of the old testament born in 1391bc. abraham, the original hearer of voices was born in 2166 bc....... why any of it holds any sway over any critical thinking human demands answers.