Was Jesus autistic?

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Weather one is inspired by the historic Jesus or the biblical Jesus, I feel what is more to the point is that Jesus loved the poor & marginalized and would have felt the greatest of affinity with autistic people.

Chris

Noah was autistic. That huge boat was part of his special interest.

But very much so a schizophrenic. Just reading through bible verses recently (at the insistance of some evangelical neighbour) I just get the impression he really suffered from delusions of grandure along with voices he would hear such as the devil tempting him to turn stone into bread. In fact there would probably be more he would be in company on the schizophrenic spectrum with a folie à deux situation with some of his disciples.

And he respected children and women as well.

And he also knew how to kick in the bottom the disrespectful and the ones who were not to be respected.
(to say it kind and gentle, as an euphemism)

Or was it what you call tantrums?

He wasn't Autistic, given his social success, leadership talent and clarity of social thought. However, his tenacity and hyper focus, and his temper tantrums are known. Last Saturday I went to visit the place where he lived after he was kicked out of Nazareth (north of the Sea of Galilee, in Capernaum). He did exist, if we Israelis say so and have scientific proof of it. There's also scientific proof that he was crucified where Christians claim he was crucified (the Holy Sepulchre is there today). This country is full of holes, digging and digging to find out what from the Bible and the New Testament is true and which are lies. I don't believe something unless I see it with my eyes, lots of things are lies but many, many things are true and have been proven, ruveyn.

I do think there is no evidence whatsover that Jesus is autistic based on the character in the Bible. The reality may be different because the "real" Jesus AKA Jebus AKA Jeshua AKA Yeshua could well be autistic, who knows, but I feel that would be impossible to prove.

He probably suffered delusions of grandeur. Although it’s hard to say if he was anymore far off than our politicians today for instance. He probably played it as it made sense 2000 years ago.

All the healings, walking on water and waking up the dead could be part trickery, part show and part being knowledgeable about medicine such as it was back then. His disciples might have played just as much part in this as Jesus himself did. Have any of you seen a revivalist meeting? That kind of mass suggestion could have played a big part of it. As for walking on the water, I do that several months a year, it’s called ice! Or maybe he simply had familiarized himself with the locations of the underwater rocks.

I don’t think Jesus was schizophrenic. He made sense to his followers, and schizophrenics don’t make sense. I knew one, I’d know.

what scientific proof? DNA?

Well, you can certainly walk on water there now, because they've built this beautiful promenade on the water, made of acrylic, that is transparent and you feel like you're walking on water. It's for pilgrims and tourists, so they wouldn't take us for a walk there last Saturday, I was disappointed. We were a local, study group.

I just did a googled search and these are the results:

Results 1 - 10 of about 7,450 for "was jesus schizophrenic". (0.19 seconds)
Results 1 - 8 of 8 for "was jesus autistic". (0.13 seconds)
Results 1 - 3 of 3 for "did jesus have asperger". (0.33 seconds)

Just proves question of whether Jesus is schizophrenic is almost 1000 times more frequenlty discussed than the question of whether Jesus is autistic.
So the believers of an autistic Jesus are definitely in a very slender minority.

If I remember right, Alan Watts reckoned that what he actually said was "I am a son of God," which is not so grandiose, at least relatively, because it allows for the notion that everybody else could also have that honour. Apparently the original text is in Greek. I don't know Greek myself, but I suspect it's like Latin in that it does not have the definite and indefinite article ("the" and "a").......in which case the original text would be ambiguous with regard to this important theological point.

Watts went on to say that the Church had developed the attitude that they'd accept the divine nature of Jesus but no way would they allow the rest of us to see ourselves as deities. His implication seems to be that the Church fudged the records in the translation so that you and I wouldn't start getting ideas above our station.

I wasn't all that impressed with the article. Mostly it's too long so I got bored long before the end. I suppose the basic idea is quite funny, but like somebody said, brevity is the soul of wit. I don't see it as particularly offensive though. It's pretty clear from the references to modern stuff that the author wasn't being at all serious.

I'm assuming this is a joke, right?

Greek does have a definite article, unlike Latin.

I think there was a time when any leader worth his salt would propagate a bit of spin that he was actually a deity.......a good one for stopping the common herd from getting into this "after all, he's only an ordinary bloke, so why should he have all that power?" Probably explains why atheism was stigmatised as well.


There was one bit of research that reckoned all Jesus' "miracles" took the form of popular scams of the day as practised by charlatans. If so it would seem a strange choice of repertoire for a genuine miracle-worker.

I've heard some disturbing tales of those revivalist "spiritual healing" meetings too. It's apparently not difficult to vibe up a suggestible subject till they can't feel pain any more, but the effect wears off, and during the "show" they can obviously do terrible damage to the damaged body parts by using them normally while the pain receptors are on hold.


There are some psychotic people who have extraordinary powers of persuasion, but I can't remember the exact name of the condition.

Thanks....so it seems that Watts knew what he was talking about. Is the original Greek text in the public domain? It would be interesting to track it down and see what it actually says.