"The assessment of the sanity of Jesus first occurs in the gospels. The Gospel of Mark reports the opinion of members of his family who believe that Jesus "is beside himself." Some psychiatrists, religious scholars and writers explain that Jesus' family, followers (John 7:20), and contemporaries seriously regarded him as delusional, possessed by demons, or insane.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself”. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Be-el?zebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons”.—?Mark 3:21–22 (RSV)The accusation contained in the Gospel of John is more literal:
There was again a division among the Jews because of these words. Many of them said, “He has a demon, and he is mad; why listen to him?”—?John 10:19–20 (RSV)C.S Lewis famously considered Jesus' mental health in what is known as Lewis's trilemma (the formulation quoted here is by John Duncan):
Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable.The agnostic atheist New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman wrote on his own blog:
And he may well have thought (I think he did think) that he would be made the messiah in the future kingdom. That may have been a rather exalted view of himself, but I don’t think it makes Jesus crazy. It makes him an unusually confident apocalyptic prophet. There were others with visions of grandeur at the time. I don’t think that makes him mentally ill. It makes him a first-century apocalyptic Jew.[58]" --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/support