Why circumcision is so very very important...
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROPHETISM
"The main part of this book is intended as an introduction to important findings in Bible research from the angle of psychology, with the emphasis on the work of the Flemish Bible scholar and psychologist Dr. Somers (parts of chapters 3.6 to 3.10 are little more than a re-wording of his original writings).
2.1. A Jesuit breaks free
Dr. Herman H. Somers, born in Antwerp on 3 October 1921, is an accomplished scholar with acclaimed contributions in many fields of learning. He studied in Leuven and Rome, and is an M.A. in Philosophy, Ph.D. in Classical Philology (i.e. Latin and Greek), Ph.D. in Theology, and Ph.D. in Psychology. For forty years he was in the Jesuit order. He had worked as a schoolteacher, journalist for the Jesuit-led paper De Linie, lecturer in Classical Philology and in Psychology, practising psychopathologist in a mental asylum, before he went on to devote 25 years to scientific research. He has been active in a variety of research projects, from noise ecology and experimental psychology to pioneering work in computer-aided mathematical text analysis of the Bible.
As he studied the Bible more closely, he developed doubts about its divine character. In the face of unexpected findings inconvenient to the faith, he refused to renounce scientific standards, and drew his conclusions. In what he describes as a painful process, he grew away from the Christian faith, and left the Jesuit order. Pro-Jesuit sources claim that it is only because of his unwillingness to comply with his vow of poverty (concretely: renouncing the family property in favour of the order after his mother died) that he has left the order.
In 1986, he published the book: Jezus de Messias: was het Christendom een Vergissing? (“Jesus the Messiah: was Christianity a Mistake?”).1 Written in Dutch, it is an abridged version of a more technical study in French, which he sent to a number of experts and interested parties, among them the Vatican. It is a ground-breaking exploration of the psychopathological syndromes accurately described in the New Testament, especially of Jesus’ mental condition.
In June 1990, he published a more voluminous sequel, this time also dealing with the Old Testament prophets. It is called: Toen God sliep, schreef de mens de Bijbel. De Bilbet belicht door een psycholoog (Dutch: “When God slept, man wrote the Bible. The Bible explained by a psychologist”).2 We hope that it will soon be translated into all major languages, and meanwhile we will offer a summary of the book’s most striking points.
Since then, dr. Somers has also written a history of the Jesuit order, a psychological study of Mohammed, and a study of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
2.2. Methodology
A psychological investigation of the Bible starts from the premise that the Bible text is based on real events. Of course, in the centuries of writing and rewriting, distortions may have crept in (deliberately or by mistake), stories from other traditions may have been added, historical facts embellished, blown up to mythical proportions, or on the contrary, concealed. But nonetheless, the very tradition of which the text is a part, could not have existed if the founders of that tradition, whose life and times are described in the text, had not existed. The core of the actual texts must be function of real words and deeds by real people.
That this premises, evident though it seems, is not automatically accepted, may be seen from two trends in modern Bible studies. Firstly, there are people who flatly deny that Jesus ever existed. According to the Marxist-leaning scholar P. Krijbolder, Jesus was merely a character invented as a literary device in the presentation of a new ideology, and the four Gospels were designed to present four aspects of this ideology.3 In that case, if at all there is scope for psychological analysis, it is of the psychological motives and attitudes of the writers, not of the text’s characters, since these are fictional.
Secondly, there are a lot of theologians who follow the German theologian Bultmann in his Entmythologisierung (demythologization) of the Bible stories. This means that the stories are not to be taken literally, since they are in fact merely myths. They are stories made up by the community of believers in order to express their faith. If we want to read the Bible correctly, we have to relinquish the idea that it describes what really happened, and interpret it as a collection of expressions of the faith, moulded in literary genres developed for that very purpose. This approach does usually not imply that Jesus’ existence is doubted, merely that the miracle stories, the virgin birth, the resurrection are “not to be taken literally”.
The skepsis regarding the existence of Biblical characters may be more reasonable in the case of persons situated in the distant past, like Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, but from Moses onward the stories start looking too much like they are essentially historical. However, the “demythologizing” skepsis regarding the reality of Jesus’ divine vocation and miracles may well be extended to characters like Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, and Solomon: while their life and times may have been real enough, the postulated divine intervention in them is considered, by the demythologizers, as just a figure of speech.
There are reasons for giving in only minimally to the extreme skepsis regarding the basis in reality of the Bible narrative, and for sticking to the essentially historical character of the Bible’s stories. Firstly, there is a logical contradiction in postulating that the core text of a religious tradition is unhistorical, “mere” narrative. A religious tradition can only be created by people, in fact by people who have managed to attract the loyalty of a number of followers. If the first Christians made myths in order to “express their faith”, then someone must have generated or inspired this new faith among them. Saying that Jesus never existed, implies that the Gospel-writers did write about someone who did not exist and did not found their religion, but failed to write about the man who did create their religion and therefore must necessarily have existed. This is not strictly impossible, but it is also like saying that the Shakespeare to whom the famous plays and poems have been attributed, never existed, but that his plays and poems were written by someone else whose name may also have been Shakespeare.
Secondly, there is quite a bit of external evidence. There are several references to Jesus in non-Christian sources, just like there are external references to the Hebrew migration from Egypt. Of course, philologists have taken great pains to find forgeries and interpolations in these texts, but by now this explaining-away has been superseded by a willingness to take sources seriously as long as there are no solid independent grounds for suspecting forgery. For instance, the historical authenticity of the passage on Jesus in Flavius Josephus’ work (late first century AD) is now accepted by many scholars: though it has been tampered with, it was not inserted.
Thirdly, there is a lot of internal evidence in the Bible text. That is to say, there are passages that could not have been there except as references to reality or (often as polemical replies) to historical outside comments on Jesus. While theologians of the Entmythologisierung school say that many passages are edifying fables, a number of Gospel passages are not edifying at all. For instance, Jesus cursing an innocent fig tree when, out of season, it isn’t bearing fruit. Or Jesus not being able to do miracles in some places, and not being believed by his own townsfolk, even being considered insane by his own family. These things are mentioned because people in the audience of Christian preachers remembered them, and they had to be acknowledged and, if possible, explained in consonance with the preachers’ doctrines. If these things hadn’t really happened, there would not have been any reason for Christian writers to mention them. Other criteria of internal evidence, esp. to separate genuine testimony from made-up stories, are provided by modem methods of forensic psychology to evaluate courtroom testimonies.
Fourthly, the psychological investigation of the Bible comes up with a new internal criterion. We can safely assume that the Bible writers were not aware of the findings of modem psychopathology, i.e. the study of mental diseases. They did not know the psychopathological conditions that modem psychologists have studied and organized into categories of coherent syndromes. Yet, in some places they do give accurate descriptions of such psychopathological syndromes. The stamp of realness is that in these descriptions, no symptoms of different conditions get mixed up. Anyone can name a few acts and attitudes that he associates with the term “madness”. But realistically describing a condition of catatonic schizophrenia, or querulous paranoia, can only be done by someone who knows psychopathology - or by someone who merely describes what he sees in a particular real case of such a condition.
It is not out of place to look for psychopathological conditions in the Bible. After all, then as now, a certain category of mentally afflicted people would be attracted to religion, and become the most ardent students of Scripture. Certain mental conditions do not lead to a total personality disintegration, to a loss of intellectual capacities, or to an unbearably antisocial behaviour. In fact, highly talented and literate people can be afflicted by psychopathological conditions. In the old days, some of them could set themselves up as teachers and prophets, and their eccentric behaviour would only add to their aura of godmen. And though many religious madmen would be recognized for what they were, a few would not (at least not by the final editors of the Bible), and it is these few that interest us here.
For a first example of a pathological description, we can take a very clear and simple case from the Gospel. It does not concern Jesus or another prophet, but a “possessed” child, cured by Jesus according to Luke 9:37-43, Mark 9:14-29, Mathew 17:14-21. The Gospel relates how a child is brought to Jesus, because it is possessed by a deaf-and-dumb demon which it has had since birth. When it sees Jesus, it gets a crisis, shakes and with foaming lips falls to the ground. Jesus raises it up and the crisis is over, “the demon has gone out”. Remark that the text doesn’t say that henceforth the child can hear and speak.
Even a layman can recognize this as an epileptic crisis which, as is normal, subsides after a few minutes. But the story gives two important details that complete the syndrome. Firstly, the child gets the crisis when it is confronted with Jesus. Typically, these crises erupt after sudden emotions, such as a child may feel when confronted with this strange man with his charismatic airs, probably accompanied by a number of followers. Here, the story does not say that the child was already having a crisis before Jesus came in. It was the other way round: apparently, Jesus’ entry was causally related to the crisis.
Secondly, the child has been deaf (and therefore it can also not speak) since birth. Now, one typical physiological cause of epilepsy can be a trombophlebitis occurring around the time of birth, which leaves a scar on the brain, thus indirectly causing epilepsy while directly causing deafness.
This simple story thus gives us important conclusions. Firstly, this “possessed child” must have existed. It is so completely improbable that a writer who knew nothing about these subtler points of the epileptic condition, would have invented this story. It could only be an account of a real case.
Secondly, from the fact that the story is told as a report of a miracle wrought by Jesus, it is clear that the writer did believe that a cure took place, and that Jesus’ extraordinary powers had been demonstrated. In fact, from the details of the story, it seems that Jesus himself believed this. Yet, both the writer and Jesus were wrong: epileptic crises always subside, and that is no indication of cure at all. This shows how easily people in those days could be made to believe in the miraculous power of anyone who had the guts to style himself a miracle-worker; and how some people, notably Jesus, could erroneously believe such a thing about themselves.
As Dr. Somers writes: “The features, found in the text, are all coherent with the syndrome of epilepsy and especially with an infantile form: perinatal infection of the ears with inflammatory complications, causing thrombo-phlebitis in the brain with the consequence of epileptic seizures and deaf muteness. In the text of Mark 9, all symptoms are described with precision: the child is mute, falls in the water and the fire (a loss of consciousness), utters a cry and is agitated, has foam on his mouth, becomes like dead and after a while is ‘cured’. Obviously, 2000 years ago nobody was aware of the true nature of epilepsy and the typical features of this illness in young children. If a witness describes so correctly the phenomena of an epileptic seizure in a child with all concomitant circumstances, this fact has precedence over all philological arguments and constitutes proof of authenticity and historicity. If moreover, the witness mentions all these features in order to prove his incorrect view on the facts (viz. that Jesus effected a miracle cure), it is clear that the testimony is beyond suspicion. If anything here depends on culture, it is the interpretation, in this case: that it is the devil who causes the seizure.”
Another example is the “exorcism” related in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20. A man was possessed by a host of demons, and dangerous. He had broken the chain in which people had put him, and now lived in caves and on burial-grounds, and the people were afraid of him. Jesus asked the “demon” in this man for his name, as was customary in exorcisms. The name was “Legion”, since there were many demons at once. Then he drove the demons out, into a flock of pigs, who became mad, threw themselves into the lake, and drowned. The man became calm and asked to stay with Jesus, but was not allowed to. The people of the area asked Jesus to go away.
This man apparently suffered from schizophrenia with catatonic agitation. In a fit of rage, such people can develop an unbelievable strength, enough to break handcuffs. Even Jesus, after “curing” him, is apprehensive about having him around, and consequently sends him away. Such people’s personalities totally disintegrate, they eat their own excrement and live worse than animals. Jesus speaks to the man, and the next thing we read is that the pigs become mad and run away, into the lake. Unless you believe in miracles, this seems to mean that the man went into a rage and didn’t take on Jesus but went after the pigs.4 Seeing the madman in his rage, the pigs naturally ran away, and afraid as pigs can be, some of them even ran into the lake. But then, as always, the rage subsides and the afflicted man becomes quiet. Jesus sends the man away, and a proof that this indeed was a lasting cure is not even attempted.
In this story we have a smaller number of elements, so the improbability of the writer just making it up is not as striking as in the first story. Still, the picture of the sick man here is realistic, as is the impression that mere passers-by, such as Jesus’ followers (who don’t get to see his regular crises followed by equally regular periods of calm), would think that after a fit of rage everything has come back to “normal”, and that a cure has been effected.
From these examples a method can be derived:
the search in the text for certain symptoms should precede any other consideration;
if a well-known syndrome can be identified, all other elements should be coherent with this syndrome (if no syndrome can be identified, then psycho-pathology considers its job finished. it is nobody’s intention to force a psycho-pathological explanation where there is no solid ground for one);
the fact that the witness is unaware of the scientific significance of the elements he mentions, will be considered as decisive.
Therefore, this psychopathological control of old texts can decide the questions about the historicity of the facts almost with certainty. As the syndrome described is culture-neutral and independent, all textual and philological criticism has to take this fact into account. Some methods of judicial expertise can subsidiarily be applied (such as the criteria of U. Undeutsch)5 in order to decide about the truthfulness of a testimony according to internal criteria.
As a consequence of this methodological solution some earlier philological conclusions are to be re-examined. It can be shown that a number of hypotheses intended to solve ununderstood texts of the Gospel and the Apocalypse, are defective. If one reads that in the story of the epileptic child two devils were mentioned: a mute one and an epileptic one, and that therefore one can suspect that two different stories were joined, it is clear that this clumsy construction is only rendered necessary by ignorance of the infantile epileptic syndrome.6
According to Somers: “Similarly, the attempts by some philologists to explain the story of the possessed man of Gerasa (Mark 5) as a synthesis of two or three others, mixed with folklore, is now superseded by a realistic understanding of the story through psychopathological examination. The possessed of Gerasa shows all symptoms of schizophrenia with catatonic agitation. The story is quite realistic, including the delusion that he was possessed by a legion of devils. Mark’s text is rather precise: the man was subject to a grandiose delusion; he was agitated esp. during the night, he roamed amidst the graves, howling, and he mortified himself with stones. Nobody could control him, he broke all chains. It is not very strange that such a lunatic chases a herd of pigs while uttering loud shrieks, sending his devils into them. All these elements confirm the diagnosis of catatonic schizophrenia.
“The probability that such description could be put together by accident is infinitesimal. In practice, there can be no more doubt about the historicity of the facts. There is only one story, no folklore, nothing but a rather precise report of a real encounter of Jesus with a schizophrenic patient, written with the intention to show how Jesus had power over the devils. The witness intended to prove a very different thesis from what he actually did prove. Indeed, in our two examples: the epileptic child and the schizophrenic of Gerasa, Mark has shown that Jesus did not have power over the devils because there were none, but that he thought he did. From these two examples it is clear how the psychopathological examination of these texts is able to explain them and to show directly their historical truth.”
These were two examples of accurate descriptions of psychopathological conditions in the Gospel. Now, after many years of Bible analysis, dr. Somers realized that the descriptions of some prominent Bible characters also show coherent descriptions of psychopathological syndromes.
2.3. The Patriarchs
The first Old Testament character who deserves a closer psychological investigation, is Abraham. His story is that of a man who has no children, but hears a voice promising him a numerous progeny.
Dr. Somers takes the trouble of demonstrating that everything in the story of Abraham regarding marriage customs is authentic: the fact that children born by a slave girl were legitimate, that the official wife could adopt such a child (e.g. if she was sterile, as Sarah is said to be), that the nomads lent out or sold their sisters and daughters to visitors or in exchange for food supplies, and so on. Some of these customs were not in vogue anymore in the time the Bible was committed to writing, so if they figure in this story, this indicates its historical authenticity. The report of Abraham’s visit of Egypt completely fits the social facts that we know from Egyptian historiography. Modernist theologians are mistaken if they say that the patriarch’s story is just an edifying narrative concocted by priests in order to express the Israelites’ faith in their God.
The theological dimension of the story seems to be more recent, but the skeleton of actual events related is no doubt about real people, living in the 16th and 15th century BC. The personal data about Abraham also bear the stamp of authenticity. Dr. Somers lists the following remarkable data which the Bible narrative gives us about Abraham:
He hears Yahweh’s voice, giving him orders, and claims Yahweh visits him.
He thinks he is the progenitor of a numerous progeny, though at first he cannot have children with Sarah.
He offers his wife for the pleasure of the Pharaoh and of chieftain Abimelek.
He considers himself Yahweh’s chosen one, elevated above all other tribes.
He institutes male circumcision, and gives it the symbolical meaning of the Covenant with Yahweh.
He sends his eldest son Ismael, together with the latter’s mother, the slave girl Hagar, into the desert.
He wants to kill his and Sarah’s son Isaac.
This is not a normal behaviour pattern. Yet, it is not entirely inconsistent. In fact, the psychopathologist recognizes a typical pattern: the syndrome called paranoia. In this mental disease, the patient suffers from persistent thoughts that are in conflict with reality. Typical delusions are: being persecuted by an enemy, being endowed with a special mission or special powers, belonging to a family of otherworldly descent. These delusions can be accompanied by hallucinations, usually the well-known phenomenon of “hearing voices”. Often these voices command him to commit very specific symbolical acts, sometimes specific crimes. The refusal of one’s own sexuality, as well as sexual impotence, often accompany this condition.
The limited mutilation called (male) circumcision, is not something invented by (or prescribed by God to) Abraham. The Egyptians and other peoples knew the practice. The rationale was that everyone has both a male and a female soul. In the male, the left-over female resides in the prepuce, the skin covering the top of the penis; in the female, the leftover male resides in the clitoris. Incidentally, this primitive insight corresponds with certain findings of modern embryology: the same tissue that becomes the glans (top of the penis) in a male embryo, becomes the clitoris in the female embryo; and the same tissue that becomes the labia, the visible part of the girl’s genitals, becomes the boy’s prepuce. So, in order to achieve full sexual differentiation, the part which corresponds to the outermost part of the opposite sex’s genitals is removed. In order to make real men, the left-over “labia” is cut off, and in order to make real women, the left-over “glans” is removed.
Since womanhood is more taken for granted, whereas a “real man” is something one has to become, the practice of female circumcision is fortunately not that widespread. Today, it is confined to North and East Africa, where its defendants often invoke Islamic sanction for the practice. In fact, Mohammed never prescribed it, but according to a tradition, when seeing a girl’s circumcision, he told the people to “diminish but not destroy”, which is generally understood as an acceptance of the minor circumcision (removal of the clitoris), but a rejection of the major circumcision (removal of the labia, followed by sewing up the vaginal opening until the day of defloration). The practice is extremely painful and destructive, and the World Health Organization and many social activists are trying to eradicate it. Male circumcision, on the other hand, is fairly harmless and is found among many peoples in different continents. The Bible only mentions circumcision as applicable to males.
The fact that circumcision is so widespread, invalidates the Bible’s claim that it was the token of the exclusive covenant between Yahweh and His chosen people. If Abraham perforce wanted to circumcise his son, there must have been a different reason: perhaps the paranoia syndrome. Attempts at mutilation of one’s own or a child’s genitals are not uncommon among paranoid patients. They are a violent expression of their refusal of their own sexuality.
But probably the story of Abraham instituting circumcision does not warrant any inferences about the historical Abraham’s personality. It is quite possible that the priestly Bible editors during the Babylonian exile (6th century BC) retroactively made circumcision into the sign of the Covenant. In Palestine and Egypt, it could not have been a distinctive custom, because it was widespread, but in Babylon the Hebrews distinguished themselves from the Babylonians by this custom, so it got emphasized and sanctified as a factor of the Hebrews’ identity. To give the practice full sanction, it was attributed to God’s own will as expressed in the Covenant with Abraham.
On the other hand, while circumcision may not originally have been introduced as a sign of the Covenant, it may well have been started, as far as Abraham’s own clan was concerned, by Abraham himself. At least, if we accept that Abraham was an immigrant to Kanaan from “Ur of the Chaldees” in Mesopotamia, it is logical that he was the first in his clan to have his son circumcised, as a matter of cultural adaptation to his new environment. All in all, it is safer to subtract the introduction of circumcision from the list of peculiar behaviour traits in the historical Abraham. The aforementioned six facts that remain are still peculiar enough.
It is possible that Abraham at first had a healthy sex life, and that he got no children due to purely physical causes (impotentia generandi rather than impotentia coeundi). The frustration and inferiority feeling that would naturally follow from being a married man without children, might then have been a typical starting-point for the progressive development of a paranoid delusion. The inferiority feeling gets transformed into delusions of greatness and divine favour. The typical construction you find among many paranoid patients is: my present misfortune (including the fact that people consider me mad and put me in a mental hospital) is merely a stage of testing, after which my true mission will become clear to all and I will be glorified.
Abraham lent Sarah to other men (Genesis 12:10-20, 20:118). Doing this with your own wife (rather than with your sister or daughter) was very unusual, because the laws against adultery were very strict. In fact, both the pharoah and Abimelek were very unhappy and indignant when they found out this woman they had hired was already someone’s wife. Is this practice of making a childless wife available to the inseminative potential of other men not an indication that her ultimate pregnancy was brought about by one of those other men?
In Genesis 18:1-15 it is related that a visitor, called Yahweh (but otherwise a perfectly human fellow who washes his feet and eats flour cakes), wants to see Sarah, and afterwards tells Abraham that next year he will have a son. Although the story may have been censored a bit in the final editing, there can be no doubt about what had happened in between. It would explain the oral tradition mentioned in the Talmud, that Isaac didn’t resemble Abraham at all. Similarly, the son that Hagar is said to have given Abraham, may well have been another man’s offspring: nobody keeps check on what exactly a simple maid is doing at night.
At any rate, Abraham does not behave like a man who, after years of fruitless trying, has been blessed with two sons. He sends the eldest, Ismael, together with his mother Hagar, away into the desert. The youngest, Isaac, will be sacrificed at Yahweh’s command. Did Abraham suffer at the thought that these children, who had restored his manhood in the eyes of his tribesmen, were in fact not his children at all? Did he suffer from a conflict between his delusion of a God-given promise of numerous progeny, of which the sons were the fulfillment, and the sneaking realization that they were not his own sons? At any rate, in a completely pathological development, he hears a voice telling him to sacrifice his son."
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