Jesus: The Village Psychiatrist

Abstract

Jesus: The Village Psychiatrist. By Donald Capps. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 192 pp. $19.95 (paper). It is not every day that one happens upon a book wherein comparisons between Jesus of Nazareth and Sigmund Freud abound. Indeed, for many, those two names stand poles apart from one another. But Donald Capps has managed to produce a tome in which every chapter brims with associations between Jesus and Freud. Capps's book Jesus: The Village Psychiatrist is work of one scholar among many who of late have attempted to bring knowledge from medical field to bear on biblical studies. Divided into two sections, Capps's initial three chapters seek to lay groundwork for rest of book by defining and illustrating disorders. According to DSM-IV (the standard mental health manual), somatoform disorders all share a common feature in that they reveal the presence of physical symptoms that suggest a general medical but not fully explained by a general medical condition (p. 3). To state it more simply, somatoform disorders not full-blown illnesses themselves; rather, they mimic such illnesses. For Capps, persons with whom Jesus (and Freud) interacted fall into this category. For those who have read works of J. D. Crossan or J. J. Pilch, this argument may seem familiar. However, according to Capps, what sets his work apart from such scholars is that while they want to distinguish between Jesus curing a disease and healing an illness, he does not; somatoform disorders are diseases because they have physical - organic - symptoms but they (also) illnesses because primary causes psychosocial (p. xviii). In all reality, while Capps adheres to a more rigid definition than those previously mentioned, his prevailing image of Jesus as a healer is not too different. In end, Capps's title is true to book's content; Jesus is a psychiatrist because most of persons whom he healed were suffering from a mental or emotional disorder (p. xii). Beginning with part two of book, Capps turns his gaze toward a number of Jesus' healing encounters (two paralyzed men, two blind men, demon-possessed boy, Jairuss daughter, and hemorrhaging woman). Each chapter begins by assessing authenticity of stories and then moves into a description of them. This is followed by a comparison of Jesus' cases with Freud's; then a socio-psychological interpretation is offered. …

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