been said about him by others. But not a dismissal. Not easily dismissed, this highly unusual man whose unique sense of God separated him from his religious peers. He was unusual, yes, unique certainly, but not by any stretch of the imagination either perfect or all-knowing in the sense eventually suggested by Catholic thinkers.

31. Schonfield, Hugh J., Those Incredible Christians, p. xi: In The Passover Plot, I rejected after protracted and thorough research the traditional portrayal of Jesus and revealed him as a Jew, who at a psychological moment in Jewish history courageously, steadfastly and with deep insight acted on the conviction that he was the Messiah his afflicted people were awaiting. I showed him to have been a man of faith, but no more than man, who employed his natural intelligence to bring to fruition the predictions which in the manner of his time he believed must be accomplished.

32. Schweitzer, Albert, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, p. 35: In the last decade historical research has more and more clearly perceived that the expectation of the second coming of the Messiah is at the center of Jesus' thought, and that it dominates his feeling, his will and his action far more rigorously than we had previously supposed... Jesus considered himself to be the Messiah and expected his majestic return on the clouds of heaven.

33. Schweitzer, Albert, Ibid., p. 37: Jesus is evidently a hybrid, tainted from birth by heredity, who even in his early youth as a born degenerate attracted attention by an extremely exaggerated self-consciousness combined with high intelligence and a very slightly developed sense of family and sex. His self-consciousness slowly unfolded until it rose to a fixed delusional system, the pecularities of which were determined by the intensive religious tendencies of the time and his one-sided preoccupation with the writings of the Old Testament. Jesus was moved to express his ideas by the appearance of John the Baptist. Proceeding step by step Jesus finally arrived at the point of relating to himself all the Scriptural promises, which had become vital again through national misfortune, and for whose ultimate glorious fuldilment all hearts hoped. Jesus regards himself as a completely supernatural being. For only so and not otherwise can man understand his behavior when he arrogated to himself divine rights like the forgiveness of sins. (Matt. 9:2; Mark 2:5-12; Luke 5:20, 7:48)

34. Schweitzer, Albert, Ibid., p.40: We find a boy with unusual mental talents who is, nevertheless, predisposed to psychic disturbances, and within whom delusions gradually form. He spent his whole leisure in the study of the Holy Scriptures, the reading of which certainly contributed to his mental illness. When at the age of thirty he first made a public appearance, his paranoia was completely established. It is apparently one of those cases, where formless and indistinct psychotic ideas are, indeed, present, but where, nonetheless, they need an external shock and a strong emotion, in order to form a typical systematic structure of paranoia. This shock was provided for Jesus by another paranoid, no other than John the Baptist. Meantime Jesus' delusions attained their most complete maturity, and when he heard of the "forerunner of the Messiah", who was baptizing sinful people in the river Jordan, he betook himself there in order to receive baptism himself. After the baptism Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days. This sojourn is for us of the greater interest for these forty days lie between two sharply differentiated sections of his life. The delusions which up to that time were isolated and unrelated to each other henceforth merged into a great systematic structure of delusions; doubtless Jesus had at that time repeated conversations with God the Father who had commissioned him and whose doctrine he preached. Such a development of his illness, a transition from the