The question of whether the historical Jesus was in good mental health has been explored by multiple psychologists, philosophers, historians, and writers. The first person, after several other attempts at tackling the subject, who broadly and thoroughly questioned the mental health of Jesus was French psychologist Charles Binet-Sanglé, the chief physician of Paris and author of a four-volume work (The Madness of Jesus). This view finds both supporters and opponents.
Opinions challenging the sanity of Jesus
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.<ref>{ { cite book |last=Kasmar |first=Gene |title=All the obscenities in the Bible |publisher=Kas-mark Pub. Co. |location=Brooklyn Center, MN |date=1995 |page=157 |isbn=978-0-9645-9950-5 |quote=He was thought to be insane by his own family and neighbors in 'when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself... (Mark 3:21–22 – The Greek existemi, translated as "beside himself", actually means insane and witless). The Greek 'ho para, translated as "friends", also means family.}}</ref>
The accusation contained in the Gospel of John is more literal:
, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, suggests in his article "The Madness of King Jesus: Why was Jesus Put to Death, but his Followers were not?" (2007) and in his book The Madness of King Jesus (2010) that Pilate and other Romans regarded Jesus as an insane lunatic. According to the Gospels, Jesus was presented to Pilate and sentenced to death as a royal pretender, but the standard Roman procedure was the prosecution and execution of would-be insurgents with their leaders. Therefore, to suggest that Jesus was put to death by the Roman authorities as some kind of royal pretender does not explain sufficiently why he was killed, unlike his disciples.
Jean Meslier (1664–1729) had similar thoughts in the 18th century. In chapters 33 and 34 of his Testament, he provides evidence for his conclusion that Jesus "was really a madman, a fanatic" ().
Challenging the sanity of Jesus continued in the 19th century with the first quest for the historical Jesus. David Friedrich Strauss (, 1864) claimed that Jesus was a fanatic. Lemuel K. Washburn opined in a pamphlet Was Jesus insane? (1889) that "Jesus was not divine, but insane". Oskar Panizza introduced Jesus as a psychopathological and paranoid case. Oskar Holtzmann in (1903) presented Jesus as "ecstatic", which he described as a pathologically-strong excitability of the imagination and the power of will. (as George de Loosten, 1905) attempted to retrospectively diagnose Jesus as generally mentally ill, similarly to Jean Meslier. (1905) determined Jesus to be either epileptic or paranoid. Using a few examples, he developed a description of the typical pathological prophet ("Prophetentypus") and applied it to Jesus. (1908) hypothesised that the abnormalities he found in Jesus' behaviour could be explained by a nerve overstimulation (). However, it was not until the publication of Charles Binet-Sanglé's four-volume work from 1908 to 1915 that the topic was extensively and visibly discussed.
Binet-Sanglé diagnosed Jesus as suffering from religious paranoia:
His view was shared by the New York psychiatrist , who in 1912 published his study, Religion and Civilization: The Conclusions of a Psychiatrist, which enumerated a number of Jesus' mentally-aberrant behaviours. Hirsch agreed with Binet-Sanglé in that Jesus had been afflicted with hallucinations and pointed to his "megalomania, which mounted ceaselessly and immeasurably". Hirsch concluded that Jesus was just a "paranoid":
The Soviet psychiatrist Y. V. Mints (1927) also diagnosed Jesus as suffering from paranoia. The literature of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, following the tradition of the demythologization of Jesus in the works of Strauss, Renan, Nietzsche, and Binet-Sanglé, put forward two main themes: mental illness and deception. That was reflected in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita in which Jesus is depicted by Pontius Pilate as a harmless madman. It was only at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s that the mythological option, the denial of the existence of Jesus, won the upper hand in Soviet propaganda.