Knowing Jesus

I was chatting with a friend about someone I knew who was at the extremity of life and described him/her as a person of devout religious faith in one of the more liturgical traditions (for example, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Catholic, Orthodox, etc.). My friend, quickly replied, “Does he know Jesus?” For a moment I was flabbergasted! The suggestion was palpable—how could one of those possibly “know Jesus.” How does one respond to such a question and suggestion?

            Jesus, as every conscious person in these United States knows, is a figure of the ancient past; he lived around two Millenia ago. An obscure (in his day) healer, thaumaturge and religious teacher during his life, he was crucified at the hands of the Romans on a charge of sedition and near the middle of the first century CE he was touted by his followers as being raised from the dead.

            Hence, the question could mean, does my seriously ill friend know Jesus like a figure of human history, or does he know Jesus as a figure in modern culture, for the name of Jesus is touted by innumerable religious groups, by their church steeples on countless corners, in religious commercials on television, in religious publications, in political movements, in marketing, etc.

            But I do not think my friend, who raised the question, was talking about knowing Jesus as a figure of the ancient past or as a cultural icon in the modern world. I was being asked if my seriously ill friend knew Jesus intimately, as we know those dear to us. That is, does he know Jesus spiritually, in his heart by faith? Has he been “born again” through a faith encounter with the living Jesus?

            Physically, human beings have only five faculties of sensation: seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting.¹ These are the only means by which we are able to “know” the world around us. Physical sensations encountered through our senses are transmitted by means of neural activity to the brain where the brain interprets them. For example, we sense a touch, and the brain interprets it as soothing or painful.

Christian folk, however, believe there is also another non-physical way of “knowing.” It is by perceiving “spiritually.” Spiritual perception, they claim, is not dependent on the physical senses but rather on the Spirit of God that communes with the human spirit (Rom 8:14-16; 1 Cor 2:11-14; 6:17) to impart a knowledge of Jesus, the Christ (Phil 3:7-11). It is in this spiritual sense that I was being asked if my seriously ill friend “knew Jesus.”

The difficulty, however, is that human beings don’t have indwelling spirts as a distinct, identifiable aspect of the human anatomy. Human beings can “show spirit,” for example, but the spirit in this case is a motivational attitude that animates an individual, and that attitude would likely be considered an emotional response to some exterior stimulus. “When Paul speaks of the pneuma [spirit] of man, he does not mean some higher principle within him or some special intellectual or spiritual faculty of his, but simply his self…”² Nor do we usually speak in polite society of an exterior spirit acting upon us to produce an emotional response, such as that of “knowing Jesus.”

            As with any stimulus, the brain must process the putative “spirit encounter.” The stimulus in this case would be hearing the “Gospel” in the clamor of the different gospels preached by the likes of a Jim Jones or Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Benny Hinn or Billy Graham, Martin Luther or Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Sunday or Bishop John Shelby Spong, etc. Two texts in the New Testament even disagree over the role of Faith (Paul: Gal 3:6-19) and Works (James 2:18-26) in salvation. In short, there are competitive gospels, and each proclaimer is arrogant enough to think the gospel he preaches is absolute divine Truth to the exclusion of all other truths. Compare Paul’s arrogant statement about those who disagreed with his gospel in Gal 1:6-9. We tend to forget in our arrogance that it is God (if God there be) who will judge the condition of the human soul (if human soul there be) and will thereby “separate the sheep from the goats.”³

            There appears to be no accounting for the unusual things people will take as “gospel truth” when it comes to religion.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Philip G. Zimbardo, et al., Psychology. Core Concepts (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2009), 305.

²Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (2 vols. in 1; trans. K. Grobel; New York: Scribner’s1951, 1955), 1.206.

³An image used by Matthew’s Jesus in Matt 25:31-46.

Human Insight or Divine Revelation

In a recent article, published shortly after his death, Roy Hoover¹ linked (human) insight and (divine) revelation:

What Paul regarded as a revelation we often refer to as an insight…I mean to use insight in this essay in the same sense as the meaning Paul had in mind in using the term revelation—that a new reality had become visible to Paul when God raised Jesus Christ from the dead…”²

An insight is a sudden thought that arises from within. A psychologist might define it as follows: “In psychology, insight occurs when a solution to a problem presents itself quickly and without warning,”³ or perhaps better: “The ability to see and understand clearly the inner nature of things, esp. by intuition.”⁴ Psychologists regard insight as a common human ability and have developed therapies relying on human insight in the treatment of patients with mental difficulties.⁵ On the other hand, in Pauline thought a revelation was something initiated from a divine source that came from outside an individual (Gal 1;12; 2:2; 2 Cor 12:1).

            What are we then to make of Hoover’s suggestion that (human) insight and (divine) revelation are the same experience? One seems to cancel-out the other. That is to say: if it is revelation, it is not human insight, and vice versa. Julian Jaynes, late Princton psychologist, however, theorized that ancient humans had a bicameral mind (i.e., two-chambers). One part of the mind issued commands that the other half of the mind perceived as voices of the Gods. Jaynes argued that the ancients did not consider their emotions and desires to be from within themselves, but their inner emotions came from the outside as actions of the Gods.⁶ The human mind began shifting to human consciousness around the 2^nd Millenium BCE, Jaynes argues.⁷

Today, it is generally thought that sudden flashes of insight that suddenly present themselves to us emerge from the subconscious. Yet how are we to explain auditory “hallucinations,” where people hear voices telling them to do certain things, or people of religious faith claiming to have received “answers” from God to their prayers? Might such experiences be from the subconscious, occurring as a historical residue of the bicameral mind that today is referred-to as insight? Reactions to Jaynes’ hypothesis are mixed, some positive and others negative.⁸

            On at least two occasions Paul, in his undisputed letters, claims to have had revelations from the Lord (Gal 1:12; I Cor 11:23) and on one occasion claims that the Lord spoke to him, and Paul quotes the Lord’s very words: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9). Could these occasions be considered instances of a residual bicameral mind at work in the first century CE? The bicameral mind is a mental state in which an experience of the right hemisphere of the brain is transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. Or must we think that Paul was only speaking metaphorically. That is, he didn’t mean to say that he heard an actual voice. It was only a sudden flash of insight that came to him.

            Hoover preferred to describe as (human) insight what Paul described as (divine) revelation, and Jaynes’ hypothesis presents a plausible theory for explaining divine revelation as simply human insight. What an awesome and terrifying thought! If true, God-believers are more alone in the universe than ever before.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Late Weyerhaeuser Professor of Biblical Literature and Religion Emeritus at Whitman College.

²Roy W. Hoover, “The Origin of Paul’s Gospel and the Power of Insight,” The Fourth R 37.5 (November-December 2024), 18.

³https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight

⁴Webster’s New World College Dictionary, under the word “insight.”

⁵Philip G. Zimbardo, et al., Psychology. Core Concepts (6^th ed.; Boston: Pearson, 2009), 576-77.

⁶Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Break-down of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), see his readings of the Iliad, p. 72 (date of the Iliad is around 8^th/7^th century BCE).

⁷https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality#:~:text=Jaynes%20theorized%20that%20a%20shift,complexity%20in%20a%20changing%20world. See his argument for the breakdown of the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia: Jaynes, Origins, 223-246.

⁸https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality#:~:text=Psychiatrist%20Iain%20McGilchrist%20proposes%20that,that%20McGilchrist%20mischaracterized%20Jaynes's%20theory.