J. Harold Ellens’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

This essay develops and illustrates the role of psychological process in the development of the Master Stories of Judaism and Christianity. This formative process is shaped by the memory and interpretation of key historical events that answer the main question which drives the development of the faith, theology, and religion of these traditions. That question was, “How is God in history, and what does our history and experience, therefore, mean?” The trajectory of development of Rabbinic Judaism seems to have been derived from the rational legalism of the Pharisees, while Christianity arose from the other Judaism, namely, the apocalyptic stream and the Jesus Movement which flowed from it. The consequence of these two different sources is the rise of twin religions with radically different original psychological tones, styles, objectives, and rationales.

Professor Wayne G. Rollins has written a remarkably important book on the history of the interface between psychological and biblical studies. It is called Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective. It is so comprehensive that it reaches from the words of Jesus of Nazareth to the models of Kohut and Winnicott, from the First Century to the Twenty-First, from Freud to Fowler and beyond. He definitively addresses the full range of issues relating to the psychological critique of the Bible and the history of Biblical Psychology.

Don Capps employed a Freudian Model and current biblical criticism models of Crossan, Borg, and others to evaluate the biblical data regarding the person and self-concept of Jesus of Nazareth. This article points to some vulnerabilities for serious criticism inherent in Capps's model and suggests the necessity of a wider range of psychological models for screening the data available on Jesus' development as a person in order to draw conclusions about his nature and motivations. Capps concludes that Jesus was a melancholic personality who was at odds with his society because he and his family were defamed regarding his problematic birth story, resulting in the violent symbolic action of cleansing the temple, thus expressing his arrival at self-confidence and self-affirmation. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45472/1/11089_2004_Article_372208.pdf