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Alarmed at the growing body of psychiatric literature which deals with the psychopathology of Christ, Professor Bundy has seized a literary whip of cords and proceeded to the cleansing of the temple of all pathographers. In doing so, however, he has been eminently fair. He has approached the subject in a spirit, it is true, of some indignation but nevertheless with a determination not to take any unfair advantage
of his opponents. He therefore begins by giving an extremely complete and well summarized history of those writers who have approached the subject of the personality of Jesus with psychological curiosity, especially Renan, von Hartmann and Nietzsche.
In his third chapter Professor Bundy has made available in English various psychiatric estimates of the Christ by such writers as Oscar Holtzmann, Emil Rasmussen, de Loosten and C. Binet-Sanglé. Here the estimates of various men who have classified Christ as an ecstatic, an epileptic, a paranoiac, a constitutional psychopath and a neurotic, are given. In collecting this psychiatric material and presenting it so succinctly, Bundy has conferred a favor upon all students of psychopathology.
The personality of the Christ, as well indeed as that of other Messiahs, is of the greatest interest to modern psychiatrists. Was he a symbolical figure embodying the eternally popular myth of the despised son coming to a very public triumph, or was he an ordinary human being who, by a familiar mental mechanism, came to identify himself with the Son of God? What parts of the more or less conflicting stories of his life can be accepted as actual happenings and what parts are attributed to his character with the psychological appropriateness always found in legend?
The above-named psychiatrists and many more have attacked these problems and have come to conclusions which are at least sufficiently plausible to make the theologians endeavor to refute them. Professor Bundy's chief arguments against the diagnoses are as follows: The b