The Psychiatric Study of Jesus: Exposition and Criticism

Schweitzer's dissertation for the doctorate in medicine at Strasbourg, published by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen in 1913, the year he left for Africa. Several writers of the time had argued from the Gospels that Jesus suffered from a paranoid mental illness, and since Schweitzer's own eschatological Jesus could be read as support for them, he set out their arguments and answered them as a physician. He concludes that their diagnoses rest on unhistorical use of the sources and on a misreading of beliefs that belonged to Jesus' time. Charles R. Joy's English translation was published in 1948.