Was Jesus of Nazareth Autistic?
Does fasting for 40 days qualify as an eating disordered behaviour?
This may strike you as an odd, even an inflammatory, question, and it’s certainly not definitively answerable. But there are lessons to be learned in investigating it.
It came to me over these last couple of weeks while reading three texts: a novel (Him, Geoff Ryman, published December 2023), a nonfiction book (Unmasking Autism, Devon Price, published April 2022), and a research article about the role of “collaborative morality” in the “emergence of personality variation and autistic traits” (by Penny Spikins, Barry Wright and Derek Hodgson, published in Time and Mind in 2016).
In this piece, I’ll offer an interpretation of Jesus’ story based on my recent reading of Unmasking Autism, which is about Autistic people whose proficiency with masking sees them reach adulthood without ever coming up on people’s, i.e. teachers’ and parents’, radars as Autistic, and inspired by Him. I’ll also refer to the academic article mentioned above, which will help to contextualise “the Son” (as Ryman’s narrator calls him) within a broader framework of neurodivergent boundary pushers and (r)evolutionaries.
Note: I am following the guidelines of Price and others, and capitalising the A in Autism and Autistic. To find out why, read this article.
Enough of a miracle, enough of a miracle for anyone
Him fictionalises the life of Yehushua (in modern parlance: Jesus) of Nazareth. Throughout his life, but especially during his early years, Yehushua embodies several traits that, particularly since the publication of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (aka DSM-5) in 2013, are consistent with a modern understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
One day, Yehushua’s mother Maryam finds herself inexplicably pregnant, and is exiled for it. She marries a local heretic called Yosef, and gives birth to a girl — “well the baby had no father, so what else could she possibly be?” — whom she names Avigayil. “Enough of a miracle, enough of a miracle for anyone.”
In the years that follow, she has six more children, all by Yosef. Avigayil becomes friends with the son of the local tekton, or stonemason. The boy’s name is Yehushua. He dies young, and when he does, Avigayil experiences grief for the first time. In its wake, she begins to identify as a boy and takes Yehushua’s name. Her family interprets this as a symptom of grief, and nothing more than a phase, but it sticks.
As the narrative progresses, Yehushua (fka Avigayil) becomes more and more able to articulate his specialness: he is God in human form, present on Earth in order to better understand the human experience (of love and its absence, grief; of time as linear and finite), to unite humanity through preaching (the lessons should by now be quite familiar (!): there is only one God, wealth and status mean nothing, the meek shall inherit the Earth, sins are forgivable as long as you repent and do not deny God, etc.), and ultimately to save us all by dying a hideously painful death.
But before he’s able to do any of that, he spends his childhood and adolescence grappling with what it means to exist in a human world. Humanness doesn’t come naturally to him, and this disjunction comes across as stubbornness, insensitivity, defiance in the face of instructions from his mother, and a general sense of not being willing — or able — to cooperate with others unless the drive to do so comes from within himself.
Ryman’s narrator refers to the infant Avigayil’s “incomprehension of human feelings” as “inhuman”; a more appropriate descriptor might be “atypical”. Young children learn behaviours from the people around them, but Him makes a point of stressing the extent to which little Avigayil performs human emotions. In one scene, she folds her arms and leans her head sideways, pushing her lips over to one side of her face in a gesture Maryam recognises at once: “the child was deliberately overstating her confusion, miming to make it apparent”. I’ll return to this later.
Years later, after Avigayil’s transition to Yehushua, their father Yosef dies. Yehushua’s siblings grieve in what we might consider the ‘appropriate’ way, as does Maryam. Yakob wails and weeps. For Maryam, it is as if “the very air around her changed”. The other members of Yehushua’s family have free access to their emotions — positive and negative — and do not have to think about expressing them in a way that other people deem ‘normal’. But Yehushua doesn’t. He asks his mother, “What do you want me to do?”
Yosef’s death “isn’t a surprise”, he says. He sits and stares at the corpse of his father, then gazes at his brother “as if curious”. While Yakob is overcome with spasms of sobbing, Yehushua wipes his brother’s face with his sleeve, prompting the following exchange.
“You care about Yakob,” said Maryam.
“He’s still here,” said Yehush, mildly.
“You’re not human.”
Yehush paused in thought. “I’m learning,” he said.
Of course God, trapped in human flesh, must learn how to embody that flesh so as not to rub people up the wrong way. There are ‘normal’ ways to respond to death. There are rules: you cry, you grieve. To many of us, these processes come naturally. But this learning journey resonates strikingly with the way autistic (and other neurodiverse) people learn how to react to everyday life in a way that other (neurotypical) people perceive as ‘normal’.
It is only when Maryam’s friend Idra arrives that she is “finally” able to cry — to let her emotional response run its course. Idra assures Maryam that her boys are grieving too. Some are, but not all.
Yehush was standing and staring at them all, appalled perhaps by all the noise, his head cocked sideways as if someone distant was calling him.
He does not know grief, has not had time to form a response to it, so he freezes, as if solving some complex equation. God does not know death as the end of something finite, because God exists outside time. Perceived from without, all life and death are concurrent. We’ll come back to this non-linear way of perceiving time in a little bit.
In Avigayil’s early years, in a rare moment of mother-daughter intimacy, she and Maryam share a meaningful look, a glance of recognition over something someone had said. Maryam smiles to herself. This is her:
Imagine how I would have felt if anyone had seen me or understood me. Maryam knew exactly how good that would have felt, and appreciated all over again what a treasure she had found in her daughter.
Like her daughter, Maryam is a misfit. Pre-emptively exiled as a way to escape the punishment for sex out of wedlock — we know she was impregnated by the Lord, but her compatriots don’t — she understands what it means to be divergent, an outcast, and that those who fall outside the norm are treasures, not freaks.
Enter: Unmasking Autism
Unmasking Autism, by Devon Price, explores the phenomenon of masked Autism. In conversations about neurodiversity, masking is pretty much what it sounds like. Researcher and author Dr Hannah Belcher likens it to camouflaging, and writes that it means “to hide or disguise parts of oneself in order to better fit in with those around you”. Masking behaviours vary from person to person.
What’s important to note about masking is that it means assuming behaviours that are at odds with how one would naturally be. Since it involves suppressing certain behaviours (such as the self-stimulatory habits, or ‘stims’, that many Autistic people rely on to keep a level head), or the fake-acting of others (like maintaining eye contact with people despite feeling uncomfortable, or socialising for longer than one’s energy allows), it can be draining. Diverting energy into what feel like unnatural behaviours leaves Autistic people with less energy overall, which is one of the reasons so many suffer from burnout, high stress levels and social anxiety. For a constellation of reasons, Autistic girls and women are more likely than Autistic boys and men to go through life masking than to have their disability recognised and diagnosed.
You could say that masking removes some of the roadblocks Autistic people face, because a successful masking strategy conceals the Autism of the masker. It prevents other people from treating Autistic people as Autistic, which in turn eliminates some of the risk of discrimination or bullying. This is (sort of) all well and good, until the energy required to maintain the mask, and the toll its upkeep takes on the bodymind (a la Gabor Maté) becomes unsustainable. Then, another strategy is required. Enter: Unmasking Autism.
In this context, “unmasking” means “proudly owning one’s disability”. No more pretending, no more suppressing self-stimulatory behaviours, no more hiding. Put simply, taking the mask off means being unapologetic about one’s nature and identity. Devon Price writes that it can have a “big impact on how [neurodiverse] people feel”, plus it can change the attitudes of the neurotypical population. So, win-win, as long it’s safe to unmask.
In Unmasking Autism, Price describes numerous traits associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder — more than you might think. They emphasise the variety of ways that being “on the spectrum” can manifest. They use the word “constellation”. One person’s Autism might seem completely alien to another person’s, because the lights that flash on in his personal constellation of Autistic characteristics may be almost entirely distinct from those that flash on in hers. I use “his” and “hers” deliberately, because, in many cases and for mostly social reasons, Autism often manifests differently in men and women.
No Autistic person, or at least a very small number of Autistic people, will recognise in themselves all the traits Price describes. You’ll likely see some in you. I certainly see several in me. And an exercise like this inevitably involves some cherry-picking, but I hope you’ll agree that the example I discuss here make Geoff Ryman’s descriptions of Yehushua’s behaviours shine a little differently.
Price writes that it’s not uncommon for Autistic people to have trouble naming, or even recognising, their feelings. Alexithymia, which in Greek translates to something like “no words for emotion”, is more common among Autistic people than in the general population. (Devon Price says half of Autistics experience Alexithymia; Autistica says one in five.)
This can get in the way of maintaining functional relationships — romantic or otherwise — with neurotypical people. In terms of emotional responsiveness, they may “become disturbed or overwhelmed when others are upset” but be “uncertain how to respond [to] or support them”. To explain his muted reaction to his own father’s death, Yehushua says he’s “learning” about being human. He cares for his brother Yakob because he’s “still here”, but as far as he’s concerned, his father no longer is. Of course, this is logically true. But it strikes Maryam, who has frictionless access to a wellspring of ‘natural’ human emotion, as cold and inhuman.
Autistic children, especially boys, might be described as “stubborn, difficult, and strong-willed”. It’s hard to imagine a more strong-willed character than Yehushua, who battles with his mother for years over his gender identity. He defies her by opting to work for the tekton — she is against it — and announces, age 12, that he must go to the Temple in Jerusalem. 12 is the age boys are permitted to go to the Temple; girls cannot until they are 13. If Autistic children are “defiant in the face of instructions [they don’t] want to follow”, Yehushua is the Autist par excellence.
As they progress through adolescence and into adulthood, Autists often seem “youthful for their age”, Price continues. Partly this is to do with the pace of emotional development; partly it’s because, in many cases, (unmasked) Autustic people are less likely to structure their adult lives in the way society expects them to.
The rituals of adulthood come easily to some of us. Some people find fulfilment in taking on responsibilities, managing work, social and domestic lives, and engaging wholeheartedly with materialist culture. Some of us are able to hold humanitarian crises, and the inexplicability of injustice, at arm’s length. But for people who experience the world differently, the rules and expectations — often unwritten, and enforced in roundabout, subtle and inscrutable ways — of adulthood in the 21st century (at least in ‘the West’) can feel completely unnatural.
Gabor Maté walks into an essay
In The Myth of Normal, Dr Gabor Maté talks about how the culture that surrounds us requires us — if we are to avoid ostracisation and function at a high level in ‘normal’ society — to develop a “social character”. The social character is a construct. It is artificial. But it is a demand made of us by society writ large, with its consumerism, hierarchies and regimens, if we are to “fit in” and get by. Maté specifies three specific traits inherent to the “social character” demanded of us by 21st century western civilisation:
- Separation from self — we fabricate and embody “an image not of who we are but of how we would like to be perceived by others” (think: social media, fast fashion, cars, markers of status);
- Consumption hunger — we confuse desire with need “to the point that the nervous system becomes riled when the objects desired are withheld” (the actual needs of a human being are simple, and have nothing to do with consumerism: sustenance, shelter, and community);
- Hypnotic passivity — Maté writes: “you go to school, you’re regimented. You’re taught this is the way you’re supposed to behave, not other ways. The institutions of the society are constructed, so as to reduce, modify, limit the efforts and control of one’s own destiny.”
Creating, embodying and maintaining the requisite social character takes work, and this is especially true for neurodiverse people, for whom the rules aren’t self-evident. Why not keeping asking “why”, if something doesn’t make sense? Why not keep working on your action figure collection, or your electric train set? Why not dress up as your favourite anime character and hang out in a room full of people dressing up as theirs? Or, in the case of Yehushua — born female — why not form gangs with the neighbourhood boys, devote years to training as a stonemason, and shout profanities at visitors to the village from the trees?
Devon Price notes that Autistic people are often prone to “calorie restriction” and/or other eating disordered behaviours. The Yehushua of Him certainly does this, although not to the extent that the biblical Jesus did. Does fasting for 40 days qualify as an eating disordered behaviour? And they can alternate between being shy/mute and outspoken “when discussing a subject they are passionate about” — this is Yehushua to a T. And they often have difficulty remaining calm and focused in environments that are too stimulating, or stimulating in certain ways — recall Yehushua, “appalled perhaps by all the noise”, following his father’s death.
Does fasting for 40 days qualify as an eating disordered behaviour?
Finally, many Autistic people experience time differently. While people with ADHD often experience “time blindness”, which Psychology Today describes as difficulty estimating how much time has passed or completing activities within a certain amount of time, Devon Price writes about “spiral time” as something many Autistic people experience. Autists are
not single-minded Marios, running across a side-scrolling level to rescue Princess Peach. We’re more like the protagonist of the video game Katamari Demacy, a freaky, colourful demigod who rolls an ever-growing ball of objects around, each step forward attracting more random items into his ball’s expanding gravitational field until it engulfs the universe. We don’t complete discrete projects. We build worlds.
In Yehushua’s own words, God “thinks at once in all times, in all ages”, with “the speed of oceans or rocks or stars”. But in human flesh, on the Earth, “trapped here, God is in time”: Yehushua must learn to experience the world like the people around him do.
The parallel isn’t perfect, but it struck me as noteworthy. Here we have a entity who perceives all of time at once and knows nothing of death and grief, and who, embodying human flesh, has to learn about the human experience of these things. And on the other hand, Autistic people experience what Devon Price calls “spiral time”, which flows out from a centre point and is not linear; many experience Alexithymia, meaning they have difficulty accessing and naming their emotions; and many have to deliberately learn how to communicate what they are feeling in a way that is readable to neurotypical people, which, like Yehushua “miming to make [his/her confusion] apparent”, involves a kind of performance.
With Unmasking Autism fresh in mind, it was hard to read certain passages of Him without concluding that Ryman meant to suggest that Yehushua was, in fact, Autistic. And that’s without even going into the transgender element of Yehushua’s identity. As Devon Price explains, in a Venn diagram of Autistic and other neurodiverse people, and those whose gender identity and sexuality are in some way “atypical”, there is considerable overlap. In Him, Maryam worries that her miracle birth is destined to “end up a freak, one of those few poor women in men’s dress limping through life and offering male gestures, short hair, pleading eyes and a thin mean mouth”. Born female, Yehush begins to identify as a boy immediately after the death of a (male) member of their community, as if the experience — knowledge of grief — jolts him into self-realisation.
Manufacturing disability
The suggestion that Jesus, one of the most significant literary-historical figures in human history, was Autistic (or otherwise neurodiverse) is unusual, but not without precedent. Some have argued against the idea. But they may be doing so from a position of relative ignorance; those who have given it more consideration tend to be more receptive to the idea. Our understanding of Autism is evolving. DSM-5, which came out in 2013, contains no mention of Asperger’s Syndrome; the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder are broad, and include deficits in
- Social-emotional reciprocity, e.g., reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect, and failure to respond to social interactions;
- Nonverbal communicative behaviours, e.g., abnormalities in eye contact and body language;
- Developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, e.g., difficulties adjusting behaviour to suit various social contexts, and lack of interest in peers.
They also include having “abnormally” fixated interests, “excessively circumscribed or perseverative interests”, idiosyncratic phrases, “rigid thinking patterns”, and “apparent indifference to pain/temperature”. Some of which resonate when thinking about the historical figure of Jesus, and when reading Geoff Ryman’s story of Yehushua and Maryam.
It might be tempting to write off the idea that Jesus, or any historical figure who gained influence in an inherently social way, could have been Autistic (or otherwise neurodiverse), because how could a psychologically disabled person be so socially successful? It’s worth turning back to Devon Price, who has written in depth, on their own Substack, about what makes a disability a disability in the first place.
As disabled people, we have to stuff ourselves into uncomfortable clothing and postures and then compose ourselves through the pain of it if we wish to be even tentatively accepted. We have to plan for the world to be a sensory assault and a digitally-mediated, advertiser-funded hail of confusion. I forget at home sometimes that I am disabled, but once I attempt to interact with the broader world, I am forcibly reminded.
“My disability is manufactured,” Price writes. “It is created and imposed on me daily by the pressures of capitalism.”
Many aspects of disability are “inherently social and economic”. In other words, the world is disabling for people who are different. This doesn’t apply to all disabilities, some of which are categorically inhibiting. But most of the traits we associate with Autism Spectrum Disorder only become disabling in a world suffused with digital mediation, sensorily over-stimulating environments, high population density, expectations of how to dress and carry oneself (such as wearing makeup and restrictive clothing), and other cultural and economic trends that make demands of our “social characters”. Price continues:
Modern technology has rendered us all a bit more dissociative than we were before. We eagerly watch videos of manicured hands poking at crunchy slime, while our hands hover over frictionless glass screens. We stare at content showing hikers wandering beautiful woodland vistas while growing pale in our home offices for nine or ten hours per day. We touch almost nothing, never stretch our gaze past a distance of three feet.”
Many of us crave rough textures, moving bodies of water, cool breezes, and tasks that could keep anxious fingers purposefully focused. The absence of such meaningful stimuli makes us cranky, depressive, and even self-destructive. All we get are screens approximating the things we really need. We don’t even get the satisfaction of having physical buttons to press. And there’s absolutely no reason, beyond a profit motive, that life has to be this way.”
Put differently, Autism is a disability now because the world is unaccommodating for people who have Autistic traits. It pushes them to the margins by failing to support their diverse needs.
‘Alternative strategies to human pro-sociality’
But Autism may not always have been a disability, to the extent that the boundaries of what qualifies one as ‘disabled’ depend on how accommodating a society is towards difference. Consider the fact that shortsightedness is no longer disabling. In schools for deaf people, deafness is not disabling. Humans are capable of creating environments that do not disable people for being different.
Time and Mind published the article Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits in 2016. Broadly, its authors’ thesis is that the characteristics we now associate with being on the Autistic spectrum, and which in a modern, industrial-capitalist context effectively disable people from operating at their full potential, may actually have been advantageous in certain cultural contexts of the past.
In prehistory (and indeed in some non-industrial communities today) Autistic traits could have “promoted innovation” and contributed to the “rise of large scale social networks”, the article reads. Hunter-gatherer and pre-industrial societies that were able to achieve the “social buffering of vulnerabilities”, the authors argue, may have been able to create more opportunities for social advancement and enrichment, and had an edge over other, less accommodating societies. The authors argue that
a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding, could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts.
Which, incidentally, is a very different picture to the one “vulnerable” people see in many areas in today’s world. Those who are different are routinely ostracised; for decades, attempts to “correct” Autistic people have been overt and persistent (Devon Price takes aim at Applied Behaviour Analysis therapy in particular — read more about that here); bustling capitalist metropolises, and the social and working environments they create, make Autism a disability.
By definition, neurodivergent people think (and experience life) outside the box. They experience the world somehow differently to the majority — just like Jesus, and his correlate Yehushua, evidently did/do. Historically, those who have eschewed convention have been integral to our technological and cultural evolution. Growth and development require change, and change can’t happen if you don’t listen to the voices that challenge the status quo. This is the basis of biological evolution, too: mutations on a cellular level allow an organism to survive in new environs. Species that cannot adapt, die. Adapting means leaning outwards, into difference, paying more than lip service to the parts of oneself that overstep boundaries.
A sociocultural milieu that fears otherness and punishes transgression will never fully appreciate the value “different” people bring to it, and will therefore deny itself the reward of following them where they go.
Him is a work of fiction — a novel. Its author had every right to play around with ideas that may run contra to the reading public’s expectations regarding Jesus’ life. The Bible doesn’t label him as neurodiverse, obviously. But that’s as much to do with contemporary cultural mores and a lack of vocabulary as it has to do with his typicality. He clearly thought outside the box in a way that set him apart from his contemporaries. Fiction has the advantage over nonfiction in this area: Ryman can plant seeds and see how they grow without overtly testing his readers’ boundaries.
If you accept that people who ‘think differently’ — which is a consequence of neurodiversity, among other things — have been among the most influential drivers of societal change, then Ryman’s suggestion that Yehushua/Jesus was Autistic seems much less weird. It might actually seem inevitable, or even completely natural.
