F. Scott Spencer - Passions of the Christ: The Emotional Life of Jesus in the Gospels

A bout a dozen years ago I began to notice how hot the study of emotions had become across a wide array of disciplines in both the humanities and the sciences. As the historian Jan Plamper reflected in 2012, I write during a boom in the history of emotions; there is gold rush fever in the air. Paper and panel sessions ensued at the annual SBL meetings, along with a published collection of seventeen essays by an international team of scholars, which I edited for SBL Press under the title Mixed Feelings and Vexed Passions: Exploring Emotions in Biblical Literature (2017).

The present volume represents the fruit of my particular interest in the emotional life of Jesus portrayed in the canonical Gospels, interweaving close textual analysis of relevant Gospel texts with ancient and modern theological, philosophical, and psychological approaches to emotion study. It offers, I believe, the most thorough exegetical-cum-interdisciplinary investigation of the subject to date.

A handful of other recent studies of Jesuss emotions (biblical scholars paid little attention to the matter until this century) have also capitalized on the broader surge of emotion research to various degrees. Matthew Elliotts

Standing most apart in the group, Roy M. Oswald and Arland Jacobsons The Emotional Intelligence of Jesus: Relational Smarts for Religious Leaders (2015) tracks Jesuss overall emotional intelligence or EQ (distinct from IQ) profilein terms of self-awareness, transparency, empathy, inspiration, assertiveness, optimism, and stress resilience, among other traitsas a model for modern pastors and congregations. Although sketching a winsome picture of Jesuss emotional demeanor in the Gospels (Jacobson is a trained New Testament scholar as well as a pastor), it does so in broad strokes; cursory examination of Gospel texts offers a thin springboard for diving into extended applications to contemporary religious leadership.

I appreciate the contributions these monographs and their authors (and others I might have overlooked) have made to kick-starting interest in Jesuss emotional life in the Gospel narratives in dialogue with cross-disciplinary emotion research. Again, however, I hope that this book significantly moves the discussion down the field, covering more textual and theoretical ground in a compelling way.

A quick glance at the table of contents will disclose roughly equivalent concentrations on Jesuss negative/vehement (anger, anguish, disgust) and positive/virtuous (surprise, love, joy) emotions, resisting simplistic assessments of Jesuss high EQ. Humans are emotionally complex beings, intertwining a welter of dynamic feelings for good and ill and everything in between. All feelings are mixed to some degree betwixt and between intricate neural circuits, social networks, and environmental ecosystems. Although the Gospels provide nothing close to a full psychological profile of Jesus, they do provocatively illustrate some rich facets of his emotional life, the Word made feeling together with flesh.