Jesus the Hero of Gospel tales - Psychiatric Study of Jesus unstable mentally?

The Uncomfortable Texts: Reassessing the "Prince of Peace" Image of Jesus

The core modern paper (Harvard Medical School / McLean Hospital, 2012)

The most-cited peer-reviewed piece making this exact argument is:

Murray, E.D., Cunningham, M.G., & Price, B.H. (2012). "The role of psychotic disorders in religious history considered." Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 24(4), 410–426.

The authors, from Harvard Medical School's neurology and psychiatry programs, analyzed Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul from a behavioral, neurologic, and neuropsychiatric perspective and concluded these figures had experiences resembling psychotic symptoms, potentially manifestations of primary or mood-disorder-associated psychotic disorders, discussed via formal differential diagnosis. Their diagnostic candidates for the biblical figures collectively included schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, delusions of grandeur, auditory-visual hallucinations, paranoia, Geschwind syndrome, and abnormalities associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. Notably, the paper drew a direct published rebuttal — Nicholson, P.T., "Psychosis and paroxysmal visions in the lives of the founders of world religions," J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci, 2014;26(1):E13-4 — so the exchange itself is peer-reviewed on both sides. Psychiatry Online + 2

Earlier 20th-century originators of the argument

The first person to broadly and thoroughly question Jesus's mental health was the French psychologist Charles Binet-Sanglé, chief physician of Paris, in his four-volume work La Folie de Jésus (The Madness of Jesus, 1908–1915). He was joined by two contemporaries whose work is treated as the classic source material in this debate: physician William Hirsch and theologian Georg Lomer (writing under the pseudonym Rasmussen), both of whom published psychiatric pathographies arguing Jesus showed signs of paranoia or religious delusion. Wikipedia

These publications caused significant controversy and were directly challenged by Albert Schweitzer in his own doctoral thesis, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus: Exposition and Criticism (Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu, 1913), in which Schweitzer defended Jesus's sanity and accused the pathographers of ignoring historical context — worth reading precisely because it's the direct scholarly response to the claim you're asking about, not a defense written from theology alone. HandWiki

A direct theological/psychological counter-paper

Hyder, O.Q. (1977). "On the Mental Health of Jesus Christ." Journal of Psychology & Theology (Biola University), 5(1), 3–12. DOI: 10.1177/009164717700500101 — this is a peer-reviewed piece written explicitly against the "mentally ill Jesus" thesis, engaging the psychiatric literature directly rather than dismissing it. HandWiki

Links

The role of psychotic disorders in religious history consideredMurray, Cunningham & Price (Harvard Medical School / McLean Hospital) analyze Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Paul, concluding their experiences resemble psychotic symptoms and proposing formal differential diagnoses.PubMed / J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci (2012)

Full text: The role of psychotic disorders in religious history consideredFull journal text of the 2012 Murray et al. paper, including the proposed new DSM diagnostic subcategory for this pattern of religious-visionary psychosis.Psychiatry Online (American Psychiatric Association)

Psychosis and paroxysmal visions in the lives of the founders of world religions (comment)Nicholson's peer-reviewed rebuttal to Murray et al., published in the same journal, disputing the psychotic-disorder framing.PubMed / J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci (2014)

Mental health of JesusOverview of the full history of the debate: Binet-Sanglé, Hirsch, Lomer, Schweitzer's rebuttal, and modern psychiatric reassessments, with citations to primary sources.Wikipedia

The Psychiatric Study of Jesus: Exposition and Criticism (Albert Schweitzer, 1913)Schweitzer's doctoral thesis directly rebutting the early psychiatric pathographies that argued Jesus was mentally diseased — the foundational text of this whole debate.Goodreads

A couple of caveats worth being upfront about, since you'll want these when citing this material:

1. The 2012 Murray et al. paper is the only clearly "peer-reviewed journal article" in the strict modern sense that directly makes the mental-illness argument about Jesus specifically alongside the other figures. The Hirsch/Lomer/Binet-Sanglé works are early-1900s books/monographs, not journal articles, and predate modern peer review as an institution. Schweitzer's rebuttal is a doctoral dissertation, not a journal article.
2. The 2012 paper itself is explicitly retrospective and speculative — the authors state upfront that retrospective diagnosis of historical/textual figures has real methodological limitations (no clinical interview, no contemporaneous record, texts written decades after the events by non-clinicians with theological motives), and it drew a published rebuttal in the same journal, so it isn't an uncontested finding even within the psychiatric literature.