Mark Bowen

Trying to get through life as best as I can and be the best I can love life be happy and make the most of it you only get one PS f**ked my previous account up

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@Sylviaswimsalot Awww 🥰 thank you x

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

Back South now and the sun ☀️ is out
and had a cuddle with my new grandson 💙🥰(3 and a bit weeks) Happy BH everyone

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@Satans_fairy__ 🤣🤣🤣
Happy Bank Holiday

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@MrsFlowers007 🔨✏️🪛🗜️🧰🪚

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@Linda_as_was Yes 💙💙
One North
One South
🥰 thank you x

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@OscarGreta1846 Thanks and yes she’s doing great thanks 🥰❤️

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@Linda_as_was 🥰

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@OscarGreta1846 Thank you ❤️🥰

[Addy Spectre's Curator's Gaze @ArcherofLugh]

Is it possible that a man with temporal-lobe epilepsy is the reason a parochial Jewish sect stepped onto the world stage and became Christianity.

The Jesus movement began as a Galilean and Jerusalem affair: a messianic claim inside Israel, Torah intact, leadership clustered around James and the original disciples. Movements of that kind usually stay local. This one did not. The person who forced open the world gate was Paul, an outsider who never walked with Jesus, who built his authority on a private revelation, and insisted that Gentiles need not become Jews.

You only have to look at his behaviour in his own letters

He reports an overwhelming visionary incentive and further 'revelations' that he treats as non-negotiable to his cause. He speaks of being caught up to the third heaven and of a chronic 'thorn in the flesh' he cannot pray away. He boasts of having credentials, he's suffered aaw, then immediately calls the boast foolish. He can bless a church and curse a rival in the same breath. He works at breakneck pace visiting cities, writing letters, creating conflicts. There are imprisonments, unpaid labour. He reframes his earlier violence against the Jesus-followers as the prelude to grace. Meaning his career change to be honest.

None of that proves a diagnosis. First-century people already had a language for visions and divine seizure. But the pattern is hard to miss: high drive, sudden certainty, oscillating self-assertion and self-abasement, all the usual suspects.

The neurology is not clear what resulted from it is. Paul created a portable gospel that could leave the synagogue and travel the cities of the empire. Law was optional, the cross was presented as cosmic event rather than Jewish martyrdom. Otherwise the movement had had a good chance of remaining where it belonged, what it first was: a parochial religion of Israel. Not the world.

So the question is not whether Paul was mad. It is whether an intense, visionary, conflict-driven personality was the contingent fact that turned a Jewish restoration sect into a world religion. If the answer is even partly yes, then Christianity’s global career may rest less on inevitability than on one man’s nervous system.
The epilepsy hypothesis is old and cited.

The paper most often cited is D. Landsborough, St Paul and temporal lobe epilepsy, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry (1987). He argued that the Damascus-road 'vision' fits complex partial seizures, sometimes progressing to convulsions.

German and medical writers had already floated epilepsy: Ziegler (1804), Krenkel (1890), A. Stern (1957), and Matthew Woods’s Was the Apostle Paul an Epileptic? The idea is a recurring.

More recently, neurologists have applied Norman Geschwind’s interictal personality cluster, hyper-religiosity, sense of destiny, irritability, hypergraphia, hyposexuality, to Paul. A 2024 paper by Leonardo Cruz de Souza and colleagues, 'Saint Paul, the Apostle, and the Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome,' does exactly that and asks whether those traits shaped Pauline theology.

A 2012 neuropsychiatric survey by Murray, Cunningham and Price, 'The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered,' includes Paul among Abraham, Moses and Jesus as a figure whose revelations can be read in neurological terms.

None of these writers can prove the diagnosis. They are matching a dead man’s letters and a later conversion story to modern diagnoses. New Testament scholars usually treat the exercise as interesting and unprovable.

I for one wish he'd stayed a tax collector.

#BlissIncarnate

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@MolllyOnoway ❤️🥰xxx

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@KimTurn13719507 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@dommedebbiexx @m_jones_1797 💯

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@Rachelle_Hulme @Addyspectre1 @m_jones_1797 @dommedebbiexx Morning ☕️
Happy BH Monday 🙂

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@puddykat21 Morning 🙂

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@Antje19777 Guten Morgen 🙂

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@KimTurn13719507 Morning 🙂

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@Sylviaswimsalot Morning 🙂
Happy BH Monday x

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@mariejane2020 Morning 😊

[Mark Bowen @MarkBowenmb]

@MolllyOnoway 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣