You have to read this book on Gospels and trauma

Review of Post-Traumatic Jesus, best non-fiction book I've read this year

May 07, 2024

Emotions and trauma are interrelated.

As I concluded my second year of doctoral work, I finally managed to write some term papers that work toward my dissertation! My previous courses, while developing me as a biblical scholar, didn’t have much to do with Gospels or emotions. I wrote two papers this semester that approach emotion and trauma from two different angles. My paper for my seminar on Biblical and Theological Integration considers an emotion concept appropriate for a Christian to construct when witnessing someone who has suffered trauma: compassion. My paper for the Epistle to the Hebrews seminar considers what impact trauma has on the emotion construction and emotion expression of people who have experienced trauma themselves, particularly the fear of death.

In addition to my doctoral seminars, I also did a guided research with my advisor on trauma and biblical studies, and I took the Intro to Trauma Counseling class in Wheaton’s master’s in counseling program.

The best book I read this semester was Post-Traumatic Jesus by David W. Peters.

Post-Traumatic Jesus: Reading the Gospel with the Wounded

(That is an Amazon affiliate link. Here is a non-affiliate link to the book: Post-Traumatic Jesus. I want you to buy it whether I get a small commission or not!)

Peters served as a military chaplain in Iraq and came home with PTSD and a passion to integrate trauma in his life story, his ecclesiology, and his theology. He has an MDiv (Master’s of Divinity), an MAR (Master of Arts in Religion), and a DMin (Doctor of Ministry). He is an Episcopal priest.

This book is brilliant. It’s poetic, powerful, mind-blowing, tear jerking.[1] It is a retelling of Gospel stories through a trauma lens. He combines a deep knowledge of traumatology from extensive academic study and from personal experience with his imaginative insight into Scripture, midrash in a sense. Blending personal narrative and insights from trauma research with explication of Gospel passages, he tells them in fresh ways and offers insights I as a Gospel scholar had never considered.

He takes the reader on a chronological trip through Jesus’ life and ministry. The ability to tell a narrative in order is lost to many trauma survivors, so there is something to his orderly presentation that is calming even to a traumatized reader.

He tells the story, and he makes meaning. It is an antidote to trauma. The sensory details are there, in place, not fragmented out like the smells and sounds of a trauma memory, split across brain regions in self-protection because the memory altogether is too overwhelming. Like EMDR, he puts the pieces together again.

The whole book is suffused with compassion. He doesn’t use the word itself much in the text but the meaning is there. He sees suffering people, marginalized ones, those pushed out of cultural sight and then cultural memory, like Lazarus walled off from the rich man (Luke 16:19-31).

Like the Good Samaritan, Peters sees traumatized people and has pity on them and takes action to help them: the action of writing for them. He starts his story from the perspective that the early followers of Jesus were traumatized people:

“We cannot underestimate how traumatizing this reality was for people living in the world of Jesus. The loss of their political autonomy and judicial recourse, the violent moods of occupying soldiers, and the inability to get ahead because of the tax burden are just a few ways the Romans traumatized the people in Jesus’ world. This traumatizing world was where the stories of Jesus first circulated, offering a compelling alternative to Rome’s violent, traumatizing presence.”[2]

While we cannot psychoanalyze the people of Jesus’ day via the Gospel texts, I agree with his hypothesis that “the human beings in the first century AD experienced traumatic events similarly to the way we do.”[3] He appeals to reports of combat trauma over the millennia illustrating similar reactions to war (Jonathan Shay’s work). “Their songs of grief and loss resonate today, as do the psalms and other emotionally laden laments of the ancient world. And so our quest in this book is to feel something with them, so we can understand Jesus better.”[4] He also looks at specific symptoms: “While we must not be tempted to diagnose biblical characters across the space of 2,000 years and the wisps of long-dried ink, behavior is behavior, and we can only but notice the other people in biblical literature who cut themselves.”[5]

One hesitancy I often have in recommending Christian books to my friends who have survived trauma is the lack of awareness many authors demonstrate to the realities of how their words will land with traumatized people, such as marriage authors assuming that people in healthy marriages will be reading their books rather than recognizing that people in abusive marriages are the ones most likely to seek advice. Peters’ awareness of trauma and abuse is clear throughout from his thoughtful notes such as this one on the Beatitudes: “Jesus is not blessing abuse or urging battered partners to stay in their marriage. …this is not his telling victims of domestic violence to stay with their abuser and suffer and die. He is describing the kind of bravery his followers will show the world because they follow him.”[6]

I’ll share summaries of two of my favorite essays to illustrate his approach. (Warning that these contain potentially triggering content about sexual abuse and war.)

The Roman gods were rapists, but God asks for Mary’s consent regarding Jesus, “in a request for consent and a kind of mutuality between God and humanity that is entirely new in the mythologies of the world.”[7] He contrasts God’s gentleness with stories of Roman pantheon sexual brutality and misuse of human women – Rome itself was founded by the sons of rape when Mars violated Rhea Silvia. Though Mary is not violated by men, she is violated by the oppressive state under which she lives: “The one who bears in her body the child who will end death itself also carries in her body the trauma of being human. She is truly one of us, and the child she will bear will be one of us too.”[8]

Peters wonders if the demonized man in the graveyard is a former Roman soldier carrying moral injury. (He has also written about moral injury in a chapter in the edited volume War and Moral Injury.) In Post-Traumatic Jesus, he writes, “If we get PTSD from being the prey, we get moral injury from being the predator.”[9] This story stood out to me the most because of the way it astounded me. I am ashamed. I never saw this man as a person before. He was a placeholder, a space ready for Jesus to do a miracle. By applying a trauma lens and looking for clues of trauma in the story, we perhaps get closer to knowing this man as an individual. He is Legion. A legion is two thousand men and the number of pigs that leap to their dooms is two thousand. I had always thought of the demons as being the Legion – but what if this man had been part of a Legion? “He embodies the legion’s trauma,” Peters writes, “But Jesus stays with him.”[10] Jesus sees him, Jesus takes action for him, Jesus heals him.

This book invites us to see the trauma in the stories and to see how a post-traumatic Jesus speaks uniquely into human suffering. I am already recommending it to every traumatized Christian I know.

Again, an affiliate link to buy the book, but feel free to get a secondhand copy or order from your favorite book seller. Post-Traumatic Jesus

Do you have other books to recommend about trauma and the Bible?

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