A literary project: pattern recognition
through biblical mythology
Josh Wolf · 2025–2026
The NeuroSpicy Gospels is a literary project of three works that read biblical narrative through the frame of neurodivergent experience. The three works are The NeuroSpicy Testament, Jesus Was Neurospicy, and Temple and the Skool. They were composed across 2025 and 2026, in stable conditions, edited carefully, and published independently. They are listed in suggested reading order below.
This page exists because biblical comparative work is easy to misread. Without context, a contemporary author writing in the voice of biblical figures, or pairing themself with the patterns the Gospels record, can be read as either grandiosity or instability. Neither read is correct. The works are literary nonfiction in an established tradition, and they require the framing they get here.
It is literary nonfiction in the tradition of comparative theology and behavioral biblical reading. Writers have used the Gospel narrative as a literary frame for over a century — Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation of Christ, José Saramago in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Philip Pullman in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Norman Mailer in The Gospel According to the Son. Behavioral readings of the historical Jesus go back further: John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Bart Ehrman, the entire Jesus Seminar.
The contribution this project makes is the addition of one specific lens — the autistic and otherwise-neurodivergent lived experience — to the same long tradition of taking biblical figures seriously as human beings whose recorded behavior makes more sense from inside one body of evidence than from inside another.
It is not a theological claim. It does not assert anything about the divinity of Jesus, the historical accuracy of the Hebrew or Christian scriptures, the truth of any religious doctrine, or the existence or non-existence of God. The project takes the Gospel texts as literary documents — which they are, regardless of what else they are — and reads them as such.
It is not a personal claim. The author is not claiming to be Jesus. The author is not claiming messianic identity, divinity, or any kind of supernatural status. The author is recognizing patterns that have been recognized by scholars for decades. Pattern recognition is a literary tool. It is not a delusion.
It is not the product of a manic episode or a mental health crisis. The works were composed in deliberate sessions across many months, edited extensively, fact-checked against scripture, structured as discrete projects with internal coherence. This is craft. It is the kind of extended creative work that a stable mind makes when it has something to say.
Two reasons. First: the Gospel narrative is one of the most widely-read behavioral records in the Western literary tradition. It documents one person's interactions with multiple institutions across multiple years in ways that reward close reading. For someone trying to think about the conditions under which institutions remove people who name what they see, the Gospels are an unusually rich data set.
Second: the author was writing about an unusable institution that markets itself as a sanctuary, while sitting inside the documented record of being removed from one. The biblical material — about temples, about money changers, about prophets who don't survive their own visibility — was a frame the author already had. Using it was the most natural thing available.
A non-exhaustive list of the literary precedent these three works descend from.
Three works in The NeuroSpicy Gospels belong to that lineage. The contribution is one specific contemporary lens — the autistic and otherwise-neurodivergent lived experience — applied to figures the tradition has been reading carefully for a long time. The author's claim is that this lens makes the recorded behavior more legible, not less.
The works can be read in any order. The recommended sequence is the one below — it moves from polyphonic testimony to focused behavioral analysis to comparative theology.
A short note in my own voice.
I wrote these three works because biblical pattern recognition was the most precise tool I had for thinking about what had happened to me, and what I had been seeing happen to others, inside a paid neurodivergent community. I did not invent the practice of reading scripture through a contemporary frame. I did not invent the practice of pairing biblical figures with diagnostic categories — clinicians have been doing this for as long as the DSM has existed. What I did was apply that practice to figures and texts that mattered to me, in a register I could sustain across long sessions, in service of a question I was already living.
If any of this writing reads to you as I think I'm Jesus, please re-read. The claim is that the patterns the Gospels describe — patterns of seeing too much, naming what others won't name, getting removed by the institutions you tried to belong to — are old, structural, and not unique to one figure or one moment. They are what happens when a particular kind of perception encounters a particular kind of institution. Recognizing yourself in that pattern, partially, in places, is not grandiosity. It is one of the things literature has always been for.
If any of this writing reads to you as the work of someone in crisis, please look at the timeline. The first piece was drafted in the autumn of 2025. The third was finalized in the spring of 2026. They sit alongside an analytical paper applying DSM-5 criteria to documented behavior, four other essays with full citations, a documentary archive of primary-source emails, and an album of music that predates this entire project by months. These are not the artifacts of an unstable mind. They are the artifacts of a mind doing the work of making sense of an experience that refused to make sense any other way.
If you came here ready to dismiss the work because of its title or its frame, I understand the impulse and I respectfully ask you to read the work itself before deciding what it is. If you came here looking for what the work is actually doing, I'm grateful you took the project preface seriously enough to start here. The three works are linked above.
— Josh
The NeuroSpicy Gospels — composed 2025–2026 in Nevada City, California.
Offered freely under a spirit of Fair Share. Reproduce, adapt, redistribute with attribution.