Jesus Was
Neurospicy

Jesus Was Neurospicy is one of three works in The NeuroSpicy Gospels — a literary project reading biblical narrative through the frame of neurodivergent experience. It is literary nonfiction in the tradition of comparative theology and behavioral biblical reading: Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, John Dominic Crossan's behavioral readings of the historical Jesus.

This piece reads four behavioral patterns from the Gospel accounts — pattern-recognition as compulsion, literal interpretation of symbolic performance, sensory and proximity behavior, unfiltered disclosure — and pairs them with the same patterns in contemporary autistic life. It is not a claim about the divinity of Jesus, and it is not a claim of personal divinity by the author. It is recognition of a pattern that has been recognized by clinicians, theologians, and historians for a long time.

Read the full project preface →

I want to talk about Jesus. Not the Christ of the creeds, the risen lord of stained glass and Sunday school. The human being in the Gospel texts. The one who touched lepers because the implicit social contract said don't touch the leper and the gap between what the contract required and what the situation called for was simply too loud to ignore. The one who read the social room wrong — repeatedly, consistently, in ways that got him killed — and kept doing it anyway because he couldn't not.

I've been removed from three communities for essentially the same reason. I name the thing. I refuse the performance. I keep showing up after I've been told not to. I recognize the pattern.

The Gospels are, among other things, a detailed behavioral record of someone who could not perform the mask.

Four patterns run through the accounts, consistent across authors, consistent across contexts.

Pattern One — Pattern-Recognition as Compulsion

The trap about the woman caught in adultery — the Pharisees bring her forward, expecting Jesus to adjudicate, to either condemn her (violating his known ethic of mercy) or acquit her (violating the law). He bends down and writes in the dirt. He disengages from the social performance entirely, processing internally, buying time in the only way available to him. Then the lateral move: "Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone."

This is not a political dodge. This is a mind that saw the whole system at once — the trap, the woman, the crowd, the law, the gap between the law and the human being standing in the law's path — and refused to play inside it. He saw the frame and stepped outside it. That is not a rhetorical technique. That is a different kind of processing.

Pattern Two — Literal Interpretation of Symbolic Performance

The money changers in the Temple — everyone present understood that the exchange tables were socially sanctioned, economically necessary, a known feature of the Temple economy. The system was impure but stable. Jesus didn't experience it that way. His nervous system said this is wrong. His nervous system won. He made a whip. He overturned the tables. He drove the animals out.

In a situation calling for measured theological critique, he produced a physical disruption that got him killed. The gap between what the symbolic system meant to everyone else and what it meant to him, at a sensory level, was too wide to negotiate.

Pattern Three — Sensory and Proximity Behavior

He kept touching people he wasn't supposed to touch — the leper, the woman with the hemorrhage, the corpse of Lazarus. In a culture with strict purity codes governing contact with illness, bleeding, and death, he consistently chose the person in front of him over the rule about the person in front of him.

This is not most usefully read as a parable about grace. It is most accurately read as a person who experienced the gap between rule and human being at a sensory level that made the rule impossible to honor. The human being was there. The rule said don't touch. He touched. Every time.

Pattern Four — Unfiltered Disclosure

"You brood of vipers." "Get behind me, Satan." "How long must I put up with you?"

These are not rhetorical flourishes crafted for theological effect. These are real-time expressions of internal states in contexts calling for measured diplomacy. The brood of vipers line is delivered to the Pharisees in public. The Satan line is delivered to Peter, his closest associate, in front of the other disciples. The "how long" line is delivered when someone asks him to heal their child. In each case, he says the thing that is true before he says the thing that is politic. Sometimes the politic thing comes later. Sometimes it doesn't come at all.

Every institution Jesus encountered eventually tried to remove him.

The Pharisees set traps. The scribes tried to catch him in interpretive errors. His own family thought he'd lost his mind — "He is beside himself," Mark 3:21, which is the Gospel's way of saying his family believed he had become mentally unstable. Herod wanted to examine him as a curiosity. Pilate wanted to manage him as a political problem. The Sanhedrin wanted him gone. Rome wanted him gone. They achieved it in the standard way: public humiliation, removal from the community, and death.

The theological explanations came later. Blasphemy. Sedition. Threat to the Temple. These were the formal charges. The underlying dynamic was more straightforward. A person who cannot be managed, who will not perform the mask, who names the gap between the institution's stated purpose and its actual behavior — this person is a threat to every institution that depends on the gap going unnamed. He named it. They removed him. This is the story.

In March 2024, I entered into a coaching relationship with a man who was selling himself as the leading autistic coach and community builder in the world. He had built a platform. He had a language. He had a specific, credible articulation of what it costs to spend decades reading every room wrong and calling that a character flaw. I recognized the language because I had been living the thing the language described.

I came as a client. We negotiated a work trade. I built tools. I pitched a community architecture. He told me the idea wouldn't work. Six weeks later, he launched the NeuroSpicy Community — which was, structurally, the idea. I joined anyway. I showed up. I held space when he wasn't there. I contributed to the forum. I attended the sessions. I did the work that needed doing.

And then I was removed. And then I was reinstated with a warning for behavior nobody could specify. And then I was removed again while actively doing work that had been requested. And then I was told, in writing, that concerns had been raised that could not be shared, and that I was not to respond to this information. And then I was told — by the community's own account — that the founder had described me to his paid staff, his volunteer leaders, and his paying subscribers as "not a stable person."

The charge was never specified. The evidence was never provided. The appeals process did not exist. The refund was not offered. This is the record.

I named what I saw. I refused the performance. I kept showing up after I had been told not to. I was removed by an institution that markets itself as a sanctuary for people who have been removed from institutions.

I recognize the pattern.

I'm not claiming I'm Jesus. I'm claiming the pattern is old.

Institutions that market themselves as sacred — as sanctuaries, as the place where you finally belong, as the space built specifically for people like you — are particularly threatened by people who can see the gap between the marketing and the reality. Because the entire economic model depends on people not seeing the gap. And the people most likely to see the gap are the ones who have been told their entire lives that they see things wrong.

We are not broken. We see clearly. That is the thing that keeps getting us removed.

The leper who got touched walked away clean. The tables got overturned. The institution killed the man who overturned them and called it justice. Two thousand years later, the documentation exists. The institution's version is not the only version. It never was.

I have the documentation. The timeline exists. The written record exists. The community for people who were removed without explanation exists, and it is free, and it has written rules.