Description: How do subjective events and psychic forces that form an individual influence the forming of a religious community? What confluence of external and internal influences in the pre-Christian Palestinians led to their acceptance of the mission and preaching of Jesus? In The Cultic Origins of Christianity, psychiatrist Fr. William Meissner, S.J., draws on anthropology of religion, psychology, and particularly psychoanalysis, to explore how the inner workings of the mind and hearts of the early Christians led to the formation of the initial Christian community.

Meissner refers to the complex interweaving of inner and external influences as the "cultic process". He argues that the dynamic forces underlying the cultic process, including what he defines as the "paranoid process", are operative in religious groups of all kinds. In The Cultic Origins of Christianity, he looks back through the history of religion to discern workings of the cultic process in the origins and historical evolution of Judeo-Christian beliefs and in the emergence of orthodox and heterodox religion groups involved in the historical evolution of the Christian Church.

Chapter one deals with the exposition of the basic ideas of the paranoid process, the primary psychological configuration on which the fundamentals of the argument rest. Chapter two discusses the cultic process as an expression of the dynamics of the paranoid process cast in the perspective of group forces and dynamics. Chapters three through six deal with the exploration of the operation of the cultic process in the pre-Christian Palestinian background within which Christianity came into being through the mission and preaching of Jesus. Chapters seventhrough nine are an extension of the analysis of divisive and consolidating influences of the cultic process in the subsequent development of the early Christian churches. Chapters ten through twelve explore the origins and development of gnostic thought systems and the rise of gnostic churches out of the same heterodox Judaic background as Christianity. Chapters thirteen and fourteen deal with the analysis of these historical and sociological developments as expressions of the operation of the cultic process.

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