So, do you see any reason to believe (or reason to disbelieve) that Paul was involved in some sort of vision-seeking?
Well Paul was definitely a seer of visions. He doesn’t silence the Corinthians in their ecstatic practice but disciplines them. To later Rabbis Paul was a monstrous apostate. But the more we place him in his own context, pre-Revolt Judaism, the less and less radical he begins to seem. (It’s not just Christians who read current conceptions – and misconceptions – back into prior ages.) In his account of being “caught up” in 2 Cor 12, he certainly uses the language later used by the Merkabah mystics.
But it’s probably a mistake to think of Paul as a full blown Merkabah mystic which really was a post-Revolt development. In Paul’s day it’s probably a mistake to talk about a single thing called Judaism. What there was, was the religion of the Jews. It reminds me of Hinduism. Hinduism is not one thing, it is a combination of thousands of sects and traditions, from the crudest idol worship to the most arid philosophical musings, united only by their devotion to the Vedas. For the Jews what united diverse categories of belief was devotion to the Torah. It seems that only after the destruction of the Temple did the need arise for Judaism to define itself as a thing. To survive it became necessary to define itself apart from the Temple.
And there are differences between Paul’s views and those of the Merkabah mystics. Paul was a thoroughgoing apocalypticist. He expected the end soon. Most of his counsel to the churches presupposes an imminent appearance of the kingdom. Although they were very much influenced by apocalyptic, the Merkabah sages marginalized eschatology. To put it in terms of modern psychobabble, they internalized the apocalypse. In their terms they journeyed to other worlds to garner divine wisdom to bring back to the realm of waking life.
But Paul knew the language of ascent and spiritual transformation. Angels could assume a human shape and humans be made divine. It’s interesting that Paul didn’t know if he traveled to the “Third Heaven” in the body or out, which would seem to mean he thought it possible to do both!
Let me recommend the books of the late Jewish scholar Alan F Segal. He’s probably best known for his work on the so-called ‘Two Powers in Heaven’ heresy, but he wrote a terrific book about Paul called Paul the Convert which deals with a lot of these issues.
So, yes I think Paul was a Jewish mystic.
The temptation to psychologize is overwhelming. Of course from our point of view that is exactly what is happening. These Merkabah folks are using techniques like chanting and visualization and postures and breathing to access the landscapes of their own personal unconscious. However this view is anachronistic. I read a commentary on the Book of Zechariah last year that discussed this very issue. The first 8 chapters of Zechariah describe a series of prophetic visions and dreams only some of which are interpreted for the reader. The Hebrew uses different words for dreams and visions. They can distinguish between a waking vision and a night-time dream. However, what dreams and visions have in common in these texts is that they give access to other worlds external to the observer. Paul didn’t know if he went to Paradise in the body or out, but he definitely thinks he went somewhere. (It would be interesting to find out what he meant by “out of the body” since he didn’t seem to have the Platonic conception of the soul, at least from what we can glean from his comments about the body in 1 Cor.)
The scholarly bookshelves groan and sag with discussions of mystical “descent”. Here is a chapter from Guy Stroumsa, who taught at Oxford and Hebrew U, on the subject.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
The idea of a mystical descent, in particular, seems to be a rather strange phenomenon, still only partly understood. It is perhaps nowhere illustrated as clearly as in those hieratic Hebrew texts of late antiquity that we have come to call “hekhalot literature” and that represent the first strata of the Jewish mystical tradition. These texts describe the ecstatic experience and mystical visions of the yordey merkavah, those who “descend to the Chariot,” a reference to the vision of the Chariot in Ezekiel, chapter 1. Despite some new studies, the puzzling metaphor of descent and its original meaning are still defying scholars. I hope to be able to suggest here a way to understand them better.
Absent any other evidence, I wouldn’t put too much weight on the descent language. That sort of paradigm and idiom reversal isn’t that uncommon. E.g., in English we say one thing depends *on* another. The image is one of one thing being supported (from below) by another, say, a foundation. But the very word ‘depend’ comes from Latin, de-pendere, which, literally means, “to hang from”. The physical image is literally reversed.
“These Merkabah folks are using techniques like chanting and visualization and postures and breathing to access the landscapes of their own personal unconscious. However this view is anachronistic.”
But . . . where they (and especially Paul) using something like visualization techniques and postures to induce visions or not? I realize you may not know, but I don’t see how it is anachronistic to ask the question. Whether they understood the physiology and psychology involved, they did or they didn’t do things that are known to induce visions.
I’m not accusing anyone of anything. My point is that psychologizing the experience would be anachronistic even though that would be a natural explanation for us. I don’t believe that Paradise is a real place, but the Merkabah folks did. That’s all I’m saying.
I wish we knew more about Paul’s own practice. He seems acquainted with visions. He clearly seems to regard such experiences as authentic sources of wisdom and knowledge about the way the world works.
As far as the “descent” language it has been suggested that it is, as you say, an idiom. After all, in other places in the Hebrew Bible we hear of folks “going down” to Egypt, for example. The issue with that is the nature of what is being described. The sage is attempting a vision of Yahweh on his throne. “Descending” to the throne suggests ideas that made the Rabbis queasy. Read Strousma’s chapter for context. You have to register to access Academia.edu but it’s free. And you can download lots of other neat stuff too.
I had forgotten the details that we’d covered in this thread, when I recently stumbled across the video again, and rewatched it (then went and read the relevant chapter of Segal’s book).
Having gone over it again, fresh, I can’t get over both how well it fits and how much it could explain.
How well it fits with the data:
We know that Paul was a mystic. We know that Paul was spreading something that looks like mysticism along with Christianity (e.g., 1 Cor 14:30). So that is a first point.
A second thing, that is sort of obvious, but only just occurred to me: prophecy often involves mysticism–where else do prophets get their *visions* and revelations? As above, Paul speaks of people in his congregations getting prophecies on an apparently regular basis. But it’s not just Paul: the Didache, for example, discusses itinerant prophets as though they are a commonplace of early Christianity.
A third thing, that was mentioned by Segal and makes eminent sense on inspection: though we may sharply distinguish the literary forms of apocalypticism and mysticism, in life, they tended to go together. He mentions literary evidence of mysticism discovered at Qumran. And, if we look at apocalypticism, it almost always has some visionary experience that gives it life. I mean, the very word apokalupsis is used by Paul when discussing his mystical experiences. If we look at the visions of Daniel or the visions of Revelation, those are presented as *visions*. If Christianity started off as an apocalyptic movement, it would make sense that it had some amount of mysticism in it from the beginning.
So what does it explain?
First, it explains how the first Christians–including Paul–became convinced that Jesus was risen. If they were already having visions, and if they operated in a worldview that accepted those visions as actual experiences of reality, it wouldn’t be hard to explain how they came to be convinced that Jesus lived after dead. On this of course, the best evidence is Paul, whose experience of the risen Christ was certainly visionary, and who makes no distinction about his seeing the risen Jesus and Peter, James, and the apostles’ experiences of the risen Christ.
Second, it could explain how Jesus was so quickly deified. In the later merkabah literature, the mystic who makes the ascent is transformed into something super-angelic, even divine (e.g., Metatron).
Third, it could explain the creativity we see in Mark. It wouldn’t be that Mark was simply making things up (like the Transfiguration); it could be that Mark either had visions of Jesus’ earthly life or that he knew of visions other had had of Jesus’s earthly life and accepted those visions as truth-bearing. Perhaps mystical visions were also the source of the Infancy narratives. This would not be unlike the way many Catholics today accept the historicity of Ann Catherine Emmerich’s visions of Jesus’ life, or they way many Catholics accept the life of St. Philomena based on the visions of Sister Marie-Louise of Jesus.
By the same token, it could explain some of the creativity we find in the later apochrypha–e.g., the giant, talking cross from the gospel of Peter or various details of the proto-evangalium. Maybe it wasn’t that people were just making up wild stuff from whole cloth but that they were having visions that they really believed were somehow true.
Fourth, it could explain the appeal that Christianity had to gentiles–another thing that has really bugged me. When someone–especially someone you know and who seems sane–claims to have had vivid visions, one is tempted to take them seriously, even against one’s better judgement. And if that person promises to let you experience those same things for yourself, it is hard not to be tempted to take him up on the offer. I mean, I’m a pretty thoroughgoing skeptic, but when a smart and sane friend tells me he has experienced things in meditation that he can’t explain but that make everything make sense, even I’m tempted to suspend disbelief.
Finally, it could explain the relatively early emergence of developed gnostic cosmology. This is another thing that bothered me. Something like Valentinian gnosticism seemed, in some ways, so incongruous with all that had gone before it, yet it is relatively early. It is so specific, so elaborate, so detailed. Where did they get all these details? And why did they believe all those details were accurate? That is pretty straightforward if they are mystics. It would be analogous to Jewish angelology and demonology–it is just the kind of details that get developed in the Merkabah literature.
In short, if we allow that early Christianity was deeply mystical–with people regularly experiencing visions–it allows the tremendous creativity we see, while also explaining why people believed it. People weren’t just making stuff up and deceiving others. They really believed it. And the evidence we have suggests that such mysticism was spread with Christianity from the start.
Perhaps more later.
If we look at the visions of Daniel or the visions of Revelation, those are presented as *visions*.
Yeah it seems peculiar now but an ealier generation of scholarship regarded the genre of Apocalyptic as purely literary rather than experiental. This is how they distinguished Apocalyptic from Prophecy. The Prophetic texts were seen as collections of oracular pronouncements that were subsequently collected and edited. Apocalypses were written texts using coded symbology not actually based on specific visions. (Interestingly this same argument was made about the Merkabah texts. That they reflected speculation rather than praxis.) Now it’s seen as not so cut and dried. Prophecies are profoundly literary and Apocalyses reflect visionary experience as you point out.
…it could explain how Jesus was so quickly deified.
Precisely. The way I describe is like this. Jesus was the wine poured into the cup but the cup already existed.
…it could explain the relatively early emergence of developed gnostic cosmology.
Great point. One of the things I hope to show in my thread about the Book of Enoch is how for those writers knowledge and wisdom (“gnosis”) was a perception of the reality of the cosmos and their place in it rather than primarily moral or ethical. Even that early the seeds of gnosticism were there. And we see the tension between this view and that of the Torah and Mosaic Law.
The most likely scenario in my mind to explain Paul is that he was actually Jesus who didn’t really die on the cross. Pilate gave Jesus, as future protection from the Jews, the Roman citizenship as a freedman instead of actually executing him. Jesus had citizenship but was not allowed to participate in Roman politics as a freedman. These rumors about who Paul was then centuries later creep into Islam as Jesus being a prophet, ect.
The NT is a collection of defense legal documents about the life of Saul of Tarsus. An expungement, name changes, manumission, and conflict of interests. Extremists went to the point of sovereign citizenship.
The house of Saul was historically the legitimate ruler of Israel but was overthrown by the tyrannical house of David. That’s why Saul of Tarsus never claimed to be the Son of David. Matthew 22:41-46.
Τυραννος κατα βασιλεα
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)