According to Paul in 1 Cor 12:3, ούδει$ δυναται είπείν Κύριος Ιησούς, εί μη εν πνευματι άγίω (“No one is able to say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ unless possessed by the holy spirit”).[944]
The acclamation Κυριο$ ’Ιησούς was a performative utterance that constructed a new deity in the social world and religious imagination of the Roman Empire.
In this discourse about physical bodies possessed by a spirit, those who believed exhibited πνευματικά (spiritual gifts, 1 Cor 12:1) characterized by what would be judged to be possession phenomenon in the Roman Empire: ουκ έρουσιν οτι μαίνεσθε (“Will they not say that you are being driven mad?” 1 Cor 14:23; of those speaking in tongues εν πνευματι άγίω; compare 14:2632; John 10:20).[945] The declaration Κύριος ’Ιησούς stands in contrast to what Paul in 1 Cor 12:2 characterizes as possession phenomena in pagan cults: οΐδατε οτι οτε έθνη ητε προ$ τα είδωλα τα άφωνα ως αν pyeooe anayopevoi.[946] Those possessed by the spirit of Jesus in these early Christ-cults declared, “ABBA,” in a ritual of apotheosis that collapsed the separation between mortals and gods (Rom 8:12-39; Gal 4:1-7). With the confession Kupios ’IpooGs these communities imagined the cosmic defeat of death and a new social order in which the identity of one possessed by the spirit of Jesus was no longer determined by social dichotomies that defined physical bodies in the Roman Empire: Jew-Gentile, free-slave, malefemale (Gal 3:28; 1 Cor 12:13). In short, the communal utterance Kupios ’IpooGs constructed a discourse about spirit possession that sustained the plausibility of belief in a salvation from cosmic and social forces of oppression felt by at least some, if not many, inhabitants of the early Roman Empire.Since the 19th century, history-of-religions approaches to the study of these Christ-cults in the early Roman Empire have been entangled in a discourse about comparison, religious experience, and an apology for Christianity. In the preface to the 1899 reprinting of his book Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes nach der populären Anschauung der apostolischen Zeit und der Lehre des Apostels Paulus, Hermann Gunkel commented on pneumatic phenomena in early Christianity:
There is scarcely a people or a religion where similar phenomena could not be found. So there is a vast, almost incalculable, and extremely multiform material that must all the more be taken into account in order to understand the New Testament phenomena. We should not be afraid that this will obscure the originality of the New Testament pneumatic phenomena or of the great bearers of the Spirit throughout history. It will not obscure this, only illumine it. All the history of religion, when pursued in a suitably comprehensive and wise fashion, will serve only to demonstrate the originality and marvelous grandeur of primitive Christianity, particularly of the gospel.[947]
For Gunkel, “Pneumatic experiences are to be differentiated sharply from the doctrine of or speculation on the Spirit, where complex religious- historical constructs may be involved. Even Paul’s speculation regarding the Spirit poses a very difficult problem.”[948]
There has been a resurgence of interest in such experiences to explain Paul’s gospel of Jesus as a deity, and what Gunkel called pneumatic experiences as distinct from complex religious-historical constructs have now been repackaged under the category religious experience. John Ashton in The Religion of Paul the Apostle locates the essence of Paul’s religion in his religious experiences.[949] Luke Timothy Johnson in Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity uses the category of religious experience to recover a phenomenological understanding of early Christianity.[950] Larry Hurtado in Lord Jesus Christ and elsewhere argues that the emergence of the worship of Jesus cannot be understood apart from revelatory religious experiences of early believers.[951] For these scholars the category of religious experience creates a contrast with theology, texts, institutional correctness, or ideological bias toward empirical causes.[952] As such, religious experience locates explanations of the early Christ-cults in inner subjective or transcendent causes and mystifies the social dynamics of spirit possession as a public discourse about physical bodies in the history of religions.
A.