The Apologetics of Religious Experience
Ashton’s interior causes become explicitly transcendent for Larry Hurtado and Luke Timothy Johnson - “acts of God” as a possibility suggested by Hurtado;[987] or as Johnson comments, “Like any religious activity, glossalalia can be either sincere or phoney (or a complex mixture of both).
Like other religious experiences, it can involve human and transcendental causes simultaneously.”[988] Like Ashton, Johnson and Hurtado also look to Paul’s conversion as the paradigm for religious experience, but for Johnson and Hurtado religious experience functions in a way similar to Martyn’s construal of Paul’s gospel as an apocalypse of God: an intervention of the transcendent in the world of human affairs. Johnson writes, “[T]he experience that turned Saul the persecutor into Paul the Apostle is one of the classic examples of religious experience in the full sense of the definition.”[989] This focus on Paul’s conversion allows religious experience to be conceived as an encounter with a religious reality that creates observable effects: religious experiences become irreducibly real and transformative in themselves. Hurtado comments, “The important and undeniable thing is that Paul’s embrace of Christian faith, his rather sudden transformation in religious convictions, was generated by a powerful religious experience that he took to be a divine revelation.”[990] For scholars such as Johnson and Hurtado, the Damascus road experience (Acts 9 used to frame Galatians 1) provides a useful model of so-called religious experience because it creates a powerful image of the religious intervening in the secular, an image of quotidian experience interrupted by experience of the ultimate, the numinous, the sacred. Paul’s conversion has been phenomenologically repackaged in the history of religions as a religious experience that brought Paul into contact with a transcendent reality.According to Hurtado,
[D]evotion to Jesus was exhibited in an unparalleled intensity and diversity of expression, for which we have no true analogy in the religious environment of the time. There is simply no precedent or parallel for the level of energy invested by early Christians in expressing the significance of Jesus for them in their religious thought and practice. The full pattern of devotion to Jesus that we examine in this book is not one example of a class of analogous religious phenomena in comparable groups, but is instead truly remarkable in the history of religions, justifying (indeed, requiring) a special effort to understand it in historical terms.”[991]
Hurtado suggests that revelatory religious experiences were one of the crucial causative factors in this unprecedented cultic veneration of Jesus Christ. “If we are to consider the resurrection appearances as crucial in generating earliest Christian claims, these experiences must have involved unusual and specific elements that helped shape the unprecedented convictions that mark the early Christian proclamation. That is, these experiences likely involved the sense of being encountered by a figure recognized as Jesus but exhibiting features that manifested to the recipients of the experiences the conviction that he had been clothed with divine-like glory and given heavenly exaltation.”[992] He goes on to say, “Whether one chooses to consider these experiences as hallucinatory, projections of mental processes of the recipients, or the acts of God, there is every reason to see them as the ignition points for the christological convictions linked to them.”[993] The extent to which Hurtado has simply adopted the interpretive schema of early Christian sources is evident in his comment on Paul’s “rather sudden transformation in religious convictions.”[994] This narrative of sudden transformation is the story of Acts 9. Hurtado has equated the theology of a mythological narrative with an ill-defined, yet essentialized religious experience.
Such religious experience is not an explanation for a historian of religions but simply an acceptance of the theological construction of encounters with the resurrected Jesus in early Christian narratives. It is, then, not what Hurtado calls “ideological bias or insufficiently examined assumptions that prevent some scholars from taking seriously the view that revelatory religious experiences can directly contribute to religious innova- tions.”[995] Historical analysis of early Christianity certainly requires recognizing that discourse about and performance of visions, heavenly journeys, and spirit possession were quite important in the religious innovation of Paul and others associated with early Christ-cults. The historian of religions is not required to take the mythological reality created by such discourse and performance at face value as a historical explanation of the beginnings of Christianity. Hurtado’s confusion of theological myths with history simply serves to establish Christianity as a singularity in the history of religions.Hurtado employs a dichotomy between religion and magic that has often characterized discourse about encounters with gods. Hurtado describes “full cultic devotion” of Christ as an unprecedented innovation for any Jew, an innovation that could only be produced by the experience of a revelation. By “full cultic devotion” he means “public, corporate devotional practices that are intended as adoration and/or that engage the figure in ways otherwise reserved for God (e.g., prayers, hymns, and so on).”[996] In contrast to such full cultic devotion to a deity stands “the more secretive and private invocations of various names and beings that characterize ‘magical’ materials such as amulets, among which there are, of course, Jewish examples.”[997] Prayers versus invocations; public versus secret; adoration of God versus adjuration of various names and beings. Such analysis is to have already adopted an apologetic discourse in favor of one social context for constructing an experience of a deity over against another social context.
Despite Hurtado’s suggestion to the contrary, the deity that Paul and his followers adored as Kupios belonged to what some inhabitants of the Roman Empire identified not as religion but as superstition and magic.[998] The veneration of Jesus as Lord in early Christ-cults was on the periphery of established religious cults in the Roman Empire. This social context, however, was not determined by any essential characteristic of religion or religious experience in relation to magic but rather in socially constructed discourses about the gods. Paul’s discourse about possession by Kupios’ Ipoons was on the margins of Jewish and Greco-Roman society of the first century. This marginality was the social location of magic as identified in the ancient world.[999] Hurtado’s revelatory religious experiences mystify the social and political dynamics of the early Christ-cults.Luke Timothy Johnson, to whom Hurtado appeals for support for his own project to understand religious experience in early Christianity, suggests that what is missing from scholarly accounts of Christian origins is an adequate grasp of Christian experience that a phenomenological approach to the study of religion can provide. “Our inability to deal with this register of language [that is, statements that have to do with religious experience and power], I suggest, has complex causes within scholarship, including a bias in favor of theology against religion, and the lack of an epistemology specifically calibrated to the religious dimensions of human ex- istence.”[1000] [1001] Johnson’s phenomenology reifies early Christian discourse about spirit and power - what he calls the “transformative energy-field spoken of in these texts” - so that the spirit becomes a linguistic symbol for the experience of transcendent power not only within the religious discourse of the community but also within the analytical discourse of the scholar.[1002] Consequently, Johnson judges to be reductionistic in a bad sense any analysis of Paul’s discourse about spirit possession and power simply in terms of social and political realities rather than in terms of a transcendent reality encountered as Other.[1003] Instead of adding any insights into the history of early Christianity, Johnson’s phenomenology serves to insulate the myth of the resurrected Christ in his own analysis of early Christianity from what he regards as the reductive analysis of anyone for whom the myth of the resurrected Christ has no reality outside of its social construction.[1004] Johnson claims that an interpretation of the formative texts of a world religion must take seriously the possibility that in fact early Christians were encountering an Other that exists independent of the religious discourse of the community. For example, in prefacing his phenomenological analysis of the experience of the resurrected Jesus in Christian meals, Johnson comments, “Whether we ourselves want to declare in favor of transcendence, we can entertain the notion that participants at such meals considered themselves engaged by a power that was truly Other.”[1005] No one as far as I know, whatever method they adopt to study early Christianity, denies that at least some early Christians believed that in ritual meals they were engaged with an unseen world inhabited by the resurrected Christ. Johnson easily moves from the so-called phenomenologically bracketed reality of the early Christians to transcendent causes invoked as explanatory by the historian of religions. Despite Johnson’s protests to the contrary, these supposed transcendent causes to which he appeals for explanation of, for example, the phenomenon of glossolalia among those possessed by a spirit - these supposed transcendent causes are simply the reified remains of Christian theology. “Religious experience” as an object of investigation has been defined by Johnson’s theology.[1007] To be sure, Johnson protests otherwise: “The case studies carried out here should demonstrate, however, that a phenomenological approach to earliest Christianity is not a surreptitious form of theology. Indeed, it makes as vigorous a use of historical, sociological, psychological, and anthropological perspectives as any reduc- tionistic approach. The difference is that the phenomenon is not itself eliminated in the process but remains the steady focus of attention.”[1008] Johnson’s apology for Paul’s deity is evident in the definition of religious experience that Johnson offers: religious experience is a response to what is perceived as ultimate by the whole person with a peculiar intensity that issues in action.[1009] The narrative of Paul’s Damascus road conversion is offered as a classic example of religious experience “in the full sense of the definition.”[1010] In contrast to Paul’s example of a real religious experi- ence, Johnson points to the example of Alexander of Abonoteichus, the second-century religious innovator now made infamous by Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet, as the paradigmatic example of religious charlatanism, who takes his place alongside “recent cases displayed regularly on television.”[1011] Johnson accepts at face value Lucian’s reductionistic analysis of Alexander’s religious innovation as fraud (a religious innovation introduced by an elaborate performance by Alexander of being possessed by a god), yet rejects any reductionistic analysis of the new god proclaimed by Paul. According to Lucian’s account Alexander duped his audience into believing in the arrival of a new god through performances associated with spirit possession. Oracles had prophesied this arrival, and Alexander presented appropriate displays of the power of the god. Religious fraud of the sort allegedly perpetrated by Alexander and of which Paul was also accused is only possible to the extent that an experience of a deity can be constructed out of a relatively stable set of culturally specific expectations for recognizing the presence of a god.[1013] Although Lucian’s account relies on stereotypes and lacks theoretical sophistication, it suggests such expectations. After an apprenticeship in which Alexander was introduced to the magic associated with Apollonius of Tyana, he made ready his plan to present himself as a prophet of a new deity. This deity was a new incarnation of the older deities Apollo and Asclepius. The discovery of an oracle (forged, according to Lucian) in an established temple of Apollo at Chalcedon announced the imminent arrival of Asclepius, the son of Apollo, in a new form at Abonoteichus (Alex. 10). Another oracle attributed to the Sibyl predicted the arrival of Alexander as the prophet of this new god (Alex. 11). Alexander arrived and put on a performance of being possessed by the deity - a performance that Lucian accuses Alexander of faking by chewing root of soapwort (Alex. 12). On the appointed day for the physical appearance of the deity, Alexander ran through the marketplace naked - a theatri- cal display Lucian compares to that put on by the devotees of the Mother Goddess in a frenzy of possession (Alex. 13).[1014] Alexander then addressed the people, uttered a few meaningless words in Hebrew or Phoenician, and miraculously produced the new god in the form of a snake from an egg buried (beforehand by Alexander, according to Lucian) in the foundations of the future temple of the god (Alex. 13-14). “I hold Asclepius,” he proclaimed (Και λαβών αυτό εί$ τα$ χεΐρα$ εχειν εφασκεν ηδη τον ’Ασκληπιόν, Alex. 14).[1015] As a result of this spirit-inspired performance, the audience believed a god had appeared in the form of the snake held before them by Alexander: as Lucian reports, “The assembly - for almost the whole city, including women, old men, and boys had come running - marveled, prayed, and made obeisance They at once raised a shout, wel comed the god, congratulated their city, and began each of them to sate himself greedily with prayers, craving treasures, riches, health, and every other blessing from him” (Alex. 13-14).[1016] Glycon, the new Asclepius, son of Apollo, had arrived in the city, and the newborn god quickly grew into a large, talking serpent. Sacred rituals were instituted, and Alexander announced, “Let those who believe in the god [oi πιστευοντε$ τώ θεώ] perform the mysteries under the blessing of Heaven” (Alex. 38). According to Lucian, oi πιστευοντε$ τώ θεώ are those willing to construct the authority of the prophet through socially negotiated norms for the presence of a god. D.