The Religion of Paul

Religious experience is a modern category that internalizes the essence of religion.^[953] Or as John Ashton comments, “[I]f our primary concern is with Paul’s religion we should focus our attention not upon his published thoughts but upon the much less accessible experiences that underlie them.

J. Louis Martyn’s commentary on Galatians may appear to be an unlike­ly point of departure for a discussion of religious experience and the reli­gion of Paul. For Martyn, Paul’s gospel of Jesus as Lord is best understood not as an example of the category religion - but instead as revelation (what Martyn calls apocalypse) in opposition to religion. In the context of com­menting on Paul’s statements about spirit possession and belief in Gal 3:1­5, Martyn states: “The generative context in which the Spirit fell upon the Galatians was not their act of commencing observance of the Law [which for Martyn is an example of religion]; it was God’s act in the revelatory proclamation of Jesus Christ suffering crucifixion, the act by which God kindled their faith [which for Martyn is not religion but apocalypse].”^[956] Martyn defines religion as “the various communal, cultic means - always involving the distinction of sacred from profane - by which human beings seek to know and to be happily related to the gods or God.”^[957] In contrast to religion as a human enterprise stands the revelation (apocalypse) of God in Christ.

Martyn’s analysis confuses Paul’s view that the reality of God in Christ is true (and, for example, pagan gods are not - an apologetic viewpoint of religious polemics expressed by Paul in 1 Cor 12:1-3) with the compara­tive implications of the modern category of religion (in the singular) as an analytical tool to understand Paul’s gospel in the context of the religions of late antiquity. Martyn’s contrast between religion and Paul’s gospel is simply rhetorical sleight of hand that exempts Paul’s view that the reality of God in Christ is true from the history of religions, in which gods are so­cially constructed.^[959] Martyn has adopted Paul’s theology of transcendent realities as though such theology can function analytically to understand the confession of Kupios ’Iqoons in opposition to religion as human ac­tivity manifested in the religions of late antiquity.^[960]

Ashton’s response to Martyn is terse: “This is surely nonsense.”^[961] He goes on to say, “To allow one’s reading of a text not only to be coloured by one’s theological prejudices but to be determined and dictated by them is to abandon any pretence of scholarly objectivity.”^[962] Ashton replaces Martyn’s theology of God’s revelation in Christ with interior religious ex­perience as the foundation for understanding Paul’s gospel.^[963] For Ashton the category religion refers to “Paul’s religious experiences, and of his gut reactions to them.”^[964] Ashton cites Adolf Deissmann’s characterization of Paul as a “religious genius” and quotes approvingly Deissmann’s contrast between Paul’s “original sphere of vital religion” and the secondary sphere of theology.^[965] Ashton sees himself as pursuing an understanding of the enigma of Paul as laid out by Hermann Gunkel: “To the apostle [i.e., Paul] his life was an enigma whose solution lay for him in his teaching regarding the πνεύμα [spirit]: to us the apostle’s teaching regarding the πνεύμα is an enigma whose solution is to be found in his life and only in his life.”^[966]

It is difficult to determine what Ashton thinks he is identifying with the category religious experience because he never explains it other than that he regards it as more fundamental than theology.^[967] Ashton can leave the precise meaning of religious experience unexplained because religious ex­perience has come to be something of a technical term, if lacking precision of definition, in the Western construction of religion as an area of academ­ic study.^[968] Far from being neglected, its reality is taken for granted.

Religious Experience, the Religion of Paul, and Women in Pauline Churches 329 because shamanism and spirit possession are socially constructed.^[970] As such, shamanism is not about the inner, hard to access, religious experi­ences of individuals, but about certain types of publicly identified and cho­reographed interactions with the gods. A shaman exists only to the extent that a community recognizes the shaman according to publicly negotiated, if not always explicitly defined, criteria for interacting with the gods. Ash­ton’s misleading comparison of Paul’s religion to shamanism in terms of the interior religious experiences of individuals simply replaces Martyn’s theology of revelation (apocalypse) with a theology of experience, so that Ashton’s religious experience now stands in for Martyn’s more prosaic, though no more theological, apocalypse of God.^[971]

For Ashton, Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus is a paradigmat­ic example of religious experience. “[W]e must surely accept what the sources tell us about the immediacy of that vocation when it came.” Never­theless, “the full explanation of his calling, sudden and overwhelming though it must have been, is to be sought in his whole career, before, dur­ing and after the event on the Damascus road.”^[972] Ashton’s analysis of Paul’s Damascus road experience illustrates how interchangeable are Martyn’s theology of apocalypse and Ashton’s religious experience, for Ashton has simply assumed the theological framework of early Christians that creates the religious experiences of Paul as narrated in the New Tes­tament.

Conversion narratives are political, social, and economic. The narrative of Paul’s vision in Acts portrays a sudden, dramatic change and supplies a conversation between Paul and Jesus that draws the reader into the dynam­ics of ecclesiastical authority (“Get up and enter into the city, and you will be told what to do,” Jesus tells Paul in Acts 9:6), and Ananias as repre­sentative of the church at Damascus mediates Paul’s reception of the spirit (Acts 9:17). On the other hand, the rhetoric of Paul’s account in Gal 1:11­24 constructs an experience of Jesus as self-interpreting. The authority of Paul as an apostle possessed by the spirit of Jesus (Gal 2:20) is unmediated

by human agency - that is, unmediated by the politics of physical bodies: “I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood nor did I go up to Je­rusalem to those who were apostles before me” (Gal 1:16-17 - άποκαλυψαι τον υίον αύτου έν έμοί in Gal 1:16 should be taken to refer to Paul’s discourse about possession by Christ crucified).^[973] Nevertheless, Paul’s own narrative in Galatians is no more evidence of an irreducibly religious experience that exists prior to its interpretation by Paul as a reli­gious thinker, to use Ashton’s terms, than is the narrative of Acts.^[974] Paul’s interaction with Jesus is not a phenomenological reality that needs to be taken seriously independent of the discourse that constructs the experience as religious (and in this case, pneumatic) in the context of ecclesiastical politics - specifically, Paul’s relationship to authorities at Jerusalem and opponents in Galatia.

It is, to be sure, in the interest of a spirit-possessed intermediary to mys­tify the social basis for his or her authority: “Those who are spiritual dis­cern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny,” Paul writes in 1 Cor 2:15 (NRSV). Not surprisingly, religious intermediar­ies in the Roman Empire who claimed to mediate between the seen and unseen world were involved in a discourse about fraud as well. In Gal 1:20 Paul takes an oath that he is telling the truth: “Before God I am not lying” - to distinguish himself from false apostles and false teachers who pro­claim another message from God (Gal 1:6-9).^[975] In Acts 23:1 the Paul of Acts announces, “Brothers, I have conducted myself with a clear conscious before God to this day.”

B.