On the other end of that pole resides the visionary and mystical Paul. Christo-pher Morray-Jones explored Paul’s report of an ascent into paradise recorded in 2 Cor 12.39 He did so in order to trace what influence Jewish apocalyptic and visionary-mystical traditions had on Paul. What is interesting is that, unlike Safrai and Tomson, who were able to situate Paul’s appeal for financial support on a chronological continuum of evolving Jewish views, but also isolate those elements that were unique to Paul, Morray-Jones saw only a striking resemblance between Paul’s account of an ascent into paradise and the later rabbinic accounts of Akiva who entered pardes along with three others (the Jewish mystical liter-ature known as the Hekhalot and Merkava texts). So strong is the resemblance for Morray-Jones that he makes his central claim: “We know from the context in which Paul’s account is set that he based his claim to possess the authority of an apostle on this vision. We must therefore conclude that merkava mysticism was central to his religious practice and experience, and that it profoundly shaped his understanding of his calling and apostolic role.”40
Morray-Jones is not alone in his enthusiasm for the mystical Paul. He readily admits his reliance on the work of Alan Segal and Albert Schweitzer before him.41 It was Albert Schweitzer, a Lutheran, who questioned the Lutheran insistence on righteousness as the center of Paul’s gospel. Instead, Schweitzer argued that for Paul what mattered was being ‘in Christ’, which Schweitzer understood to mean as participating in a mystical union with Christ. Equating mysticism with apoca-lypticism, Morray-Jones has made the case for studying early Jewish mysticism on the premise that early Christianity originated as an apocalyptic movement within Judaism.42 From another angle, roughly at the same time of Morray-Jones’ work
39 Christopher R.A. Morray-Jones, “The Ascent into Paradise (2 Cor 12:1-12): Paul’s Merkava Vi-sion and Apostolic Call,” in Second Corinthians in the Perspective of Late Second Temple Judaism, 245–285.
40 Ibid., 282.
41 Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Albert Schweitzer, Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus (1930) repr.
with Introduction by W.G. Kümmel (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981). It is perhaps interesting to speculate here on the influence that F.C. Baur would have had on Albert Schweitzer.
42 Christopher Rowland and Christopher R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, CRINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
on Jewish mysticism and the New Testament, Paul’s mystical experiences were being investigated as ecstatic experiences with insights from neurobiology.43
What was interesting about the published volume of papers on Second Corin-thians is that here we had two articles, reading different parts of the same epistle, and drawing on different portraits of Paul’s Jewish experiences. First of all, for both papers, the issue was no longer whether Paul continued being Jewish; that much was a given. The question has now instead become: what kind of Jew was Paul? I have argued that for the one it was Paul the rabbi, for the other Paul the mystic. One might say that Paul’s epistle itself offers that spectral range since he boasts of his Jewish credentials in 2 Cor 11:22-2444 and then speaks of being caught up to the third heaven in the very next chapter (2 Cor 12;2). But it also reflects recent scholarly trends and I believe it actually says something about the contin-uing struggle in Pauline studies of where to place Paul between ‘Law’ and ‘Love’.
In fact, my reservation to Morray-Jones’ reading of Paul as a Jewish mystic,45 is that Morray-Jones all too easily (but unconsciously) slips into the well-known distinction between ‘prophet’ and ‘priest’, the opposition that the sociologist Max Weber introduced between charisma and ritual, revolution and institution.46 Paul
43 Cf. Colleen Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
44 2 Cor 11:22-24: “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman – I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.” Cf. also Phil 3:4-6: “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”
45 Another, more technical, objection I have to reading Paul as a mystic in Second Corinthi-ans is that I wonder whether this would really have been effective with Paul’s Corinthian re-cipients. In light of the charges brought against Paul that his gospel was veiled (cf. 2 Cor 4:3), what would Paul have to gain by highlighting such an individual esoteric experience? He had already charged his opponents with being “peddlers of God’s word” (2:17). In what way would Paul be different? Furthermore, while one cannot entirely discount that Paul may have had mys-tical leanings, he also maintains a certain reserve. In 2 Cor 11:13 he polemically demonizes the super/pseudo apostles for disguising themselves as true apostles of Christ, thus highlighting that Paul was all too aware of the dangers of false transformation. On this, see Edith M. Humphrey,
“Ambivalent Apocalypse: Apocalyptic Rhetoric and Intertextuality in 2 Corinthians,” The Inter-texture of Apocalyptic Discourse in the New Testament, ed. Duane F. Watson, SBLSS 14 (Atlanta:
SBL, 2002) 113–135, p.125 n.18.
46 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A.R. Anderson and Tal-cott Parsons 1947 [German original 1922] (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964) 358–372 (the relevant sections on charisma and charismatic authority). See also, Max Weber, “The Prophet,”
the visionary, the ecstatic mystic, is given access to secret and direct revelations that liberate him from the strictures of his former life in the Law. For Morray-Jones, Paul is less the Pharisaic proto-rabbinic forerunner of the later halakhists, but rather a direct heir to such charismatic prophets as Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, all of whom were privy to revelations, divine mysteries and audiences.
The problem with this is that Morray-Jones has unknowingly reintroduced the binary opposition that has been so hard to shake when treating aspects of Paul’s Jewish experiences.
I have argued thus far that there is a continuing struggle in biblical studies to situate Paul the Jew, artificially I might add, between ‘law’ and ‘love’. The ‘Torah observant’ Paul who clings resolutely to Judaism and its commandments, or the
‘liberal’ Paul whose mysticism breaks free of religious constraints, both repre-sent two ends of that artificial spectrum. But, to me, the mystical variant hides a dangerous potential of which many of its proponents seem not to be aware.47 For, to then maintain that Christianity emerged out of this mystical/apocalyptic/char-ismatic seedbed, no matter how Jewish, only implies that what did not become Christianity was its ritualistic and legalistic shell that of course forms the core of rabbinic Judaism. Christianity is thus Jewish, but an evolved form of Judaism.
Rabbinic Judaism and, by extension, every form of contemporary Judaism, is at best a mere shadow of enlightened Christianity. If, as I mentioned at the start of this contribution, Paul the apostle represents that hyphen in the so-called sig-nifier of ‘Judeo-Christian’, only one conclusion is sadly clear: the ‘Judeo’ exists only to the extent that it ends up becoming ‘Christian’. To mimic the words of E.P.
Sanders when explaining why Paul left Judaism: what is wrong with Judaism is that it is not Christianity.48
in The Sociology of Religion (1963) 46–59 [German original 1922]; reprinted in Prophecy in Israel:
Search an Identity, ed. David L. Petersen, (Philadelphia: Fortress; London: SPCK, 1987) 99–111.
47 I might even press the point further and speculate on a residual (even if unconscious) anti-Ju-daism in the same way that Marianne Moyaert in her contribution to this volume will speak of
‘latent anti-Judaism’. That is to say, an anti-Judaism that goes unnoticed because it has seeped into patterns of thinking deep within Christian collective consciousness.
48 I am reproducing the quote again here for the sake of emphasis. Sanders, Paul and Palestini-an Judaism, 552: “In short, this is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not ChristiPalestini-anity.”