Ego-documents on religious experiences in Paul’s Letters: 2 Corinthians 12 and related texts

Abstract

This article investigates the earliest Pauline text that gives account of an individual revelation and reports on personal religious experience in this field: 2 Corinthians 12:1–10. Paul is the only person from the first decades of the Christ-confessing movement who wrote ego-documents (first person reports) that are embedded in his letters to several communities and individuals. These texts serve predominantly the polemical dispute with opponents in the newly founded communities of Christ-confessors. Some of these texts are very brief narratives of interior religious experiences Paul had in earlier stages of his life. In 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 he reports on visions and revelations (hórasis and apokálypsis), on one or two raptures (harpagmós/raptus) and in contrast on an audition, on a lógion kyríou that he understands as committing him to a life of weakness and disease even though he has urgently prayed for recovery. Though Paul uses his life and his religious experiences as a religious and moral example in this text, the text also opens up a window into his personal religious world that deserves special attention. Beyond its actual setting within Corinthian conflicts, 2 Corinthians 12 is an outstanding example of the hybrid character of Pauline religious experience: the text is situated at the interface of concepts of Ancient Judaism (especially apocalypticism, martyrdom, and the figure of Satan), pagan healing-oracles (Asclepius), individual prayer that is shaped by a formula close to Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, and the Early Christian concept of the heavenly Christ Kýrios. Beyond that, the function of the text within the broader argument is of particular interest: Paul does not use his apokálypsis for demonstrating the strength and authority of his unique religious expertise or for deepening the religious imagination of the communities, but for the defense and the interpretation of the physical weakness of his person by referring to a particular lógion kyríou that is transmitted only in 2 Corinthians. Thereby he provides his addressees an insight into his personal encounter with the heavenly kýrios and at the same time clarifies that religious communication with the kýrios neither means personal glory nor automatically leads to health, power and success. All in all the text works as a counter-revelation and expresses how cautious Paul is of using his Open Access. ©2020 Oda Wischmeyer, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557596-010 personal religious experiences, i.e. revelations, for what he calls boasting (kauchāsthai). The whole personal narrative is directed polemically against those charismatic missionaries who Paul names “hyper-apostles”. In contrast, he interprets his disease as the actual revelation of the cháris and the dýnamis of the kýrios. The focus is not on the demonstration of Paul’s access to the heavenly world, but on the explanation of his weak physical condition as gift (cháris) of the heavenly Christ and thereby on a religious interpretation of the physical condition of his body. His body is interpreted as a place of revelation. 1 New Testament Studies; Paul and the different aspects of the importance of his individual religious experiences When I received the invitation for the conference on “Lived Ancient Religion”: Leaving the (disciplinary) comfort zone – Lived Ancient Religion AD 1 to 800, I wondered whether and how a New Testament scholar could contribute under the fashionable, but provoking and somehow threatening heading of “Leaving the disciplinary comfort zone”. New Testament scholarship is committed to the interpretation of the canonical collection of Early Christian texts in their Greco-Roman and Ancient Jewish contexts and to the study of the history of their reception. New Testament scholars also investigate that part of the Early Christian literature of roughly the first two or three centuries CE, that is known and collected under the term “NT apocrypha”: texts of different genres that follow up and imitate viz. develop the New Testament literary genres. Nevertheless we feel bound to our discipline and to the discussion of those particular subjects for exegetical debate that have arisen and still arise from the New Testament texts themselves. The extent of our canon is limited and the texts have been interpreted since about 150 CE. There is no letter and no word in this collection of texts that has not been under discussion countless times, and there is no option for a scholar’s choosing of one hypothesis out of others without becoming associated with one or another New Testament “school” or “wing”. Therefore, it can be disputed whether New Testament studies are a real “comfort zone”; but the fact that New Testament scholars do work and argue within a specific “zone” – 1 As far as we know the first commentary on a NT book was written by the Gnostic theologian Herakleon on the Gospel of John (about 150 CE). 182 Oda Wischmeyer