Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [247]
Christopher Morray-Jones has very persuasively argued that Paul’s experience in 2 Corinthians corresponds to the Temple vision of Acts 22:17.13 He has also recently published a brilliant analysis of the famous “transparent illusion” in the Hekhaloth texts.14 The conclusions seem reasonable. But, even if Morray-Jones’s conclusion is not accepted, the evidence of 2 Corinthians is undoubtedly a first-century report of a heavenly ascent that Paul says is important for Christian experience.
We should not think of 2 Corinthians 12 as the verbatim recording of Paul’s actual experience. Rather we should think of it as his mature reflections on the experience after many years of Christian learning. Converts learn the meanings of their experience in their new community. This is true of Paul’s mysticism as well; even though he is our first Christian writer he is not the first Christian. He learned his Christianity from the community in Damascus and, in turn, became a spokesperson for it. His subsequent Christian experience cannot have failed to have affected his memories of these events as that is a quite common and widely verified aspect of conversions even today.15 This implies a significant growth of his maturity of Christian thought in the years between his conversion and his writings which we cannot clearly delineate.
It is only surprising that a Pharisee would claim these visions, since we tend to think that the Rabbis were rationalists. The Rabbis, the successors to the Pharisees, keep a respectful silence about these spiritual experiences, even though we have certain evidence that they were not so rare. Yet Paul does not give us much description. Hence, we do not know whether Paul was unusual for a Pharisee in his reception of these visions or whether he was actually quite typical. If so, Rabbinism would then have expunged them from its purview after Paul and the rise of Christianity. We know that the Mishnah contains very many serious cautionary rules in the way of open discussion of such experiences (e.g., m. Hagigah 2). But Merkabah Mysticism continued to develop even after the Rabbinic rules were put into effect, as the hekhaloth literature and various haggadic and Talmudic stories are all later than these traditions. Jewish mysticism certainly, and perhaps apocalypticism as well, sought out visions and developed special practices to achieve them.16 Thus, we may safely assume that Paul experienced a number of visions in his life, that his conversion may have been one such prophetic incident, though it need not have been one, and that the meaning of these ecstatic experiences was mediated by the gentile Christian community in which he lived.
Mysticism and apocalypticism were part of Jewish tradition before Paul converted; he may thus have learned about ecstatic experience as a Pharisee or merely known about them from his general Jewish past. He may also have learned them in Christianity. Ultimately someone Jewish must have brought them into Christianity since there was not very much time between the end of Jesus’ ministry and the beginning of Paul’s. From the Damascus Christian community and Paul’s own protestations of his education “from the Lord,” it is much more likely that Paul was educated in Jewish mysticism before his conversion, and hence brought this style of spiritual experience to bear on his Christian experience.
Paul’s Christian interpretation of these apocalyptic mystical visions is also a mark of his long association with the Christian community.17 The Christian nature of his vision is due to the experience itself as he interpreted it. We need not suppose that the divine nature of Paul’s revelation precluded influence from his supporting Christian community as well. All converts naturally find the meaning of their conversions in the community that values them, and that meaning is revealed to them progressively after conversion.