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is a rare insight into first-century thinking, since it demonstrates either a disagreement in the community or more likely a first-century mystic’s inability to distinguish between bodily and spiritual journeys to heaven. In effect, then, Paul was merely saying that the ascender experienced a RASC. But our world no longer supports his quandary; nor did the ancient world shortly after Paul’s time. They adopted the Platonic notion of the soul, which answered the question sufficiently for them. Indeed, the answer still informs religious life today. It seems likely, however, that the presence of a heavenly journey is itself a signifier that ecstatic experience is taking place.

The Spiritual Body and Its Presence in Ascent Mysticism

WE MUST ASK how Paul conceived such a journey to take place without a developed concept of the soul. The first answer may just be that he thought it took place in the body. He had already told us that he was not sure whether the ascender was “in the body” or not. He was quite sure that resurrection would not be fleshly, though it may be bodily. Since it already seems clear that Christ’s body, as it appeared to him in visions, and the body of the resurrected believer were parallel, it must be that the ascender’s body and the body of the resurrection were analogous as well. The demonstration appears to be 1 Corinthians 15:44, where Paul described a mystical notion of a spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) which was received by the Christ, and Paul found residence in it in the same way that God inspired the prophets or Enoch became part of the Son of Man.

Paul used a prophetic anthropology to explain this spiritual body. God gave the prophet His spirit and the spiritual body participated in the resurrection. This put Paul in the same category as the apocalypticists who first recorded the notion of bodily resurrection. It also put him rather far from those classes of people who championed the notion of the immortality of the soul, though Paul, being an apostle to the gentiles, may have known of the doctrine. He certainly seemed familiar with Stoic and Cynic doctrines and methods of argumentation.20

With only the most general hints about Paul’s conversion in his own writing, we must fill in how the Jewish cultural context informed his experience. Ezekiel 1 was one of the central chapters that Paul used to understand his own conversion. The vision of the throne chariot of God in Ezekiel 1, along with the attendant vocabulary of the Glory or kavod (kābôd) for the human figure described there as God’s glory or form, has been recognized as one of the central themes of Jewish mysticism, which in turn is closely related to the apocalyptic tradition.21 The very name Merkabah-that is, Throne chariot Mysticism, which is the usual Jewish designation for these mystical traditions even as early as the Mishnah (ca. 220 CE: See Mishnah Hagigah 2:1)—is the Rabbinic term for the heavenly conveyance described in Ezekiel 1.22 The truly groundbreaking work of Hugo Odeberg, Gershom Scholem, Morton Smith, and Alexander Alt-mann23 showing the Greco-Roman context for these texts in Jewish mysticism, has been followed up by a few scholars who have shown the relevance of these passages to the study of early Rabbinic literature,24 as well as apocalypticism and Samaritanism, and Christianity.25

The entire collection of Hekhaloth texts has been published by Peter Schaefer26 and translations of several of the works have already appeared.27 Nevertheless, the results of this research have not yet been broadly discussed, nor are they yet well known.28 The ten volume compendium known in English as The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by G. Kittel, has scarcely a dozen references to Ezekiel 1, although it is a crucial passage informing the Christology of the New Testament, as Gilles Quispel has so cogently pointed out.29

The Angelic Liturgy from Qumran (4QShirShab) confirms the same themes of Jewish mysticism which we can only date to the third century from mystical sources.30 The “Angelic Liturgy” cannot be dated