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By Root 2496 0

the only Jewish mystic of this period to relate this personal experience confessionally. The difference between this experience and the other ancient Near Eastern journeys to heaven-Adapa, Etana, Enoch, etc-is that from this period onward, the journey is most often being made through RASC. In Paul’s writing, we have an anomalous case where he is not sure whether it is made in the body or in the spirit. But it seems clear that spiritual bodies and angelic bodies must now be considered analogous. They are bodily but they are not flesh. Paul believed that they were bodies like the heavenly bodies but with distinctions to be made between heavenly bodies (1 Cor 15:41). This suggests that Paul would have ranked Christ higher than an ordinary angel but that he would have considered both divine in some general way.

There is adequate evidence, then, that many Jewish mystics and apocalypticists sensed a relationship between the angels and important figures in the life of their community. The roots of this tradition are pre-Christian, though the tradition was massively developed by Christianity. Furthermore, Jewish scholars have overlooked Christianity as evidence for the existence of these traditions in first-century Judaism. Paul did not have to be a religious innovator to posit an identification between a vindicated hero and the image of the Kavod, the manlike figure in heaven, although the identification of the figure with the risen Christ is a uniquely Christian development. If so, along with the mysterious, anonymous psalmist from Qumran, Paul was a rare Jewish mystic who reported his own personal, identifiably confessional mystical experiences in the fifteen hundred years that separate Ezekiel from the rise of Kabbalah.

Paul himself gives the best evidence for the existence of ecstatic journeys to heaven in first-century Judaism, with his report in 2 Corinthians.36 His inability to decide whether the voyage took place in the body or out of the body is firm evidence of a mystical ascent and shows that the voyage had not been interiorized as a journey into the self, which later became common in Kabbalah. Since the Rabbis proscribed the discussion of these topics except singly, to mature disciples, and only provided they had experienced it on their own (M. Hag. 2.1), the Rabbinic stories interpreting the Merkabah experience often took place while traveling through the wilderness from city to city, when such doctrines could easily be discussed in private (b. Hag. 14b). This is precisely the scene that Luke picked for Paul’s conversion.37

It is significant that in 2 Corinthians 12, when Paul talked about mystical journeys directly, he too adopted a pseudepigraphical stance. He did not admit to the ascent personally. Apart from the needs of his rhetoric, Rabbinic rules also forbade public discussion of mystic phenomena. A first-century date for this rule would explain why Paul would not divulge his experience in his own name at that place. It would also suggest why Jewish mystics consistently picked pseudepigraphical literary conventions to discuss their religious experience, unlocking the mystery behind the entire phenomenon of pseudepigraphical writing. But none of the standard discussions of this incompletely understood phenomenon mention Paul’s confession or the Mishnah here.38 Again, Paul may be giving us hitherto unrecognized information about Jewish culture in the first century which is unavailable from anywhere else.

Transformation into the Christ

WHEN PAUL was not faced with a direct declaration of personal mystical experience, he revealed much about mystical religion as it was experienced in the first century. Paul himself designated Christ as “the image of the Lord” in a few places: 2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15 (if it is Pauline), and he mentioned the morphé (form, shape) of God in Philippians 2:6.39 More often he spoke of transforming believers into “the image of His son” in various ways (Rom 8:29; 2 Cor 3:18; Phil 3:21, and 1 Cor 15:49; also Col 3:9). These passages are critical to understanding what Paul’s