James: I always love when the people Richard critiques come here and explain the context of their work and their goals in a civil, constructive way. It’s so indicative of the quality of the academy in general. Thanks for showing up and being focused on substance!

Thank you. That’s actually an expanded version of the talk he gave at the conference that he wrote the guest post for that I am analyzing here.

https://youtu.be/giymlWuB6AY

I appreciate this detailed reply. I must admit it leaves some questions I raised here unanswered, but it does show where we agree (on most things!) and not (e.g. I’m an empiricist, which means we can’t say Paul survived the 60s without evidence of it), and it is of help to our readers at least to contextualize how we arrived where we are.

My views of Paul have changed over the decades, but I still situate the “seven core” documents in the 50s CE (with Philippians and Philemon included but on the edge–as per Baur), and consider the most important tags of Paul’s thinking to be his claim that he has “seen” the “Star Man” (thank you David Bowie) and “talks” with him regularly, that “He” will soon appear in the skies to rescue his livning adherents, and the few who have died, and they will be exalted in immortal transformed glory from dust creatures to become the new rulers of the cosmos–with the man Jesus, crucified and ascended to haven, being the first of this new genus of such beings. A virtual God-Family. Further, he is deep into the visions and dreams of Daniel, particularly chapters 9-12, which he applies to the parties and politics of the Imperial court (Caligula through Nero). His mission he grounds in Isaiah 49, and perhaps all the “Suffering Servant” materials, as a kind of “Second Anointed One,” who will in fact gather in the chosen ones of scattered Israel (Hosea’s “Not my people”), intermingled with the “nations,” fulfilling all sorts of restoration themes in the Hebrew Prophets which he has now applied to the entire cosmos–angels, principalities, heights, depths, things above and things below–in a grand transformation of “All Things” finding unity in God the Father, the Creator. It is quite a cocktail mix of Hebrew Bible themes and history–namely the figure of Abraham, Middle Platonism, and his own delusional ideas of being at the lynchpin of the salvation of all history. The best modern analog would be David Koresh–and thus my involvement in Waco in trying to help the FBI to understand such craziness.

My summary, taken from the closing lines of Paul’s Ascent to Paradise, summarizes my views–which are hardly standard theological-seminary fare, and I have paid the price for that, as you have:

“Broadly speaking he presents a Hellenistic way of salvation—a particular scheme of apotheosis, or “immortalization,” with certain apocalyptic peculiarities. The broad contours of his religious experiences—epiphany, the reception of oracles, visions, the journey to heaven, secret revelations—these are all well known to us, especially from the Greek magical papyri, the Hermetic texts and various forms of esoteric Judaism of the period. Add to that his specific expectations regarding his mission to the Gentiles, the conversion of Israel, and the imminent Parousia of Jesus as cosmic Lord, and you have it—his own particular vision and version of that most characteristic Hellenistic hope-escape from mortality. And yet it is those very apocalyptic “particulars” that make Paul really Paul. His was not a scheme of salvation for any place or for all time. Although he has endured and been mis-appropriated in many different ways over the centuries, from the standpoint of the history of late Second-Temple Judaism, he belongs in those crucial years of hope and promise, before the terrible days of August, 70 CE, when many such dreams came to an end with the destruction of Jerusalem and the bitter and crushing end of the Jewish revolt against Rome.”

Of late I have begun to think Paul lived past 70 CE, surely did not die in Rome, or Clement would have noted that, and he might have even gone back to the Galilee. The figure of Ha Acher (aka Elisha ben Abuyah another coded moniker), teacher of Rabbi Meir, comes to mind–one who left the Pharisees over his “two powers in heaven,” ascent experiences, studied Greek books, said the Torah had been suspended, and ended up a disappointed apostate (see Goshen-Gottstein, The Sinner and the Amnesiac).

That’s a good question. And indeed, we don’t know, because we don’t have any early texts about it. Paul is only concerned with other things, like procedure (who gets to prophesy or speak in tongues and when); the actual content of these things never comes up in the extant letters.

You might get a general idea from later examples. This democratic lay prophesying was still a thing for the Montanists in Tertullian’s day and he almost hints at content (e.g. see Assessing Tertullian on the Status of Women in the Third Century Church); and 1 John 1 gives instructions for which “spirits” to believe (thus referencing a still-ongoing practice of talking to them; and this is a second century letter/forgery, so it’s addressing later practice in the guise of earlier).

But rarely do we get specifics. I imagine these were considered secrets for the community to know and not outsiders. And there were straight prophets (people who directly communicate with spirits or have visions and report them in plain language) and the “tonguesters” (people who in a trance babble, which was taken as celestial language and thus a spirit/angel speaking through the person like an instrument, requiring as Paul explains “interpreters” who can “translate” the alien language into usable information—a procedure emulating Greek oracles, most famously at Delphi, the original sense of “prophet” being the men who “interpret” the alien babbling of the “seeress”). So they had a lot of this going on.

We have anthropological analogs (the Shakers for example, and certain extremist Christian sects in North and South America who have lay prophets and babblers and interpreters) in which the communications typically consist of three different things: reassurances of faith (confirmations of preexisting beliefs, settling of doubts, inspired interpretations of scripture to that end), local problem solving (standard psychic stuff, addressing interparty dramas and troubles; Tertullian mentions learning “secrets of men’s hearts,” cures for ailments, coming dangers or catastrophes to prepare against, and the like), and apocalypticism (predictions or visions of the end times and what they will be like; predictions or visions of heaven and hell and what they will be like; etc.).

In the studied models (I cite studies of the Shakers myself in element 15 of ch. 4 of OHJ), a fourth thing can crop up: attempts to claim or usurp power or promotion, i.e. having visions that change doctrine or proclaim increased status for the revelator. For example, in Shaker communities, seeing Jesus entails apostolic election (which is what the original Apostolic churches also believed), so if existing leaders don’t want the person claiming this to enter their ranks, they will declare the vision a lie or Satanic and expel the person, so claiming to have powerplay visions was risky for the perp, may require careful diplomacy, and often hinged on their level of lay or elite support (and those two classes could be in conflict).

Paul appears to reference opening an understanding of the secret messages in scripture, so his communities might often have been claiming this, and these claims would generally be “in alignment” with existing dogmas rather than challenging it, for the above reasons (this is basically what 1 John was written to police). But one could also stumble accidentally from one category to another.

For example, Caroline Bynum discusses an example in her study of resurrection dogmas whereby a woman prophesied an inspired understanding of Paul’s epistles whereby it was “fleshed out” that the new spiritual bodies we rise in won’t have physical (much less sexual) organs and therefore men and women will have functionally identical bodies (in Origenism this appears to have meant we would be amorphous balls of light, on the Platonic principle that a sphere was the perfect body, light represented heightened glory, and so on).

She then went further and asserted that this meant women should have equal authority roles in the church even now (thus toppling Paul’s Christ to man to woman hierarchy), which was horrifying to traditionalists like Tertullian, and so her teaching was declared heretical, and this may have partly driven the church’s backing of “resurrection of the flesh” over Pauline pneumatism, so that women’s and men’s bodies would be the same and therefore hierarchically support male supremacy in heaven. Egalitarians were thus declared heretics and exiled. All cascading from one laywoman’s risky “prophecy/vision.” It was risks like this that led the church to shut down the entire institution of lay access to god, and thus lay prophets (and tongues) altogether (this also seems why the first apostles closed election with Paul, to shut down any further pretenders nosing in).

As examples of all four things, peruse the OT prophets: lots of proclaiming wrath on enemies, calling out sins in allies, divine reassurances for present boons or troubles, and so on.

The phrase “farthest reaches of the West” or “terminus of the West” was a Roman colloquialism for Spain, in particular Hispania Ulterior (Further Spain), which it could still be colloquially called, though it was recently divided into smaller provinces and the furthest west would be Lusitania (i.e. Portugal) in then-recent technical parlance. But also, the furthest Western city of size and fame was Cadiz, not anything in (what is now) Morocco (no city there came close in population or fame).

One could go even further west and still be in “Spain” colloquially (Lusitania officially). None of this need mean Paul went specifically to Cadiz or Lusitania; it’s just that “Spain” held widest understanding as “the furthest west” one could go (the ends of the Earth on Roman maps). Morocco (or then the recently-minted province of Mauritania) wasn’t in popular imagination that way. The Roman western border in Africa ended before the westernmost coast of Spain, and although we know Paul did cross borders, there wasn’t much in the way of civilization to evangelize out there.

There were also even further known places (Rome traded with the Canary Islands, for example), but those would not be in popular knowledge or understanding; and in any case, Clement is being poetic. He’s simply referring to Paul’s mission “to Spain” as Paul himself described it, by the colloquialism “end of the West.” We can’t tell from either expression where exactly (much less how far west) in Spain Paul went.