St. Paul, Medium
In Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, New Testament scholar James D. Tabor presents a radical reinterpretation of the apostle Paul. I find his arguments generally persuasive and well worth considering on their own merits, but what’s most interesting to me is that his viewpoint places Paul squarely in the tradition of mediumship.
What follows is my summary of Tabor’s basic position. Much of what he says is controversial, and you would have to read his books in order to explore the detailed justifications he provides. I’d also note that I don’t necessarily accept all of his conclusions at face value; sometimes I think he gets a bit ahead of himself.
Life of Jesus
Jesus (Hebrew: Yeshua or Joshua), born and raised in the obscure village of Nazareth in Galilee, was the eldest son of Mary and Joseph, a workman or artisan; he had four brothers (James, Jesse, Joses, and Simon) and an unknown number of sisters, one of whom may have been named Salome.
Galilee was a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment directed at the Roman occupiers. When a local man, John the Baptizer, began preaching of the restoration of the Davidic kingdom which would follow the overthrow of Rome, Jesus joined his movement. After John’s arrest, Jesus continued to preach the same message throughout Galilee. He was one of several would-be messiahs who arose during the period, all of them coming to a bad end at the hands of the Romans; others included Theudas, Judah the Galilean, and someone known only as the Egyptian.
When Jesus reached Jerusalem, he came to the attention of the Roman authorities and the Sadducees, collaborationist Jews who were permitted to carry out the Temple sacrifices in exchange for cooperation with Rome. He was arrested for sedition and executed by crucifixion. Later, some of his followers became convinced that he had been resurrected. The movement continued, led by Jesus’ brother James (Hebrew: Yakob or Jacob). Though Jesus’ status as Messiah was controversial, the Jerusalem movement remained on good terms with the larger Jewish community.
Teachings of Paul
Paul of Tarsus was a devout Jew who, for some reason, took exception to the Jesus movement and harassed its members. En route to Damascus, he underwent the first of many ecstatic visionary encounters with a being he identified as the risen Jesus. This “peak experience” changed his life forever. He retreated into the Sinai Desert to commune with Jesus over a period of three years, gradually building up a new theology dramatically opposed to traditional Judaism. He became convinced that it was his mission to proselytize to the Gentiles and thereby hasten the return of the risen Christ (Greek: “the Anointed”), who would usher in not merely a new earthly kingdom but a new order of the cosmos.
This new order was grounded in a “mystery” or secret that Christ had imparted to Paul during their many hours of spiritual communion: God had begun by creating a race of living beings to inhabit the earth, but with the sacrifice and glorification of Jesus, a new plan had been set in motion. Humans would be transmogrified into a spiritual race higher than the angels, who would overcome the forces of darkness and reconfigure the universe in a new and perfect form. Although the entire human race would eventually be transformed, the first fruits of the harvest, after Jesus himself, were to be his most faithful and enlightened followers – namely Paul and his acolytes.
This new order of the ages superseded the earthly order spelled out in the Torah and made Jewish dietary laws and other restrictions irrelevant. It did not matter if you were Jewish or Gentile, male or female, free or slave, poor or rich, so long as you were “in Christ,” meaning that you had experienced the same mystical communion Paul himself had known. This mystical unity was achieved through a new baptism, intended not merely to purge people of their sins, but to remake them as perfect imitators of Christ. The ceremony of baptism was expected to provide immediate spiritual gifts, which might include the gift of prophecy, the ability to speak in tongues, and the ability to heal. With every new baptism Paul performed, the number of souls ready for service in the new angelic order increased.
This message differed profoundly from the teaching of the Jerusalem church, which was a direct continuation of the messianic message of Jesus and John. The elders of the Jerusalem church had no interest whatsoever in parting from traditional Jewish ways and would have been appalled at the notion of human beings aspiring to become gods. Though Paul kept the extent of his apostasy from them as best he could, they began to hear rumors of his strange and disturbing teachings. Twice they summoned him to Jerusalem and demanded an explanation. On the second of these trips, they arranged for him to visit the Temple, where he was waylaid by an angry mob and arrested by Roman sentries. It is entirely possible that James and the other elders had precisely this outcome in mind. Paul was taken to Rome as a prisoner and probably died there during the persecution of the Christians under the emperor Nero.
Paul’s legacy
Paul’s writings are our earliest Christian documents; the Gospels and the book of Acts were written decades later. All the Gospels were strongly influenced by Pauline teachings, and the book of Acts largely celebrates Paul’s career. Judea’s unsuccessful revolt against Rome in A.D. 66-70 led to the dispersal of the James sect and paved the way for the triumph of the Pauline movement. In one of the great ironies of history, the ideas held by the Jerusalem leaders – and by Jesus himself – came to be regarded as heresies and were violently stamped out by a church now committed to a version of Pauline Christianity sanitized, in part, by later letters written in his name. Although his influence remained, Paul’s central idea - that Christians would be elevated to godhood in order to rule the cosmos - was whitewashed and forgotten.
I think the above is a fair summary of Tabor’s argument, albeit oversimplified. If Tabor is correct, Paul was essentially a medium – though Tabor himself does not use this term. Like channelers known to us from Emanuel Swedenborg through the present day, Paul believed he was in regular contact with a spiritual intelligence whose wisdom and guidance he passed on to his followers. Unlike mediums who mostly communicate the thoughts of ordinary deceased persons to their loved ones, channelers of Paul’s type claim to be in contact with high-level spirits, who are more advanced, more knowledgeable, and more godly. A well-known modern example would be Jane Roberts’ communications with a being known as Seth, who imparted a complex philosophy in hundreds of regular sessions.
As with Pauline Christianity, the roots of Judaism may also be found in mediumship. Though the story told in the book of Exodus is fiction, likely contrived during the long years of the Babylonian captivity, it may preserve some authentic memories of practices in the formative years of the Jewish faith. Key to those practices was a tent, known as the Tabernacle, in which a spiritual leader (e.g., Moses) privately communed with a spirit identified as a local or tribal deity. (That Yahweh was originally only one of many Israelite deities is indicated by the survival of the term Elohim as a synonym for God; the word is plural and means “gods.” It is also indicated by stray verses* in the Hebrew scriptures referring to Yahweh as the chief of a council of gods.)
Channeling God
Now back to Paul. Let’s look at his claims in more detail. He made it clear that, after his initial revelation(s), he traveled into “Arabia” in order to continue his mystical journey.
“For I would have you know brethren, that the Gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from a man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12).
Tabor writes,
Paul doesn’t say how long he stayed in Arabia, but he does note that it was three years after his vision of Christ when he finally went up to Jerusalem to meet Peter and James (Galatians 1:18)…. Like the Twelve he had his own “three years” with Jesus—but now as the glorified heavenly Christ!
Though he sometimes deprecated himself as “the least” of the apostles, it’s clear that he actually thought his message superseded theirs. He, after all, was in direct contact with the risen Christ, while Peter and the other apostles had known only the mortal man. Tabor:
When [Paul] uses the formula “I received from the Lord,” he refers to a rich body of “revelations” that he has received, including direct sayings from Jesus, teachings about the Lord’s Supper, and details about how the end of the age will unfold….
This reflects and reinforces his view that the revelations he has received from the heavenly Christ are far superior to anything anyone received from the earthly Jesus.
Moreover, Paul was convinced that he had been lifted up to “the third heaven,” the highest station a mortal human could hope to reach. Tabor thinks this happened while he was in Sinai, as part of a continuing series of mystical experiences that shaped and molded his thinking for the rest of his life:
One should not imagine Paul’s “conversion” as necessarily a sudden one-time event on a single day, as reported in the book of Acts. What he calls his “revelation of Jesus Christ” was something he was “taught,” which implies a period of heavenly tutoring that would have involved multiple “visions and revelations of the Lord” (Galatians 1:12; 2 Corinthians 12:1). This particular ascent experience was one of many visions and revelations he had received….
In his mind this experience superseded anything Peter, James, and the rest of the apostles had experienced with Jesus on earth. One could safely say that Paul would have seen this privileged experience as surpassing anything any human being had ever received. In effect, Paul had tasted in a proleptic way the glorification that would be revealed at the second coming of Jesus in the clouds of heaven.
Paul and modern spiritualism
In its early stages, Paul’s movement was characterized by some of the same phenomena found in the American and British spiritualist movements of the 19th century. Converts were convinced that they had obtained miraculous spiritual gifts and were encouraged to display them at religious services. It is clear from some of Paul’s letters that these demonstrations could get out of hand. Tabor:
[In one letter] Paul was fearful, from the reports that he had received, that demonic spirits might have invaded their Christian space and were the source of some of the chaos—impersonating the Spirit of Christ. One of the gifts of the Spirit was the ability to supernaturally “discern” whether a spirit speaking was that of Christ or an imposter (1 Corinthians 12:10)….
It is hard for us to imagine such a scene. It must have been something akin to the behavior reported at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, or perhaps at some of the early-nineteenth-century revivals in frontier America, with people shouting, running wildly, falling to the ground, and even barking or laughing uncontrollably.
Or, for that matter, akin to the spontaneous demonstrations of mediumship that sometimes emerge in spiritualist churches and séances. None of this would have seemed strange to Paul, who, as Tabor reminds us,
is hardly a post-Enlightenment rationalist. Paul’s world is thick with angels and demons and he believes he is locked in battle with cosmic forces. The fantastic and the miraculous are to be expected at every turn. His cosmos is that of Hellenistic Judaism, with levels of heavens, astral spirits, and a Hadean underworld.
Today’s spiritualist cosmology is also replete with angels and demons, though these entities are more typically characterized as higher-level and lower-level (earthbound) human souls.
Another parallel with contemporary spiritualism is Paul’s idea of a new spiritual body, as opposed to the disembodied state envisioned by the Platonic tradition.
According to Paul, we humans are “clothed” in a physical body, which we shed at death, but our desire is not to end up naked or unclothed—that is, stripped of the body, as Plato would have it—but to be re-clothed with a new eternal house that God will create (2 Corinthians 5:1–4)….
If God created our physical world with all of its variety of “bodies,” or outward forms, for various plants and animals, surely he can provide spiritual bodies for those whom he raises from the dead in the new creation (1 Corinthians 15:36–38). Paul thinks of a body as a mode of being, whether in a physical creation or in the new spiritual creation that God would fashion in the future….
Resurrection is … the reclothing or “reincorporation” of the essential self with a new immortal body that frees it from the Hadean state of death.
Spiritualists commonly say that the physical body is only one of several bodies nesting inside each other. The astral body and the soul body are considered higher-dimensional forms taken by the spirit, which is not completely bodiless until it reaches a very late stage of development.
Finally, Paul’s most shocking idea, that humans were born to be gods and will eventually rule the cosmos, is not dissimilar to the spiritualistic teaching that human incarnation is only one step along an evolutionary road that will lead to a merger with the oversoul and eventually with the godhead itself.
In short, Paul had much in common with spiritualist channelers of more recent times. Surprisingly enough, the roots of Christianity lie partly in mediumistic phenomena that many modern churchgoers would reject as dangerously un-Christian.
footnote: “stray verses”: 1 Kings 22:19–23; Job 1:6–12, 2:1–7; Isaiah 6; Zechariah 3; Daniel 7
Michael, along the same lines, you might enjoy checking out this book: Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle's Life and Thought by Colleen Shantz (2009).