ABOUT THIS BOOKThis collection of essays continues the investigation of religious experience in early Judaism and early Christianity begun in Experientia, Volume 1, by addressing one of the traditional objections to the study of experience in antiquity. The authors address the relationship between the surviving evidence, which is textual, and the religious experiences that precede or ensue from those texts. Drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, social memory theory, neuroscience, and cognitive science, they explore a range of religious phenomena including worship, the act of public reading, ritual, ecstasy, mystical ascent, and the transformation of gender and of emotions. Through careful and theoretically informed work, the authors demonstrate the possibility of moving from written documents to assess the lived experiences that are linked to them. The contributors are István Czachesz, Frances Flannery, Robin Griffith-Jones, Angela Kim Harkins, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, John R. Levison, Carol A. Newsom, Rollin A. Ramsaran, Colleen Shantz, Leif E. Vaage, and Rodney A. Werline.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYColleen Shantz is Associate Professor of New Testament at St. Michael’s College in the Toronto School of Theology. She is the author of Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (Cambridge University Press) and the co-editor of Experientia, Volume 1: Inquiry into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Christianity (Society of Biblical Literature). She chairs the Religious Experience section of the Society of Biblical Literature. Rodney A. Werline is Associate Professor and the Marie and Leman Barnhill Endowed Chair in Religious Studies at Barton College, Wilson, North Carolina. He is the author of Pray Like This (Continuum) and Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution (Society of Biblical Literature) and the co-editor of numerous volumes including Experientia, Volume 1: Inquiry into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Christianity (Society of Biblical Literature).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Religious Experience, Past and Present 1
Frances Flannery with Nicolae Roddy, Colleen Shantz, and Rodney A. Werline
Part 1. The Body and Self in Religious Experience
The Body and Ritual Reconsidered, Imagined, and Experienced 13
Frances Flannery
The Afterlife as Mirror of the Self 19
Alan F. Segal
"My Name is Legion": Spirit Possession and Exorcism in Roman Palestine 41
Richard A. Horsley
The Experience of Prayer and Resistance to Demonic Powers in the Gospel
of Mark 59
Rodney A. Werline
Part 2. Text and Religious Experience
The Medium of the Divine 75
Steven M. Wasserstrom
Visions, Mysteries, and the Interpretetive Task: Text Work and Religious
Experience in Philo and Clement 1 83
Celia Deutsch
Transformation by a Text: The Gospel of John 105
Joseph Verheyden
Religious Experience and the Apocalypses 125
Crispin Fletcher-Louis
Part 3. Community and Identity
The Construction of Religious Experience in Paul 147
Troels Engberg-Pedersen
Paul's Rapture: 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 and the Language of the Mystics 159
Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte
Dreams/Visioons and the Experience of God in Luke-Acts 177
John B. F. Miller
The Confluence of Trauma and Transcendence in the Pauline Corpus 193
Colleen Shantz
Response to Papers by Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Colleen Shantz, Bert Peerbolte,
and John B. Miller 207
Rollin A. Ramsaran
Bibliography 213
Indices 235