Corpus-Paul

[Jeff Peterson <peterson AT mail.ics.edu>]

At 5:37 PM +0000 4/15/99, Mark Goodacre wrote:
>The "person in Christ" is almost universally taken to be Paul himself, being
>humble.  The exception to this is Michael Goulder, "Vision and Knowledge",
>_JSNT_ 56 (1994), pp. 53-71,

Goulder is joined in his dissent by another stimulating maverick, Morton
Smith. In an article in the _Eranos Jahrbuch_ in the 1980s, Smith argued
that Paul's "man in Christ" is in fact Jesus himself -- part of Smith's
thesis that Jesus' experience of ascent to the heavens was a formative
influence on early Christian devotion. (Don't have the citation handy but
can get it for anyone interested.)

>I would like to add that a fine Oxford DPhil thesis was recently written on 1
>Cor. 12 by Paula Gooder

Yet another recent Oxonian contribution to understanding this passage is
the two-part article by C. R. A. Morray-Jones, "Paradise Revisited (2 Cor
12:1-12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul's Apostolate," _HTR_ 86
(1993) 177-217, 265-292 (distilled from a DPhil under Christopher Rowland).
Adduces as parallel to Paul's ambiguous ascription of the vision the
reticence to claim and describe one's own heavenly vision attested in the
Merkabah-Hekhalot Jewish mystical tradition, as also the "whether in or out
of the body" motif -- and makes his case more plausibly than Smith, in the
opinion of a man I know. :-)

Jeff

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Jeffrey Peterson
Institute for Christian Studies
Austin, Texas, USA
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