The earliest Christian writings are filled with stories of spirit possession and exorcism, which were crucial for the activity of the historical Jesus and for the practice of his earliest followers. Possession, besides being a harmful event that should be exorcized, can also have a positive role in many cultures. Often it helps individuals and groups to reflect on and reshape their identity, to...
This chapter attends to the social and ethical functions of the religious experience of possession in the Pauline groups. Recent ethnographic literature has illustrated how spirit possession can have a truly “productive” role in shaping social structures, ways of knowing, moral agency, and even the formation of individual subjectivities. This chapter shows that these same traits are...
This concluding chapter illustrates some of the major ways in which a critical aspect of spirit possession can emerge in texts of the early Christ movement. It does so with the help of appropriate insights drawn from anthropological literature. A starting point here is the effort to treat the “spirits” involved in cases of possession seriously and not merely as mythical and metaphorical...
This chapter looks at the fundamental role played by spirit possession in the religious experience of Paul and of his Christ groups. It begins with their doctrinal and specifically christological elaborations. Being “in Christ” is the idiom through which Paul expresses the experience of possession by a πνεῦμα, which is identified with the risen Christ and which, through its presence in them,...