Craig S. Keener’s article “Spirit Possession as a Cross-cultural Experience” explores the phenomenon of invasive spirit possession in both early Jewish/Christian cultures and modern cultures. His cross-cultural approach makes use of anthropological data on spirit possession as a means to investigate the NT and Greco-Roman data on spirit possession. In this article, I take advantage of Keener’s...
Abstract Various cross-cultural parallels to NT spirit-possession narratives (in terms of both behavior and interpretation) suggest that scholars should respect the NT descriptions as potentially reflecting eyewitness accounts or sources. Anthropologists have documented spirit possession or analogous experiences in a majority of cultures, although interpretations of the experiences vary. In...