Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul

Abstract

This book argues that the traditional, mainly cognitive and metaphorical ways of understanding central Pauline concepts, e.g. ‘being in Christ’, which have been heavily influenced by the incorporation of Platonic dualism into early Christianity from the 2nd century onwards, must be supplemented by a literal, not just cognitive and non-metaphorical understanding that directly reflects Paul's cosmology. That cosmology, including Paul's understanding of the pneuma (‘spirit’), was a materialist, bodily one, with the pneuma being understood by Paul as consisting of a combination of physical elements that would at the resurrection act directly on the ordinary human bodies of believers and transform them into ‘pneumatic bodies’. The book traces this understanding of the future events back to the Pauline present and considers how Paul conceived in bodily terms of his own conversion, of the believers' reception of the pneuma in baptism, and the way it informed his own and their ways of life from the beginning to the projected end. In developing this picture of Paul's overall world view, which maintains its basically ‘apocalyptic’ character, the book draws on ancient Stoic materialist and monistic physics and cosmology, and on modern ideas on ‘religious experience’, ‘self’, ‘body’, and ‘practice’ derived from Foucault and Bourdieu. The book states the cosmological case for the author's earlier ‘ethical’ reading of Paul in his book, Paul and the Stoics (2000).