Below is Claude.ai’s summary of a summary by Joseph Nobles/BSA of Bazzana’s chapter in Paul Within Paganism, not the original article itself. Here’s a summary of what Joe’s summary contains.
“Paul among the Other Possessed” — Giovanni B. Bazzana (pp. 121–138 in Paul Within Paganism, ed. Chantziantoniou, Fredriksen, and Young) Summarized by Joseph Nobles of the Bible Study Association
Bazzana, Professor of New Testament at Harvard Divinity School and author of Having the Spirit of Christ (Yale, 2020), argues that Paul and his communities practiced a form of spirit possession, and that this phenomenon should be understood within its broader Mediterranean religious context rather than treated as uniquely Jewish or Christian.
The Three Preliminary Issues
- Paul in the pagan context. While it is historically productive to read Paul as “fully Jewish,” Bazzana warns that this framing is sometimes used to reassert Christian exceptionalism by insulating Paul from his wider Mediterranean environment. He insists the phenomenon of possession must be analyzed within its full Greco-Roman context.
- What “possession” means. Two problematic modern binaries distort the scholarly discussion. The first is the concept of “possession” itself, which emerged from European colonial encounters with non-European peoples and was used to mark those peoples as inferior — as “porous” selves lacking the “buffered” autonomy of the rational Western subject. The second binary privileges rationality, rendering ecstatic experience inherently irrational. Bazzana argues that anthropological research has thoroughly challenged this framing: possession is often “culturally integrated,” enabling communal reflection, divination, healing, and ethical growth. “Porous” selves are not deficient; they may actually support individual and communal flourishing better than the idealized Western “buffered self.”
- Paul as possessed. Bazzana takes it as a working assumption that Paul himself experienced possession. The Pauline phrase “to be in Christ (en Christō)” functions analogously to being “in an unclean spirit” (Mark 5:2). Galatians 2:20 (“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me”) reflects, on this reading, the characteristic displacement of the host’s agency by the indwelling spirit. The pneuma that possesses Paul is identified with Christ himself, and the host-spirit relationship Paul describes (including the doulos/enslaved metaphor and the spousal imagery in comparative possession research) all fit this pattern.
The Central Question: Is Pauline Possession Exceptional?
Bazzana argues the answer lies between two extremes. He rejects both the claim that Pauline possession was completely unique and the opposite extreme that it was indistinguishable from all other Mediterranean phenomena. What is distinctive about Paul is largely a matter of rhetoric and nomenclature:
- Paul deliberately avoids terms too closely associated with non-Jewish practice. He uses propheteia instead of the more common mantikē (divination); he favors pneumata and angeloi (both with strong Jewish associations) over the more common daimōn/daimonion, which he reserves exclusively for hostile forces.
- This terminological strategy marks “the beginning of the shift that will lead to Christian theological taxonomies of angelology and demonology.” Bazzana urges scholars to resist Paul’s own rhetoric and take a more phenomenological approach.
Possession, Exorcism, and Mediterranean Parallels
Bazzana notes that exorcism, so prominent elsewhere in early Christian texts, is largely absent from Paul — Paul is more focused on the benefits of possession. He then surveys key parallels from the broader Mediterranean world:
- Orestes’s possession by the Erinyes in Aeschylus offers a striking parallel to the Gerasene demoniac, with both figures marginalized from society and driven to its edges.
- In the Mediterranean world generally, the spirits that possess people are often the restless dead — those who died violently, young, or without proper burial. Jesus’s death fits this profile remarkably well, suggesting the pneuma of the risen Christ may have had a “seditious” dimension.
- Cities sometimes established cults around previously dangerous spirits (e.g., the cult at Temesa, or the honors given to the boxer Cleomedes), transforming initially harmful possessing forces into community benefactors.
- Dionysiac possession is the closest parallel to Pauline Christ-possession: a foreign deity whose initial manifestation was madness and subversion eventually became integrated into mainstream religious life, bringing prophecy and healing. This helps explain why Paul worried (1 Cor 14:23) that outsiders might see the Corinthian meetings as mania.
The Stoic Pneuma Question
Bazzana engages Stanley Stowers’s proposal that Paul’s pneuma reflects Stoic “cosmic stuff” — an impersonal material substance. While he finds the Stoic framework partially illuminating (especially for Paul’s resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15), he notes that the Stoic pneuma is impersonal in ways that don’t account for the deeply personal character of Paul’s possession experience. He suggests Paul may have used Stoic-inflected language to express his possession experience without being fully determined by Stoic cosmology — and notes that even some Stoic philosophers wrote extensively on demons and divination.
Conclusion
Situating Pauline possession within the broader Mediterranean context, rather than defensively isolating it from that context, produces a significantly richer understanding of both Paul and his communities.
End Summary of the Summary
