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Flora Tells a Story A Fictional Account of the Creation of the Apocalypse of Paul Introduction The more I read of ancient Christian texts, the more I wonder about the people who wrote them. In studying these works we are taught to analyze them in terms of the social and theological contexts in which they were composed , we try to find the sources of their motifs, in short, we try to figure out their overall literary and historical context. This is of course essential, and fascinating in its own right, but it is also interesting to try to reconstruct how it felt to be the individual author, the one on whom all these diverse influences worked. Later on in this book, I will behave as a proper scholar should. I will discuss the ways that our understanding of the Apocalypse of Paul can be heightened through an expanded consideration of the various currents of early Christian thought that influenced it, and also through a heightened consideration of exactly how they interact. But of course “currents of thought” do not even exist, much less interact, except within the privileged confines of the human intellect. People are the environment in which these currents come into being, and the only environment in which they can survive. Consequently, I thought that rather than begin by plunging directly into scholarship, it might be interesting to give a sketch of how one (imaginary) human being could have brought these currents together in the specific configuration that defines the Apocalypse of Paul. I will be presenting, in narrative form, my theories as to how this fascinating little text came to be written. As I explain in the rest of this book, I see the Apocalypse of Paul as a work of gnostic propaganda. As an extrapolation of what must have gone on 13 during the apostle Paul’s ascension to the heavens as discussed in 2 Cor 12:2–4, the author of the Apocalypse of Paul has written a work that continually alludes to the stereotypes of the ascension apocalypse genre, describing Paul’s ascent in terms and with images also found in such works as the Testament of Abraham, the Ascension of Isaiah, 1 Enoch, and so on. But because this author is a gnostic, possibly belonging to the Valentinian movement of Christian gnosticism, she has worked with these stereotypes so as to suggest the truth as she sees it about the heavenly realms. What you will find in this section, then, is a fictional account of the way in which, it seems to me, the Apocalypse of Paul could have been composed. I am not by any means arguing that what I present below is how it actually was composed—neither I, nor anyone else now living, is in a position to know that. Rather, what I present here is based on my theories as to the origin of the text, and is one possible story that those theories could inspire. It is also a way of testing these theories, by encouraging us to see them in a different way, thus giving us an opportunity to think actively about their plausibility (or lack of same) as they are brought to life. Some might argue that, in choosing to present my theories in the form of a narrative, I have been unduly influenced by the gnostic authors whose works I study. While the tendency in mainline Christian theology has been to write treatises and to assert dogmas, using so-called “rational” or “objective ” language, the gnostic authors tended—not always by any means, but often—to express their thought mythologically, which is to say, narratively. Concepts are not described so much as they are personified and shown in action. That this was done consciously and deliberately is brought out clearly by Stroumsa: “In opposition to primitive, or even to early Greek mythology, the Gnostic myths arose in a mental world where metaphysical problems had already been addressed in non-mythological ways, and it arose precisely as a rejection of these ways. Thence stems the ambiguity of Gnostic thought, the artificiality of its mythology” (1984, 2). This reference to the “artificial” nature of gnostic mythology is indebted to Hans Jonas, who argued that gnostic mythology “is of a peculiar type” (1974, 264). He asserted that with all its crudities, it is a work of sophistication, consciously constructed to convey a message, even to present an argument, and deliberately made up of the pirated elements of earlier...

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