Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (review)

This volume, in memory of Gilles Quispel (1916–2006), contains a Preface and an introductory essay by the editor, seventeen essays divided into five parts (Hermeneutics and Experience, Communal Identities, Cosmology, Apocalypticism, and Practices), a bibliography, a list of contributors, and two indices. An overview of the work by a group of scholars, the book marks the tenth anniversary of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group of the Society of Biblical Literature. April D. DeConick’s introductory essay suggests that the Christian mysticism of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods is really “Jewish,” which seems justified in terms of the book’s contents (2). On the same page, the first—and the only interesting—misprint appears: “illicit” for “elicit,” which luckily works well as a joke in the context. DeConick’s essay includes a few infelicitous terms, such as the long abandoned “emic/etic” division and references to the beloved but nebulous “the sacred.” More irritating is the free-for-all term “shamanism,” and in this respect James Davila and Alan Segal sin in their contributions, too. Heed the sober warnings in Alice B. Kehoe’s Shamans and Religion. An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking (Waveland Press, 2000)!

A great deal of common ground is covered in the book, with the writers frequently referring to co-contributors’ works, and an outsider may experience the situation as listening in on a semi-private conversation. Uneven in terms of methodological heft, incisive analysis, and quasi-apologetic/wannabe intents, the essays provide much valuable and suggestive material for those who work on the late antique world. Most of the emphasis rests on Jewish sources, less so on Christian ones, with nothing on the Gnostics. The yearning to discover individual religious experience turns up in many of the essays, a somewhat vain and useless quest unless we are confronted with outright mystical autobiographies in eloquent theological, metaphysical, and psychological language. But we are not so lucky in the early Jewish and Christian arenas (read some of the Sufis instead). Meanwhile, as we lack almost any “thick descriptions” of actual mystical experience, imagine that in the Book of Revelation 1:10, we would find the pericope, “Last Sunday, when I went into trance using the dearly purchased techniques of the local Mithraists (so much more accomplished in their methods than religions A, B, C, and D), I had ingested plant E, and uttered the four page prayer F, paying special attention to the syllabic stresses in lines 34 and 35, I got carried up to heaven G III, 4, in the presence of my three sisters H, I, and J, who unfortunately were stuck on level G I, 2…” The reader is, of course, invited to fill in the letters with his/her favorite imaginings. Only a few Jewish sources come vaguely near my “vulgar-Targumic” expansions.

In Seth Sanders’ “Performative Exegesis,” mysticism appears to emerge as a legitimate space between orthodox and heterodox orientations. Sanders deals with the Qumranic Self-glorification Hymn, Moses’s shining face, the Babylonian Enuma Anu Enlil, Daniel, Isaiah, etc. He unmasks a few fellow-scholars as too timidly and defensively religious, worried whether the texts would strike back, perhaps, at too much intrepid interpretation. Humans superseding angels and even taking on divine roles (76) demonstrate bold exegetical creativity, and the rabbis obviously have more fun than present-day scholars do in teasing the divine eye and ear. Sanders emphasizes daring rabbinical exegeses in practical, not abstract, terms. Another practical aspect comes out in Rachel Elior’s essay on time, drawing attention to the calendar debates in Enoch, Jubilees, and Qumran, especially. Liturgical and legal traditions arrive in conflict (87), as heavenly time and space interests clash. As noted by Sanders, if angels can upstage humans, rabbis may tweak heaven’s eternal calendar. Both groups of “divine children” compete for fatherly attention: who is the favored offspring?

James Davila...