Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostles’s Life and Thought. By Colleen Shantz.Full text available only with personal or institution subscription.
Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostles’s Life and Thought. By Colleen Shantz. Pp. viii + 267. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. isbn 978 0 521 86610 1. £45/$80.
1. Quinton Deeley
+ Author Affiliations
1.
Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London
1. Christopher Rowland
+ Author Affiliations
1.
University of Oxford christopher.rowland@queens.ox.ac.uk
The first thing that needs to be said about this remarkable book is that it is an exciting and brave book. The second of those epithets might be a prelude to a polite rejection of its findings because they are tendentious, or stray beyond the bounds of what is currently acceptable in the discipline. That is not the case. There is no doubt that this is an unusual thesis, but its peculiarity is the reason for its bravery. It is explicitly interdisciplinary, and, what is more, retraces a course which has been eschewed by much modern historical scholarship—the application of neuroscience to the religious experience of the leading New Testament writer, Paul of Tarsus. There is a double jeopardy here: interdisciplinarity, of course, but also the exploration of the experience which is referred to in (and behind) the text as a significant factor in the writer’s experience and one that has major ramifications for understanding his thought. The interdisciplinary nature of this book has prompted the need for a comprehensive review in which the different facets of this book can be adequately assessed. We have been engaged in an ongoing conversation on the nature of visionary experience over the last three years, together with Professor Stephen Pattison of the University of Birmingham and this joint review has arisen out of that collaboration.
Colleen Shantz’s study explores a neglected field, and suspicion of mysticism and religious experience, rooted in theological fear of the dynamic unpredictability of the mystical and the experiential in Christianity, has coloured the way these issues have been treated within biblical studies. The book, which started life as a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Leif Vaage, represents something of a milestone in the spasmodic, but necessary, exploration of the nature of early Christian experience and in ...
It's exciting to see this sort of work being done, which takes mystical experience seriously as an input to foundational religious traditions.