Recent research indicates that "self-induction" can create sincere belief that one is a medium or host of spirits. According to this theory, spiritual possession can be induced simply by acting possessed. Acting turns into belief as the actor becomes absorbed in performing the act. The longer the act is repeated, less and less of it seems to be performed self-consciously, while more and more of it seems to run automatically on its own without conscious intention of the actor. The sense of possession eventually occurs when self-awareness slips away altogether, and the pretender who started the process is no longer  remembered. (See Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, MIT Press 2002, p. 252.) 

This theory suggests that prophets and their true believers have completed the self-induction process; nonbelievers  are uninitiated or in the stages of the initiation process where the act still looks like make-believe, delusion or pretense. The theory predicts that belief in the presence of God can be created simply by acting as if God is present. Although it would be unethical to test this theory by scientifically controlled experiment, self-induction can be observed in the belief-forming practices of organizations that cultivate spirituality. Perhaps it should also be found in literary records that accurately describe the development and spread of faith in God or other spirits. Our test case in this Lesson will be the Book of Acts and Paul's epistles in the New Testament, our best available descriptions of how doubters became believers in the early Christian movement.

Of course, self-induction may explain how people assimilate skills other than prophecy. If prophets and other spirit-mediums begin to learn as self-conscious actors, then so do doctors, farmers, golfers, musicians, philosophers and truck drivers, all of whom self-induce roles that initially are not true. Sitting behind the steering wheel of a truck for the first time, the "driver" is only an imposter who doesn't know how to drive. With practice, however, the act of driving becomes so automatic that the truck eventually seems to be driving itself--and the unthinking operator so completely forgets about controlling the vehicle that it runs off the road, seemingly all by itself! 

So perhaps it is true that, as Shakespeare wrote, all the world's a stage and all the people are players. Novice actors opening a show invariably experience "stage fright" (self-consciousness about acting), but if they have rehearsed enough, their playing becomes so routine as to seem natural, self-consciousness disappears, and they no longer are distracted from their roles. Young teachers beginning the first day of class normally suffer the same kind of temporary disorientation ("gosh, here I am in front of a class, and I'm not really a teacher"), and so it goes on the lawyer's first day in court, on the salesperson's first visit to a customer, or on anybody's first date. Inexperienced children, like other beginners learning unfamiliar things, clearly recognize that they are pretending or imagining. Socrates notwithstanding, their education seems complete when they have forgotten that they don't really know! 

Perhaps nobody should pretend to answer the question why anyone would want to become a prophet. Impersonating God is a tougher role than playing truck driver, performing any Shakespearian part, or even going on a first date. People must be made to believe that the prophetic voice is authentic, that the words really are God's words. The proof may require not only persuasive speaking but the performance of miracles and willingness to persecution and torture. Whom the gods love are tested, as the old Greek proverb says.

Describing prophecy as art, this Lesson does not argue or intend to suggest that prophets are deceivers, or that believers are dupes. Whether or not we believe in God, or any prophet's claims to speak for God, the point here is about art. Art is central in human experience, even human experience of the divine.

The impersonation of spirits could be a dangerous business. It raised the question, who is allowed to play? In both Hellas and Israel, spiritual authority was continually disputed between interest groups, especially between prophets and priests. Prophets often denounced the conventional rituals of priests as irrelevant or even hateful to the gods. For example, the Lord's temple in Jerusalem had become "a den of thieves" where the priests served only themselves, according to the prophet Jeremiah, who is said to have predicted the temple's destruction by the Babylonians. [Recall the counter-cultural nature of literature in general from Lesson 1. ] 

Antagonized priests often tried to silence prophets, or even have them killed, as seems to have been the case when Jeremiah was thrown into a well and left to die, and also when Socrates was condemned in the court of the high priest of Athens. It happened again, according to the New Testament, when Jesus was crucified after creating a disturbance in the temple at Passover, and also when the first Christian martyr, Stephen, was stoned to death. According to the Christian story in the Book of Acts, Stephen was killed for blasphemy, after he proclaimed that the Jews had persecuted all of the prophets in their history (Acts 7:52). Prophets sometimes may have provoked persecution to demonstrate their faith, to unite their followers, or simply to act as prophets are known to act.

Ancient prophets held themselves out as experts on a variety of problems. Whether the trouble was political, military, social, economic, meteorological, domestic, moral, medical, or psychiatric, the prophet's diagnosis was usually the same. Spirits were to blame, but they could be appeased or manipulated by following the prophet's advice!

In personal care-giving, prophets were forerunners in medicine and philosophy, curing sickness and unhappiness. They practiced faith healing and no doubt had successes, as faith healers and placebos still succeed today. [For more on faith healing, see note 7 below.] Typically, they were also imaginative moralizers, preaching that social misbehavior makes the gods angry. We've read an example in the seer Kalkhas' explanation for the deadly plague in the Achaean camp at the beginning of the Iliad, that the disease was caused by Agamemnon's insult to Apollo's priest [recall Lesson 3]. This madness of Agamemnon's was caused by the devilish goddess Atê [recall Lesson 5], but appeasement of Apollo, following the seer's directions, takes off the curse and ends the plague.  

In ancient prophecy, the wrath of spirits determined all or most of political and military history. A common lament in prophetic writing was why the people had fallen from former times of glory, when gods had befriended them.  

• Hellenic literature remembered old Troy and Thebes prior to the general collapse of Bronze Age civilization (cir. 1200 BC). Modern scholars may not know why the Bronze Age disappeared so suddenly and completely, but Homer's Muse seems to have known that the Zeus-man cult was destroyed when its leaders became hated by Zeus. [Recall Lesson 6. Compare the anger of the hero-spirit Odysseus toward the suitors when they disrespect his memory.] At Olympia and elsewhere, the massive temple building of the archaic age seems to have been an attempt to fix this problem and appease offended gods.

• In Hebraic literature, similarly, the Lord told pre-classical Jewish prophets that impiety was to blame for the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrian Empire in 722 BC (see further note 2 below) and also for the later destruction of Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah by Babylonian invaders under Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC. 

Prophets said that disenfranchised groups lost their lands and were enslaved because of impiety. This message apparently brought hope to slaves, prisoners and other oppressed people in the ancient world, as it still does today. Believers thought that they could make materially better lives for themselves by becoming obedient to the spirits.  To become obedient to the spirits often meant becoming obedient to the prophets.

According to Jewish prophetic literature, the Lord speaking through Moses promised his obedient followers a homeland in Palestine, and Jewish settlements apparently flourished in this "promised land" for hundreds of years after Moses' time, reaching a high point in the construction of the first temple at Jerusalem during the reign of King Solomon (cir. 950 BC). But when Babylonians demolished the Jerusalem temple and carted off its treasures, and many of the Jewish survivors were forced into exile in Babylon and other foreign lands, it looked as if the old prophecies must have been wrong, or perhaps the Lord had changed his mind about the Jewish homeland. The time was ripe for new prophets to come forward to reveal the Lord's intentions. 

Jeremiah and other Jewish prophets of this period weighed in on the Lord's motives in terms reminiscent of Homer, whose gods and hero-spirits became wrathful when they were not given appropriate "gifts and fair words." [On Homer's angry spirits, recall Lesson 4 and Lesson 8.] The Lord of Jewish prophecy said that he was angry because the Jews had dishonored him. That is, they had dishonored the Lord's prophets, by listening to prophets of other gods, and so the faithless people naturally deserved to be exiled among nonbelievers far from the promised land! 

So a simple moral of obedience underlay prophetic cults. If a prophet's followers acted righteously -- that is, if people did what the prophet's spirit said to do -- then the spirit's anger eventually would subside. When the spirit finally was appeased, then the community no longer would be afflicted. This was the magical theory of the prophets. 

In Jewish practice, prophets came and went, centuries passed, and still the Jews suffered. From the prophetic point of view, people didn't reform, so the Lord just kept thrashing them and sending more prophets. Evidently there were always enough believers among the Jewish people to support the prophecy business. Over the years, however, there also must have been plenty of disenchanted Jews to whom the prophets in their midst were only pretenders, arrogant liars or fools, dreamers, quacks or blasphemers whose spiritual claims were unworthy of serious attention.  Ironically, a continuous supply of disbelievers was useful to prophets in explaining why the Lord's anger never cooled. 

Similarities between Hellenic and Hebraic prophecy continued into the classical period (roughly 500 BC to 400 AD), and the two literatures retained much in common at this time, too. General parallels between the stories of Socrates and Jesus are hard to miss. Both prophets perform with limited success in conservative religious societies whose threatened leaders persecute them as blasphemers. Both claim to receive personal communication from a spirit, both act as if a divine mission shapes their lives, and both attract small groups of believers. But both are misunderstood by the multitude as dangerous revolutionaries, both are condemned by the local high priest, and both accept self-sacrifice when the time comes to choose between dishonor and death (compare the choice of Achilles: Lesson 4). Since neither of them leaves writings for posterity, both are knowable only through the imaginative story-telling of literate followers. Different followers tell somewhat different stories, and different cults eventually engage in somewhat different practices under different sets of beliefs, each splinter group claiming to be the authentic one. 

Similarities between Hellenic and Jewish prophecy had vitally important consequences for Christianity. The new faith moved easily from its birthplace in Palestine into the larger Hellenist world where it grew up and became a world class religion. In his posthumous fame as a story character, Jesus surpassed Socrates, Odysseus, Achilles and even Heracles, to become the most popular of all Greek heroes. We must imagine Jesus as a Greek hero, not because he personally was one, but because it was in the Greek world of risen hero-spirits that the stories about him caught on with by far the largest and most enthusiastic audiences. These are the stories of Jesus that have come down to our time; they are the lenses through which we see him.

Within a few generations after the crucifixion, preachers were impersonating Jesus all around the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, and the Jesus cults multiplied--including Gnostics, Marcionists and other popular cults that later would be suppressed as heretical. When writing eventually was introduced into this Christian story-telling, in the second half of the first century AD, it wasn't Hebrew or Aramaic (the Persian language probably spoken by Jesus), and it wasn't Latin, either, even though the Latin-speaking Romans had conquered all of the Mediterranean lands. Early Christian writing was Greek, not only because Greek was still an international language but also because Greek-speakers, of all people, were most susceptible to Christian beliefs. 

The development of Christendom that dominated European civilization, from the late classical era through the Middle Ages into modern times, is the premier illustration in western history of the cult-building power of literature. The conversion of Jews, Hellenes, Romans, Gauls, Celts and other "pre-Christians" into a somewhat homogeneous community of believers on an entire continent, and even beyond, required wars, inquisitions, bribes, negotiations and coercions of every sort, but it had literature as its basis. Becoming a Christian essentially meant hearing the story or gospel ("good news") about Jesus and believing it. 

Even today Christianity can be described as a literary practice in the sense that its preachers or evangelists (from the Greek evangelion = "good news") perform spiritual words in the age-old god-impersonating style of the Jewish and Hellenic prophets. Of course, the spirit's name is changed to fit Christian terminology: "Jesus says X, Christ says Y, The Lord Jesus Christ says Z..." The Christian preacher in all sects known to me are expected to impersonate God, and to do so persuasively enough to fill all of the seats in the church. This act would be theatrical, except that the congregation has played along with such sincerity that it believes. Those who lack this "faith," however, will see the preaching only as pretense or make-believe. Further self-induction may convince them that it is true.

Rome paved the way for the spread of Christianity by looting the Greek temples (beginning as early as 275 BC but not climaxing until the death of Cleopatra in 31 BC), and by destroying the second temple of the Lord in Jerusalem (in 70 AD). To the conquered peoples, these were devastating cultic events that begged to be explained as results of divine anger on a massive international scale. In other words, they called for a major revolutionary prophet to have foretold them. Who could have predicted such desecration of the holy places of the ancient spirits? Could it have been Jesus? Some of Jesus' followers said that, like Jeremiah, he had predicted the temple's destruction. Some claimed that he was the only hero who really was coming back from the dead any more, after the Romans seized the land. 

There are conflicting imitations, so which Socrates or which Jesus, if any, is to be believed? Is it whichever one (if any) we happen to be taught? Or can we determine it through scholarship? Or do all of us inevitably imitate such models in our own personal, distinctive ways? Is there anything in this area that all Socratics or all Christians can agree upon? Does agreement matter? 

The Jesus problem is particularly thorny because Jesus had no Plato, Xenophon or other literate biographer among his immediate followers. Although Jesus died in about 30 AD, none of the New Testament gospels were composed until at least a generation later. The gospels according to Mark (cir. 65-70 AD), Matthew and Luke (both cir. 80-85 AD) and John (cir. 90-95 AD) all were written by people who knew Jesus only imaginatively, through stories told about him. All other surviving written gospels (apocryphal texts that were excluded from the official canon of the New Testament) appear to have been written still later, mostly in the second century AD. The epistles of Paul to various new Christian congregations in the old Hellenistic world were composed before the written gospels, but the earliest of these letters, 1 Thessalonians, is thought to date back only to 50 AD.  Paul never met Jesus, and he was very unimpressed with the teachings of Jesus' apostles Peter and James (the brother of Jesus), who he did meet in person (see Galatians 1:15; 2:9-11).  The Jesus that Paul claimed to know was resurrected "Christ," who appeared to him in a vision. [More on Paul and his vision below.]

So Jesus' story must have been entirely oral in the beginning, unless early written records that once existed were destroyed or lost. The first Christians may have kept Jesus secret, since ancient cults often kept their gods' and heroes' mysteries to themselves, not to be revealed outside the cult. (If you wanted to know, then you had to join.) More likely, they did not preserve Jesus' story in writing for the benefit of future generations because there weren't going to be any future generations. They believed that the world was about to end, almost any day, so it probably seemed pointless to write, even if any of them knew how to write.  

Only at most ten or fifteen percent of the population of the Roman Empire could read, and far fewer could write, so popular cults at this time still had to be transmitted mostly by word of mouth. Yet, in contrast to Homeric singing, oral Christian story-telling apparently did not rely extensively upon music, verse, or other mnemonic or poetic devices to preserve the words from one telling to the next. [Recall the technology of oral literature from Lesson 10.]  The Christian gospels are written in prose and show no evidence of having been adapted from verse. Early Christian hymns must have helped to unite the thoughts of believers, but these apparently were only short lyrics, not extended narratives that told Jesus' story or repeated his teachings in detail. Apparently these songs were intended for communal singing, as modern hymns are; they weren't professional recitals, like Homeric songs. 

The evidence, such as it is, suggests that, in the beginning, Jesus' story was transmitted largely by spiritual possession. Peter authorized preachers through a "laying on of hands" ceremony that possibly may have involved instruction of some kind [Acts 6:6 and 8:14], but followers could speak of Jesus even though they were not trained as priests, theologians, historians or bards. Anyone could prophesy, provided only that he or she had been baptized. The spirit world was revealed through baptism. This event typically was imaged as "the Holy Spirit" descending upon the initiates, like a dove or a tongue of fire flying down to them through parted skies that opened the heavenly abode of God above. Linked to the source of inspiration in this way, baptized Christians were equipped to preach the good news. No doubt they learned from one another what good news ought to sound like, but the Holy Spirit gave them significant freedom to improvise. The many variations and occasional contradictions among the gospels and epistles, all of which claim to speak in the name of God, are the best evidence of this.

The mechanics of early Christian prophecy can be glimpsed in some of Paul's letters and in The Book of Acts, the earliest surviving history of the early Christians. All four New Testament gospels show it prominently too, in the baptism of Jesus by the prophet John the Baptizer, the point at which Jesus discovers his spirit (his "Father" in heaven) and therefore can separate from his teacher and begin to prophesy on his own.

The account in Acts is particularly striking. The book begins with the appearance of Jesus to the apostles within a few weeks after the crucifixion. He promises that they will be baptized in the Holy Spirit in a few days, and then they will be able to "witness" him to people in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the farthest ends of the earth (Acts 1:4-8). The clear implication is that the apostles cannot "witness" Jesus from their existing personal knowledge about him or his former life. They can witness him only after the Holy Spirit has descended and possessed them, which first happened at Pentecost according to Acts 2:1-47. [More about Pentecost below.]  

The Holy Spirit received through baptism was a form of spiritual possession, like possession by the Muse in traditional Hellenic poetry, or inspiration by the Lord in traditional Hebrew prophecy, but once the cult of Jesus began to grow the Holy Spirit fostered spontaneous, ecstatic speaking in entire charismatic communities. All Christians could be prophets. All initiated members were authorized to speak by inspiration, and what they said about Jesus continued to expand and change long after Jesus' death, as modern historical studies of the surviving gospels have demonstrated. [See note 4 below.] The gospels were meant to express the Holy Spirit, not to report studiously researched facts about Jesus' biography, as modern Biblical scholars do. 

How did Christianity lose its original character as a cult of prophets? Eventually in the course of time -- it was bound to happen -- questions arose from the proliferation of inconsistent and contradictory accounts of Jesus: what exactly was the truth? Who was Jesus, really? Shouldn't all believers agree on an answer? 

By the second and third centuries, many Christians came to see the need to police the story-telling, the Holy Spirit notwithstanding. This attitude became dominant as soon as Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire in 312 AD. Church fathers took up arms against a variety of "heresies" (that is, views about God and Jesus differing from their own views), and for their followers they bound up the word of the Lord into a single authorized book in which only four gospels and other miscellaneous writings were included. The papacy, the Nicene creed of Christian belief, and other institutions and standards of the church also came to into being, and the original idea faded that all baptized Christians can prophesy through inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Dogmatic priestly religion separated from popular prophetic art.

Acts describes baptized Christians as "witnesses" to Jesus. Witnessing was made possible only through the Holy Spirit, which was received popularly in baptism (Acts 1:3). It wasn't recalling historical Jesus. It was testifying to his presence after his death. Sighting the resurrected Jesus was one form of witnessing, but unexplained events of various kinds could be taken for "signs" of Jesus' presence. When the sick unexpectedly recovered from illness, for example, Christian witnesses were quick to attribute the recoveries to the power of Jesus. Sometimes the apostles themselves were said to have performed miraculous healing "in the name of Jesus." So Peter is said to have cured a lame man (Acts 3:1) and also to have recovered a faithful woman named Tabitha from death (Acts 9:36). To accept such apparent miracles as true, and as signs of Jesus, was to witness Jesus. 

Most Greeks eventually became witnesses. These were the people of Homer, after all, and you will recall how Homer had described unexplained phenomena, including medical conditions like plagues, in terms of activities of Apollo and other gods. [Recall Homeric medicine from Lesson 3.]  Among Greeks, Jesus was another Apollo, the explanation for cures and other mysterious events that had no other explanation. [For more on faith healing generally, see note 7 below.] Yet the likeness of Jesus to Apollo never would have occurred to Peter or any of the apostles in Jerusalem, before the cult attempted to do business in the Greco-Roman world of strange and foreign gods.

According to Acts, within a few months after Jesus' death Peter and the disciples withdrew from preaching into a life of prayer and meditation in Jerusalem, but they hired Hellenist preachers -- that is, Hellenized Jews -- to support their commune through public preaching. All or most of the disciples probably were speakers of Aramaic, an ancient Persian language regarded by Greeks as barbarian and corrupted with magical superstition, and so the services of Greek-speakers would have been needed to preach in the Greek-speaking world. Central aspects of Christianity, as we know it, may have arisen only when Hellenists translated it. One change probably was the name of the religion. "Christ" is the word for ""the anointed one" in Greek. Although we can't say for sure, it seems very unlikely that anybody in Peter's commune in Jerusalem would have used this alien word. Perhaps, the original followers referred to Jesus as "Messiah," a roughly equivalent Hebrew term, but nobody knows because all of the earliest source literature is Greek.  [More speculation on the first Hellenist preachers and the cult of Jesus in Peter's time in footnote 6.]  

The Christian mass or Lord's Supper also bears an apparent Hellenic design. It is hardly the same as the Passover feast that Jesus, as a devout Jew, would have celebrated. Its central mystery is of the kind found in traditional Hellenic hero rites, in which the dead were made present to believers at communion meals. [Recall hero ritual from Lesson 2 and also the Hellenic background page.] As the New Testament indicates, Peter and his Jewish-Christian followers would not eat with non-Jews. Jewish exclusivity in dining was a serious obstacle to Jesus-worship among Greeks, who traditionally met the spirits only at dinner. The cultural barrier apparently came down when Greeks began to give resurrection banquets for Jesus, along the recognizable lines of traditional Hellenic hero meals. 

Acts gives credit to Peter for beginning to dine with Near Eastern gentiles [see Acts 10:1 - 11:18.], but the Lord's Supper among Greeks may have been Paul's invention, later endorsed by the elders in Jerusalem. [For general info on Paul see footnote 3 below.] In one of his New Testament letters, Paul says that he "received" it from the Lord and "delivered" it to his congregation at Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:23-30) -- language indicating that the Lord's Supper was his prophecy. [See the full quotation from Paul, in the right hand column of this page.] Of course, various Christian sects have taken various approaches to the interpretation of Paul's words and the proper form and significance of the ritual.

In ancient Hellenism sacrificers had the idea that they were eating their ancestors, who fertilized the soil which had fed the animals being sacrificed; hence the need to appease the "heroes" with offerings. Christians similarly ate the body of the dead Jesus, but they did not have to offer him libations of wine. They brought wine to the dinner, as usual, but then they drank all of it instead of "offering" any to the dead by pouring it out on the earth for them.   

Drinking "the blood of Christ" to the last drop was regarded by many pagans as a practice fit for vampires or for impious drunkards who refused to part with any of their wine. Why did so many of them choose to dine with Paul, in his somewhat strange banquet dedicated to the memory of a foreigner, instead of celebrating in a local graveyard of their own heroes, as prior generations of Hellenes had done for centuries? Probably not because they were vampires or drunkards. 

Paul must have had to explain to them that Christ was not in the soil, that Christ had risen up from the ground without any help from libations or other human offerings. He told them that they could share in his new kind of immortality, too. All who ate Christ, as Paul instructed, would live eternally. Eating Christ "unworthily," on the other hand, would cause sickness and death, as Paul claimed had happened whenever Christians died at Corinth. Paul's ideas must have made the Lord's Supper very attractive. The dinner story of Christ had the power of entertainment, to relax the body and overcome worries about sickness and death. [Recall literature's power of entertainment to relieve stress from Lesson 1.]

Paul's idea that death will follow from eating "unworthily" may have been suggested by the Jewish story of the Passover, where an angel of death strikes all of those households in Egypt that fail to observe the Lord's detailed directions for the Passover meal (see Exodus chapter 12). But Paul's eating taboo may have owed something to Greek table manners, too. His dying Corinthians, who have angered the Lord by eating him improperly, are reminiscent of the rude suitors whose impious, disorderly banqueting on Odysseus' farm provokes the dead master to kill them [recall Lesson 8]. Behind the suppertime slaughters in the Odyssey and the Passover story is the very ancient notion that a sacrificer who fails to honor a victim properly will become a dishonored victim [recall Lesson 2]. 

From his letters, we know that Paul was mindful of differences between Hellenes and Jews, and that he reconciled them in ways that were at least as much Greek as Jewish. When Hellenism and Judaism were not easily compatible, in regard to the Jewish practice of circumcision and observance of kosher dietetic laws, for example, Paul directed his gentile followers to disregard the Jewish practice. Gentile men must have been relieved(!), but these exemptions bothered Jewish Christians who thought that, to become an authentic Jesus follower, the obvious first step was conversion to Judaism and adherence to Jewish law. Perhaps they were right, historically speaking, but they did not have the votes and in time lost control of the cult. The followers of Paul's Christ soon outnumbered the followers of Peter's messiah, and political power within the cult shifted away from Jerusalem toward the new Greco-Roman majority. 

Although Paul's mission among the Greeks raised funds for Peter's group back in Jerusalem, he was never an insider in Peter's circle, and there is some evidence in the New Testament that the two did not get along. However, it oversimplifies things to think of Paul simply as Greek, in contrast to Peter as Jewish. Paul was a Jew of the Diaspora (that is, a Jew living outside of Israel among gentiles), he never renounced his Jewish faith, and his broad mission was essentially Jewish, to be a prophet of the Lord. 

In his prophetic work Paul spoke the word of the Lord, had visions, tried to win believers for his personal spirit "Christ," and followed the ancient teachings of the Jewish prophet Isaiah (cir. 760 - 690 BC). Isaiah's book was Paul's mentor; Paul attempted to live Isaiah's prediction. In performing a prophetic book -- trying to fulfill an older prophecy -- he became the model for later Christians who acted as if ancient prophecy was coming true. 

Isaiah's importance to Paul is not surprising, if we remember that in Paul's time, Isaiah and the other traditional Hebrew prophets had an important technological advantage over Jesus. They were in the book. Paul couldn't know precisely what Jesus had said -- the gospels weren't written yet -- but he could read the Jewish scriptures and learn what the canonical prophets had said. Nobody said more than Isaiah about bringing worship of the Lord to foreign nations. 

Isaiah had lived at a time when it looked as if the Jewish state would be wiped out by Assyrian invaders, so he had imagined that dark changes were afoot in the spirit world, and it was his line of work to see what they were. What he saw in his prophesying was the Last Judgment, a dreadful day, very soon to arrive, when the angry Lord would judge the entire world once and for all -- not only Israel and Judah (the two kingdoms of Jews in those days) but all nations. Regardless of national origin, people who did not worship the Lord would be consumed in unquenchable fire. It seemed to be happening already in Isaiah's time when Israel (the northern Jewish kingdom, later to be called Samaria) was being torched by the Assyrians and ten Jewish tribes were about to become lost:

Only the Lord's faithful minority would escape the flames to come, but salvation at least would be global. All people of every nation would be saved who heard and followed the word of the Lord.

Isaiah laid the groundwork for Jewish prophecy to expand outside of Palestine. It was a sensible plan, since it looked at the time as if the entire Jewish nation was about to be overthrown. But as events turned out, Isaiah's prediction was premature. Jerusalem was spared when the Assyrian army was annihilated miraculously, or else it was bought off with an enormous ransom, including all of the gold in the Lord's temple--whichever version of the history you care to believe. [More on the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in note #2 below.] 

But sooner or later, of course, some invader eventually would topple Jerusalem, so that Isaiah's prophecies finally would come true. It happened about 135 years after Isaiah, in the time of Jeremiah (587 BC), when Jerusalem in fact fell to the Babylonians, and Jews indeed were forced into exile. Interest in Isaiah's predictions naturally revived at that time, and an unknown writer, known to us today as "Second Isaiah," began making revisions to Isaiah's old manuscript. These postscripts included references to events that had occurred after Isaiah's death, so that Isaiah's prophetic powers appeared miraculous indeed to Paul and other readers in classical times, who never suspected that the book had been reworked. [More on the revisions to the book of Isaiah in note #7 below.]

Paul gave Isaiah's reputation for accurate prediction another boost in the middle of the first century AD, when he and his fellow missionaries finally undertook the international missionary project that Isaiah had envisioned more than 600 years earlier. Paul's preaching career fulfilled the words of Isaiah by carrying "the word of the LORD from Jerusalem" to Hellenists in Asia Minor, mainland Greece and Macedonia. The primary message that Paul took to these foreigners was Isaiah's message, that the Last Judgment was at hand. This may have been Jesus' primary teaching also, but historically speaking we can't be entirely sure about that.

What we see of the early Greek Christians, in glimpses provided in Paul's letters and in Luke's Hellenist Book of Acts, is believers behaving as if Isaiah's Last Judgment is about to happen, as if the world is coming to an end. Doomsday behaviors, such as abandonment of family, giving away of all personal possessions, and above all fanatical praising of Christ, might have been appropriate, if the Last Judgment in fact had been near. To nonbelievers, however, it looked as if Christians must be drunk or crazy. (See for example Acts 2:13 and 26:24.) The difference between the loonies and the scoffers was belief and non-belief about a prediction. 

At least as he is presented in the gospels, Jesus taught that the kingdom of heaven surely would arrive within the disciples' own lifetimes (Mark 13:30; Luke 9:27). This was also Paul's urgent message, even though confusingly some of the disciples already had died. In hindsight, Paul's prophecy was almost as premature as Isaiah's, but some people clearly believed it, and clearly the lives of some believers were seriously disrupted as a result.

Paul's congregation in Thessaly wondered why some of the members were dying prior to Judgment Day? Hadn't they all been promised a view of the messiah coming in glory? Paul answered that the dead would be raised up to see the Last Judgment, and then the living would fly up to join them "in the air." All of this rapture surely would happen quite soon, during Paul's own lifetime [1 Thessalonians 4:13-17]. But later, the people of this same congregation had become hysterically dysfunctional, terrified that the end was at hand, and Paul had to write to them again to calm them down [2 Thessalonians 3:5-12]. 

The Thessalonians practiced communal sharing of food, but some of the zealous souls quit work and became demoralizing burdens on the producing members of the commune. Why toil if the end is so near? Other followers of Paul's completely lost interest in marriage, children and family life. On the other hand, some decided to indulge their senses with sexual excesses and other pleasures. Elsewhere, slaves ran away but then, when the world didn't end, realized that they were in deep trouble.

Obviously, many individuals didn't believe Paul's prophecies. And yet many did. At least one congregation supported Paul financially, and others may have, too. Several gave him donations to take back to the original commune of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem -- the poor "saints," as Paul called them when raising funds.  

Paul had no political or social authority whatsoever in communities where he preached doomsday. On the contrary, some people despised him as a Jew while others saw him as a turncoat from Jewish orthodoxy. Yet through prophecy alone -- his inspiring  words -- he converted Hellenists, even in such traditional Hellenic strongholds as Thessaly, Achaia, and Athens. [Recall Thessaly as Achilles' homeland of Phthia; this is also the place where Crito's friends could have harbored Socrates in exile: Lesson 13.] This is a remarkable feat, even if in the process he turned Jesus into Christ.

Central to Paul's presentation of himself to the Hellenes as an inspired preacher was his story that he had directly encountered Christ -- resurrected Christ, not the historical person Jesus. Paul refers to this supernatural episode no less than three times in his surviving letters, and Acts mentions it three other times (Acts 9:1-9, 22:3-16, and 26:9-18, Galatians 1:11-17 and 1 Corinthians 9:1 and 15:8-11). The incident had happened one day when Paul was traveling on the road to Damascus (in modern Syria, far from the Hellenic homelands). Suddenly there was Christ up in the air overhead, calling Paul by name and rebuking him for persecuting Christians. It knocked him down and temporarily blinded him. From this experience, Paul saw that the end was beginning! Jesus already had been raised and transformed in a mysterious new body. Everybody else surely would follow.

To believe Paul, similar sightings of risen Christ already had occurred to the first believers in Judea:

Paul witnessed Christ, as Peter and the others in Jerusalem had witnessed Christ. This was Paul's claim to direct inspiration, independent of the disciples who had known and worked with Jesus. It was the claim of a prophet to spiritual knowledge.

Because there is no evidence apart from Paul's testimonies and the brief descriptions in Acts, questions about what really happened to Paul on the road to Damascus can't be answered definitively. Paul's admirers and detractors reach different conclusions about it. But whatever actually took place, Paul became an opposite of his former self. He stopped persecuting followers of Jesus and devoted the rest of his life to founding Christian communities. This conversion became a model for transformation of the Hellenists that Paul hoped to convert. He was going to gain everlasting life through the Last Judgment, and they could be saved, too, through belief in his words.

Why did so many Greeks believe Paul? Several suggestions have already been made on this page. It could have helped Paul considerably that Hellenic and Hebrew literature were full of deep-rooted parallels. Greeks who knew nothing of Isaiah or other Jewish doomsday prophets could have understood that Christ was a hero, and Paul was a prophetic medium who could invoke Christ, as he claimed had happened involuntarily on the road to Damascus. They could have accepted Paul's communion meal as a hero ritual that called up the spirit of dead Jesus and that saved them, too, either from death or in death. They could have seen Paul's Last Judgment, not as a restatement of Isaiah but as a culmination of Hellenic sacrifice when all of the heroes would arise from their graves to claim the gifts that were owed to them and to bless the faithful people who had made appropriate sacrifice offerings. Would Paul's arrival in town perhaps mean that he might make Christ appear? And if Christ appeared, would it be the end of the world?

Acts was written in about 80-85 AD to tell about Paul's missionary work and related events in early Christian history, from the aftermath of Jesus' crucifixion (cir. 30 AD) until the time of Paul's journey to Rome (cir. 60 AD). This is an international story of the spread of the cult of Jesus from Jerusalem to the Greco-Roman world, a Hellenist foundation myth for Christianity. [Recall our discussions of foundation myths in connection with the Socratic Academy and Homeric Alexandria.]

Acts is also a continuation of the gospel according to Luke, written by the same anonymous Greek author and for the same unknown audience. (It is addressed to one Theophilus, meaning "lover of God.") The two books are full of parallel episodes, and they may have become separated simply because the whole story originally was contained on two standard 32-foot scrolls. The separation in the New Testament (the two halves are divided by John' gospel) obscures the unity of Luke's work.

Luke is known by scholars as the gospel to the Gentiles, because of its Hellenist features. It substitutes Greek names for Hebrew and Aramaic names, it is interested in non-Jewish Christians and international salvation (2:30-32, 3:38, 4:16-30, 13:28-30, 14:15-24, 17:11-19, 24:47-48), and it demonstrates incomplete knowledge of Palestinian geography, history and customs. It is also Homeric in its omniscient point of view (recall the omniscience of Homer's Muse from Lesson 3); God's plans are announced by angelic messengers, and many of the characters, even the shepherds tending their flocks by night on the night of Jesus' nativity, know in advance how the story will turn out (Luke 2:8; recall the present existence of "the" future in Homer from Lesson 4).

According to Luke, as well as Paul, the future can be seen when one is under the influence of the Holy Spirit. To become Christian is to gain access to the spirit, which can provide the gift of prophecy, including the power to see the end of world which is coming soon. The inspired may see risen Jesus, as Paul and many others did, or may see other "signs" that signify the approach of the Last Judgment. Christianity for Luke, as for Paul, is a cult of prophecy.

One of the striking episodes in Luke's gospel (not found in other gospels) occurs when Elizabeth, a wise woman pregnant with John the Baptizer, is visited by Mary, pregnant with Jesus, and Elizabeth suddenly becomes prophetic, empowered by the Holy Spirit to say the first "Hail, Mary."

And it came to pass, that, when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.
And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.
                          Luke 1:41-45 (emphasis added)

John does not need to be born, let alone born-again, to see how things are going to be. He can prophesy while he is still a fetus in the belly, at least when his mother is filled with the Holy Spirit. 

Prophecy is central to Luke's account. As the story unfolds it is almost as if Jesus' mother is John rather than Mary, and as if John's mother is Isaiah rather than Elizabeth. The biological mothers quickly disappear from the story, but John's life and teachings fulfill the words of Isaiah (Luke 3:1-6), and Jesus in turn lives out the predictions of John. Jesus' spiritual life comes into being only when John baptizes him.

Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened,
And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.
                             Luke 3:21-22 (emphasis added)

From this point Jesus' ministry begins. The implication is that even Jesus needed baptism under the direction of a prophet to gain access to the Holy Spirit and the gift of prophecy or awareness of the end times.

The transmission of the Holy Spirit by baptism is repeated in Acts, when dead Jesus promises his mute and amazed followers in Jerusalem: "John indeed baptized in water, but you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit not many days from now" (Acts 1:5). This dry baptism that inaugurates Christian preaching abroad occurs on Pentecost, when tongues of flame descend on each of the apostles, giving them the power to speak languages understood outside of Palestine. This event overcomes the linguistic damage done at the destruction of the Tower of Babel [Lesson 1], and it makes possible the realization of Isaiah's multicultural vision that the word of the Lord should go forth into the world from Jerusalem.

Non-believers present at this Christian Pentecost think that the Christians are drunk, but Peter reminds them that it's only 9 a.m., and he launches into a sermon explaining that the Christians are acting as everybody is supposed to act when the last days have come, according to the prophet Joel:

In their babbling and prophesying, the apostles are making it appear to be the end of the world. Peter supplies the explanation, including discussion of the "signs" or miracles that Jesus worked during his time on earth and, most importantly, Jesus' resurrection from the dead. The apostles keep count on how many people are persuaded by their acts: from this episode they convinced about 3,000 to believe (Acts 2:41).

All of which brings us back to self-induction, the idea with which this lesson began. Acts is superbly named for English readers. The English verb "to act" means "to pretend" (for example, to act the part of Robin Hood) and "to seem" (to act like a jackass when one isn't a jackass, to act scared when actual fear may or may not be present) and also "to do" (to act on a request, to act as a peacemaker). The noun "act" similarly can refer to part of a play (Act 4 of Hamlet) or to any deed (an act of war, a harmless act), and there are instances when it's hard to say which "act" is intended (for example, a foolish act may refer to a playful act or to something much more serious). 

All of these acts can be found in the Book of Acts, depending on the reader's perception of the events that it describes. Looking at the Pentecost "miracle," for example, one easily might see a picture of social manipulation via managed illusion, as the apostles stage a public event to trick devout Jewish pilgrims into thinking that the end times have come. (Everybody's prophesying; ergo, according to scripture the world must be coming to end.) That's a non-believer's perspective, which sees only the theatrical kind of acting. 

But look at this same Pentecost episode from a believer's point of view, and there's no apparent insincerity or histrionics. The apostles can be seen as honestly trying to save their fellows from a catastrophe that (they really think) is about to occur, so that a little dramatization is justified by the good intentions. If the apostles are convinced that the end already has begun, then they are acting appropriately, the way that the scriptures say people in fact will act when the end arrives. This last is the magical interpretation in which one believes in the book to such an extent that one simply does what it says.

Still another way to view this Pentecost scene is to be agnostic about what the apostles' thoughts and motives because Luke describes only appearances: on the surface it looked as if people were prophesying, and it looked as if 3,000 spectators believed them. In this view, personal thoughts and motives might be beside the point because the Holy Spirit is in change of events. The apostles might not be self-directed; the spirit may have taken over. The Pentecost may be happening spontaneously, regardless of anybody's intentions, good or bad.

All of which may illustrate self-induction. Which kind of act you see or interpret in this story -- whether Pentecost is a miracle or a hoax or something in between -- is likely to depend on your conditioned habits of thought.

Even though Christianity operates by models of action, not by rules of law, Christian preachers regularly describe the models in abstract terms: what's right to do, what's wrong to do. All violations of model behavior are correctable by abandoning the wrong acts and performing the right ones. 

Paul is also noted for having been a persecutor of Christians, prior to his "conversion" experience. Actually, Paul never converted in the sense of dropping Judaism in favor of Christianity. He always thought of himself as a Jew, even after he accepted the belief that Jesus was the son of the Lord. [Recall our prior discussions of "sons of Zeus" in Hellenism: e.g., Lesson 6.] The first Christians in Palestine thought of themselves as Jews, not as members of a different religion. Relations between Christian-Jews and nonChristian-Jews apparently were strained from the beginning, but the schism between Christians and Jews apparently was not completed for several decades after the death of Jesus.

Paul's exact role in persecuting Christians, prior to his conversion, is unknown. It was unlawful for Jews in the Roman Empire of Paul's day to inflict corporal punishment for any spiritual offense. The stoning of Steven, for example, assuming that it happened as Acts says, would have been illegal. (Acts 7:59 claims that Paul was present at this event.) But local Roman administrators may have looked the other way when Jewish priests or aristocrats broke laws. Joining the lowly persecuted Christians may have been Paul's way of cleansing his feelings of guilt by becoming one of the victims (a Hellenic behavior!). Certainly he seems to have relished being imprisoned on a regular basis. Obedience to political laws appears to have little importance for him; obedience to the Christ model, even when it meant law-breaking, was paramount.

Paul found women very active in the early Greek churches, even as congregational leaders, possibly because priestesses had been common in the old Hellenic world, or because women were allowed to have money in Hellenist society (unlike many traditional societies at the time), or possibly because Jesus had cultivated women, along with sinners and other downtrodden and despised people, the "last" who soon would become "first" in the reversed social order of the Kingdom of Heaven. Paul is sometimes accused of patriarchal leanings that eventually turned the church into an old boy's club, but these modern criticisms may not be completely fair. While Paul advised women to be silent in the assembly and to cover their heads, he also accepted women as church leaders, saints and fund raisers. 

For some further reading on Paul, see: R. Banks, Idea of a Community: The Early House Churches in Their Historical Setting (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980)(discusses Paul as a builder of communities); R. Jewett, A Chronology of Paul's Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979)(attempts to reconstruct Paul's life); A.J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1989)(comparing Paul to popular Stoic and Cynic traditions in classical philosophy); J.H. Neyrey, Paul In Other Words: A Cultural Reading of his Letters (Louisville: Westminster/Knox Press, 1990)(a reading in terms of cultural anthropology); S.K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1986)(shows how the letters in the New Testament are influenced by classical rhetoric).

In the beginning the commune consists of about 120 persons, perhaps an estimate that each of the twelve disciples was supported by ten converts at the conclusion of Jesus' ministry (Acts 1:12). The commune could not have been supported by taxes or tithing requirements like those of the priests (the Sadducees) at the Jerusalem temple. Whatever their religious differences were, the serious conflict between the early Christian preachers and the Sadducees must have had a practical economic basis, as both groups sought support from the same community of practicing Jews in Jerusalem.

Within a few years after the death of Jesus, the Sadducees brought a man named Stephen to trial for blasphemy. As Acts tells the story, Stephen told them at the trial that the Lord "does not dwell in temples made with hands" (meaning, the Jerusalem Temple) and that the Jewish priests had persecuted all of the Lord's prophets throughout Jewish history. Things apparently got out of hand at that point, and Stephen was taken out and promptly stoned to death. 

One consequence of this first Christian martyrdom is that Stephen's fellows (Acts calls them "Hellenists") fled in fear into the countryside where they had to earn their daily bread by preaching to strangers.

Note here that the apostles themselves were not persecuted at the time of Stephen's death; the Sadducees already had decided to leave the apostles alone, according to Acts 5:33-40. It's the "Helleni