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THE RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE OF JESUS The topic I have chosen for this lecture is one that would without question have held the deepest interest for William James. In speaking and writing about religion he was particularly concerned, as he said himself, with "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."1 Writing in June 1901 to his friend Henry Rankin, just after finishing the two series of Gifford Lectures that he gave in Edinburgh, he outlined his general approach: "The mother sea and fountain-head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense."2 He concluded this letter with an appreciation of the effect his lectures were likely to have had on what presumably was a predominantly Christian audience: "So I seem doubtless to my audience to be blowing hot or cold, explaining away Christianity, yet defending the more general basis from which I say it proceeds." (As a matter of fact he received quite a favourable reception, so much so that after completing the second series of lectures the following year he wrote to another friend, "If I go on at this rate they'll make me a bishop.") James would have had no quarrel with the assertion that the fountainhead of the Christian religion must have been the religious experience of Jesus. Indeed he says as much himself: "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine."3 And yet, if you look up the name of Jesus in the index of the published lectures—that is, The Varieties of Religious Experience—you will find but a single, two-word entry: "See Harnack." The relevant entry, an extract from the lectures Harnack had given in Berlin in 1900 under the title Das Wesen des Christentums, includes a quotation of Jesus' reply to the envoys of John the Baptist, along with Harnack's comment, "The casting out of devils is only a part of [Jesus'] work of redemption, but Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of his mission."4 It is a theme to which we will return.5 James's Jesus, we may infer, was Harnack's Jesus—the image, as George Tyrell remarked, in an oft-quoted bottom of a deep well. There is little in it that could have attracted James's attention or fired his imagination. Turning now to the substance of today's lecture, I want to begin by stating one fundamental assumption: Any plausible explanation of the origins of Christianity is likely a priori to be one focused upon the mystical experiences of Jesus. To dismiss the accounts of Jesus' visionary experience at the moment of his Baptism and of his Temptations in the desert as legends or else (as is far more common nowadays) to ignore them altogether is to deprive oneself of an invaluable key to understanding. Jesus was, and was perceived to be a prophet: "Who do men say that I am? And they told him, 'John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others one of the prophets' " (Mark 8:27-8). People do not drift into prophecy as they might into journalism or publishing. It seems reasonable to postulate of Jesus that like other prophets he received a call. The two experiences mentioned are the ones that I want to highlight in what follows. I shall argue that Mark's remarkably succinct account (Baptism and temptation together occupy no more light upon Jesus' subsequent career both as a preacher and prophet and as a wonder- worker and healer. The evidence lies there on the page, but few have bothered to pick it up either because it looks too hot too handle or because the majority of modern commentators are not very interested in the properly religious side of Jesus' life and teaching. It is hot to handle because David Friedrich Strauss's devastating critique of what he called supernatural interpretations of the gospel, first published in 1835, made it seem so; and it is or is thought to be relatively unimportant because what interests most people nowadays in Jesus is his message: the content of his preaching and the effect it had upon those who heard it. And they look elsewhere for evidence about what manner of man he was. Like many prophets Jesus experienced the divine call both as something heard and as something seen. His vocation came in the form of a vision and a voice. The words he heard, according to Mark, were these: "Thou art my beloved son, in thee I am well- pleased." This address accords so perfectly with the message of Mark's own gospel that it is immediately open to critical suspicion. Matthew says that the voice spoke to the bystanders—"This is my beloved son"—and it is this version that, on the face of it, better explains how the gospel-writers came to hear the story. But does that mean that the bystanders not only heard the voice but also saw the rending of the heavens and the descent of the spirit? This is a familiar problem that arises whenever we come across a report in the third person of someone else's visionary or mystical experiences. Are these public or private? Origen, writing of the vision of the prophet Ezekiel, had already seen the problem: "I do not imagine that the visible heavens were opened, or its physical form divided, for Ezekiel to record such an experience. Perhaps therefore the intelligent reader of the gospel ought to give a similar interpretation also in respect of the Saviour, even if this opinion may cause offence to the simple minded, who in their extreme naïveté move the world and rend the vast, solid mass of the entire heaven."6 Here we may agree with Origen both with regard to the vision itself, that it was a subjective experience rather than an objective account of a physical event, and to its parallel with the vision of Ezekiel. But we are not yet out of the wood; the words themselves are certainly problematic. If this was a genuine prophetic call, as I believe it to have been, what were the words that Jesus heard? Can he have been singled out as the recipient of
God's special favor in such a way that he would immediately have realised himself to be Son of God in the special, indeed the unique sense that was later to be accredited to him in Christian doctrine? Surely not. Can he even have heard the word
Unlike modern scholars, of course, he did not have the benefit of access to a Greek or Hebrew biblical concordance, which would have told him that the connotations of this word are as much threatening as consolatory, because more often than not it refers to an individual doomed to death, most notoriously the daughter of Jepthah (Judges 11:34). For the moment all I want to insist on is that he heard God addressing him as a son. The prophetic essence of what he heard can be summed up as the fatherhood of God. It is obviously wrong to project back upon Jesus the significance that Mark's text must have carried for himself and his readers. If this was the voice, what was the vision? The opening, or rather splitting open, of the heavens, as Origen saw long ago, points to an apocalyptic vision of the kind best attested in the first chapter of Ezekiel.7 This is reasonably standard; the real difficulty comes with the vision of the spirit. There seems to be something paradoxical, not to say contradictory, in an assertion that one has seen the spirit. The spirit is like the wind, which is the same word in Hebrew; it can be felt but not seen or grasped. Its first associations are with power, especially creative or life-giving power, and with prophecy. What can be meant by the statement that Jesus saw the spirit descending upon him like a dove? Here again it is best not to claim too much. I simply want to maintain that Jesus had an overwhelming sense of the presence of the spirit, so much so that he felt himself constrained, when reporting it, to speak of it in terms that implied vision. If you see something descending from the sky, before the age of airplanes or flying saucers, and if for obvious reasons you rule out snow, rain, and hail, then it is likely to be either a flash of lightning (which is actually how he later saw Satan falling from heaven) or a bird. Jesus was not just caressed by the spirit, feeling it brush against him; he felt (and said that he saw) its descent. That the spirit was seen as a dove was a strong tradition, taken up even by John the Evangelist (1:22) who notoriously avoids all mention of the actual Baptism itself. When taken along with the voice, in which God spoke to Jesus directly and immediately, the first significance of the spirit must have been with prophecy, as on the occasion in the book of Numbers, when God, in accordance with his promise to Moses (11:17), "took some of the spirit that was upon him and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied" (11:25). Paradigmatic, perhaps, is Balaam, of whom it was said that "the spirit of God came upon him, and he took up his discourse and said: 'The oracle of Balaam the son of Beor, the oracle of the man whose eye is opened, the oracle of him who hears the words of God, who sees the vision of the almighty' " (Num 24:2-4). Here the association of the spirit with both the voice and the vision in the call to prophecy is made with particular clarity. Besides the immediate connotations of power and prophecy, the presence of the spirit may have had one additional meaning for Jesus. Hearing the preaching of John the Baptist, he will probably have already come to link the spirit with the kind of eschatological judgment so prominent in the preaching of John, who, if we are to believe the tradition represented by Matthew and Luke, promised that the one who was to come would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire (Matt 3:11; Luke 3:16).
The Temptations
The prophetic call that accompanied Jesus' Baptism was somehow incomplete. As prophetic calls go this was unusual. Reading about the vocations of the Old Testament prophets, one has the impression that they set about their task immediately, often no doubt with a heavy heart, but unaffected by any lingering doubts about what they had to do and say. (Jonah, of course was an exception, but then he was really an antiprophet.) Jesus, on the contrary, had a long and arduous struggle, over which he had little control, still ahead of him. He had been touched by the spirit at his Baptism, certainly, but Mark's account, the one I am following, straightaway makes clear that he was not just touched, but seized, seized and flung. This is an instance of spirit possession, not evidently, in the negative sense in which we often understand it, namely possession by an alien spirit; but rather the experience of being taken over by a benign spirit, identified as the spirit of God. But an actual taking over, nonetheless, in which something or someone other than oneself assumes control.
There are two starkly contrasting ways of interpreting the temptation story. You may on the one hand dismiss it as a legend (Bultmann) or myth (Sanders), an especially colorful anticipatory summary of Jesus' future career as a devil-defeating exorcist. Alternatively you may agree with me that like the Baptism story, it probably originated as a report of a struggle against the forces of evil which, like the visionary call at his Baptism, was to put a characteristic stamp on the whole of his subsequent mission. The immediate juxtaposition of the good spirit and the bad, if the account indeed has its roots in Jesus' own experience, suggests another determining factor in the way he would live out the strenuous career to which he was called. This was to be one of continual conflict with evil. The spirit that Jesus "saw" at his Baptism and which then immediately drove him out into the desert is evidently the spirit of God, that is to say one of the ways in which the God of biblical tradition made his presence felt in the world. The evil spirit was Satan, the adversary, who figures in the Bible most prominently in the book of Job. If Jesus himself knew this book, or indeed was acquainted with any of the other legends that had begun to cluster around this adversary of God, then one can readily understand that his ordeal in the wilderness would have been felt and experienced as the commencement of a long battle with this personification of evil. In other words we are confronted by an account, as I have already suggested, of spirit-possession; and it is at this point that we find ourselves impelled to look for the kind of contextual explanation that historians must always seek whenever they come across evidence that points to something strange and initially incomprehensible. Reacting against the doctrinal bias of so many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian scholars, whose understanding of the gospels always starts from the faith in which they were nurtured, there have been numerous attempts, notably by Geza Vermes and Ed Sanders, to place Jesus rather in the context of turn-of-the-century Palestinian Judaism. Vermes's comparison between Jesus and magicians and miracle-workers like Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle-Drawer goes some way toward putting Jesus' miracles in context, but such resemblances concern the so-called nature miracles of Jesus rather than his miraculous cures, and in any case offer no enlightenment on Jesus' own religious experiences. Morton Smith's Jesus the Magician certainly breaks the mold, but the magical spells and incantations that he quotes in such abundance often seem curiously wide of the mark. In my opinion, as I have suggested, the appropriate category for understanding the gospel reports of the Baptism and Temptations is that of spirit-possession. This of course means moving outside the immediate context of turn-of-the-era Palestine or even of the Ancient Near East in general into the much broader context of a widespread phenomenon occurring in literally hundreds of human societies. In fact Erika Bourguignon found evidence of some form of this in all but 90 of the 488 societies she surveyed. She remarks, in fact, that more recent cases may have been modeled on biblical examples,8 although she was certainly thinking predominantly of demonic possession rather than of the occupancy of a human soul by the spirit of God. Taken together, the Baptism and temptation narratives may prompt us, as I argued in my recent book on Paul, to look for similarities to Jesus' call experience in Mircea Eliade's classic book on shamanism.9 There he describes, in graphic detail, the frightening period of preparation or training during which, in the words of Morton Smith, the shaman "is supposed to be tested, subjected to terrible ordeals, or even killed by evil spirits."10 Morton Smith thinks of the beasts in Mark's account as manifestations of friendly spirits, but they could equally well represent opponents of the rule of God, like the beasts in Daniel's famous dream, which stand for the kings of the earth, and of which the seer says that "their dominion was taken away, but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time" (Dan 7:12). It is impossible to be sure of this, but it may be that the more specific Temptations recorded in Matthew and Luke, one of which concerns "the kingdoms of the world" (Matt 4:8; Luke 4:5), may replace in their specificity the simple allusion to the beasts in Mark's much shorter account. We are on surer ground when we turn back to Jesus' actual call. In fact there is a strong resemblance between the shaman and the prophet: "One of the commonest forms of the future shaman's election," points out Eliade, "is his encountering a divine or semi-divine being who appears to him through a dream, or sickness, or some other circumstance, tells him that he has been 'chosen,' and incites him thenceforth to follow a new rule of life."11 Some may find this comparison with shamanism unconvincing, even more so the suggestion I made in my book on Paul that Jesus himself was a shaman,12 but it seems to me hard to deny the parallel with more general possession cults. Victor Crapanzano, in his Case Studies in Spirit Possession, remarks that "almost all reports of spirit-possession stress the fact that the novice is unusually clumsy and must learn to be a good carrier for the spirit."13
The Career of Jesus Among the few things that can be said with any assurance about Jesus' career, two stand out: He was on the one hand a prophet-preacher and on the other hand an exorcist-healer. I want to argue that both of these activities were colored, and indeed to a large extent determined, by his initial visionary experience and the ordeal in the desert that followed it. In this respect he resembled many of the ancient prophets of Israel and Judah. The messages of these men, though usually somber, even grim, differed widely in tone and emphasis; but each received its distinctive thrust or bias, as can be seen in the prophecies that follow, at the very moment in which the prophet first heard God calling upon him to speak to his people. In one case it was a message of consolation: "Comfort, comfort my people" (Isa 40:1). Far more often it was a rebuke or a threat. The preaching of Amos contained throughout the note of dangerous menace that thrilled and terrified him when he first heard the lion roaring from Zion (1:2). Isaiah's prophecies are permeated with his awed sense of the holiness of God that swept over him during his vision in the temple (6:3), and Ezekiel's by his extraordinary initial vision of a divine figure seated on a throne. Jeremiah from the start had a double mission, "to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant" (1:10). But the most salient example is Hosea, who makes us constantly aware of the very personal distress felt by a husband confronted by the infidelities of his wife. Always inveighing against the spirit of harlotry, he is nonetheless more attuned than any other prophet to the tenderness of God and his readiness to forgive. Turning back to Jesus, I suggest that there were two convictions that influenced his career as a preacher and healer, both with their roots in his visionary experience at his Baptism and his struggle with Satan in the desert. There was first of all his unusually deep conviction of the fatherhood of God, and secondly his belief that in combating evil through the spirit of God that had taken him over he was helping to bring about the reign of God in the world. It is with the second of these that I want to start.
Jesus the Healer Obviously the activity of Jesus that flowed most directly from his experiences in the desert was his work as an exorcist. But in so far as illnesses of all kinds were popularly attributed to evil spirits, we must also broaden our survey to include what are usually called the healing miracles. It is in virtue of his possession of the spirit, or perhaps in virtue of his being possessed by the spirit, that he was able to cure people who were deaf, dumb, and blind, paralyzed and epileptic. In doing so he will have seen himself as assisting in ridding the world, or at least the world in which he moved, of the dominion of Satan and, which amounts to the same thing, extending the dominion of God. In other words he was helping to bring about the kingdom of heaven. In one important passage the opposition between two kingdoms, or reigns, is made quite explicit:
That Jesus was regarded as possessed is clear not just from the explicit accusation of the scribes, but also from the conviction of the people at large that he was, in the RSV's quaint translation "beside himself." A better translation would be "out of his mind." The Greek verb (cognate with the word "ecstasy") suggests an altered state of consciousness, and this was apparently evident not just to Jesus' immediate followers but to outsiders as well. Elsewhere Matthew reports that when Jesus asked his disciples who other people thought that he was, he received the reply: "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets" (Matt 16:14). There was a widespread feeling, then, that he was in some peculiar way someone other than himself; and it is worth noting that when he was charged with being possessed by Beelzebub, his answer contained the implicit admission that he was indeed possessed: not by Beelzebub, but by the spirit of God. If his ordeal in the desert had had a different outcome and he had failed to resist the Temptations of Satan, then the charge that he was possessed by an evil spirit might have been justified. The world in which he moved was one in which different kinds of spirits were at large. Many Christians are uncomfortable with talk of spirit possession, but many others are not. Here is how a twentieth-century Christian healer, Granville Oral Roberts, described his ministry: "You must understand that I am two persons. One is just when I am myself, and the other is when the Spirit of God takes possession of me, and I feel the presence of God after my sermons. Then I can do things of which I am not normally capable. I am still in control of my faculties, you understand. I can still think and act. But there is a spirit in me that is different, using me." Commenting on this experience, he continues: "I pray with what some call authority, because the spirit is upon me and because I hate sickness. I hate disease. I hate evil, and when I am close to someone who is sick I suffer and I want to help him. I feel that if I do not pray for them I will burst. I put my hands on people … with force because I want to drive that evil out of them. I've tried to do it gently and it doesn't work."14 When lecturing on Paul, some years ago, I suggested that there is some advantage in thinking of the spirit in his writings as a kind of electricity, a strong but invisible force that could be deployed in a variety of ways, which he called charisms or gifts. Paul himself was a kind of dynamo, charged up with the spirit. But if Paul was possessed by the spirit of Christ, then Jesus, another dynamic individual, was possessed by the spirit of God. This was what enabled him to perform his exorcisms and other miraculous works of healing that are actually called
Matthew and Luke omit Mark's little preface to the Beelzebub saying, perhaps because they were uneasy with any suggestion that Jesus might have been thought to be
"out of his mind," but they include in the same context another famous saying, that has received a great deal of discussion:
"And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons [i.e., other exorcists] cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God [
I do not want to spend time on which of the two is right here, for even if Luke's
"finger of God" is to be preferred over Matthew's "spirit" here, what counts is the association (whatever the precise force of the verb
Here I simply want to point out that the Greek verb It is not part of my purpose here to join in the debate concerning the meaning and significance of the term
"kingdom of God" in Jesus' teaching. In the passages I have been discussing and many others
"reign" would be a less misleading rendering of the Greek The last gospel passage to which I want to draw your attention is in some respects the most dramatic, for if authentic it proves that Jesus actually told his disciples of a particular vision directly connected with his (and possibly their) work as an exorcist. It is found in only one gospel, that of Luke, who pictures Jesus responding to the enthusiastic reports of 70 disciples returning from a mission:
Even if, as many think, Luke inserted this saying in a context to which it does not really belong, few doubt its authenticity. If Jesus on the occasion of his Baptism had observed the spirit of God descending from heaven in the form of a dove, his successful fight against Satan in the wilderness had paved the way for this further vision of Satan ejected from heaven in the form of lightning. No doubt this happened during a storm, but it was no less a mystical vision than the first, following through as it did his experience in the desert. It is also very reminiscent of many of the visions recorded by Mircea Eliade as marking the beginning of a typical shaman's career.17 This gospel saying is different from the allusion to Satan in the book of Revelation (12:9-12; cf. John 12:27, 33) because it contains no trace of any later christological reflection. And it differs too from contemporary and near contemporary apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings of the Old Testament in its implication that Satan had already been defeated and cast out from heaven. Compare by contrast the following passages:
The Fatherhood of God In this, the final section of my lecture, I want to discuss Jesus' preaching about God. I have argued that the wording ascribed by all three synoptists to the heavenly voice at Jesus' Baptism cannot possibly be authentic. Nonetheless, Jesus, like all prophets, must have received a direct call from God. And in the course of his prophetic mission his preaching was permeated throughout by a sense of the fatherhood of God. Before going any further I want to make one important caveat. I am not saying that Jesus was especially conscious of his divine sonship. Christian scholars, responding throughout the nineteenth and indeed the twentieth century to the challenges of Reimarus and Lessing, have been obsessed, it is fair to say, with the questions of what the Germans call Jesus' Selbstbewusstsein, his self-consciousness, his sense of who he was: in particular did he think of himself as Messiah and/or as son of God. In a moment we shall glance at a couple of passages that, it has been argued, strongly suggest some self-awareness of that kind on his part. Now it is true that prophets are frequently asked questions like "Who do you think that you are?," and it is true too that Jesus' contemporaries seem to have speculated both about him and about John the Baptist that they may have stepped into dead men's shoes or have been occupied by another person's spirit. But as far as the prophet himself is concerned (and this is true of all cultures), the essence of his calling is to speak on behalf of God. And this, as is universally acknowledged, is what Jesus did. That, as he did so, he was constantly wondering about just how special was his own relationship with God seems to me in the highest degree unlikely and certainly incapable of proof. There are, however, a few passages in the gospels that appear to many people to furnish evidence that Jesus did think of himself in a special way, and I want to look at just a couple of these. The first is the so-called parable of the wicked husbandmen (Mark 12:1-11):
There is a clear distinction between the landlord's servants (the first envoy and the second and the third and many others) and his only, beloved
( This is possible, I suppose, but I remain skeptical. The next passage for consideration presents more problems.
This passage, sometimes known as "the thunderbolt from the Johannine sky," was highlighted by Harnack, who thought that it illustrated admirably Jesus' special relationship with God. For this he was subjected to a withering criticism by Loisy, who pointed out that the passage as it stands is far too redolent of later Christian doctrine to be accepted as an authentic saying. Nevertheless I think it possible that it may have originated in a genuine teaching of Jesus, as he endeavored to communicate his own sense of the fatherhood of God to those around him.
The last piece of evidence I want to discuss is the term abba, an Aramaic form of the word father, grammatically speaking definite (the father), but used idiomatically as a form of address (a vocative usage). This is how Paul, in two passages, wrote of the prayer of the early Christians: It is clearly very early, a usage that he has found and adopted himself. Since the only occurrence of this Aramaic form in the gospels comes in Jesus' solitary prayer in the garden (who could hear him, and who could he have told?) it could be said that it was retrojected back from Christian experience into the gospel tradition. But a moment's reflection shows how unlikely this is. Paul himself recognizes that the Christian prayer stems from "the spirit of the Son"; and it seems overwhelmingly likely that it arose as a consequence of Jesus' own practice. Yet the very fact that it was taken over so easily shows that the implied relationship with God cannot have been thought of as peculiar to Jesus. It stems from that essential element in his message that insisted upon the universal fatherhood of God, and which began, I would contend, at the moment of his Baptism.
The Transfiguration And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses; and they were talking to Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is well that we are here; let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah." For he did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid. And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, "This is my beloved Son; listen to him." And suddenly looking around they no longer saw any one with them but Jesus only. (Mark 9:2-8) The last passage that I want to comment upon, the most intractable of all, concerns the Transfiguration. The early form critics thought that this story started life as a resurrection story, a theory revived by Dominic Crossan. Bultmann considered it scarcely credible that Jesus' disciples should have seen him in a vision while he was still alive, bodily present; but as Morton Smith acidly observed, it is yet more difficult to believe that they saw him so after he had been crucified, dead, and buried.19 Once you have taken the major step of accepting the basic historicity of the Baptism story, allowing for the possibility that Jesus enjoyed visionary experiences that resembled those of the prophet Ezekiel, then it no longer seems absurd to envisage the possibility that the Transfiguration too, which so closely resembles the Baptism story, originated in a real experience. "To suggest that the blessed Evangelists," to quote Morton Smith yet again, "not to mention early Christians in general, wanted to tell what they believed to be the truth, is to strike at the very root of Formgeschichte. Nevertheless I think it likely that the Transfiguration story was not made up of other stories of events like its component parts, but was told as it was because it was basically a report of something that once happened."20 It is better to explain this story rather than to explain it away. If we accept that Jesus heard a divine voice at his Baptism, addressing him as a son, perhaps we can accept too that he was eager to enable his most intimate disciples to share in his own mystical experience. Origen had already seen the connection between Jesus' vision of the opening of the heavens and the call of Ezekiel. This was the source of what we now know as merkabah mysticism for which there is abundant evidence both in pre-Christian Judaism (including Qumran) and early Christianity. One of the earliest attestations is found in 1 Enoch, and as Christopher Rowland has argued, the vision of Great Glory in 1 Enoch 14 closely resembles the person of Jesus seen by the disciples on the mountain.21 If, as Mark asserts, Jesus was recognized by the demoniacs as the Son of God (3:11; 5:7), or perhaps "the Holy One of God" (1:24), his disciples will have been aware of this; they knew him as a man possessed by the divine spirit, and were consequently prepared to see him clothed in a divine radiance and to be told by a divine voice, "This is my Son." They had once thought he might be the prophet Elijah. They were therefore now ready to see him in the company of Elijah and Moses, the greatest of all Israel's prophets. Throughout this lecture I have focused on Jesus' mystical experience as his own, personal, peculiar, and individual. I hope that William James would have approved. But Jesus was also seen as a religious figure by his contemporaries, and especially so by his disciples. Otherwise it is hard to see how a religion carrying his stamp and bearing his name could have arisen in the first place. Morton Smith insists, rightly I think, that
"all the talk about Christian faith as 'based on the resurrection experience' has overlooked the fact that the Resurrection experience was presumably based on Christian faith. If not, why did it occur. … Evidently there was something peculiar in the
pre-Resurrection experiences of
Jesus' disciples that prepared them to have the resurrection vision. Such similarities as there are between the resurrection stories and that of the transfiguration suggest the peculiar preparatory experiences were of the sort the Transfiguration story
describes."22 1The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Collins, 1960), 50.
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, beloved, or its Hebrew and Aramaic equivalent,
, which always refers to a single child? I doubt it.
]." And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said,
"He is possessed by Beelzebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the
demons." And he called them to him, and said to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an
end." (Mark 3:21-26) 
.
] that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you 
]" (Matthew 12:27-28); and "But if it is by the finger of God [
] that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon
you" (Luke 11:20). 
) with the kingdom (or reign) of God. The expulsion of demons in God's name and with his help is an exercise of mastery that shows Jesus in the act of establishing the authority (or reign) of God over the very people who are accusing Jesus of operating with the aid of a malign power. 
], saying, "Be silent, and come out of
him!" And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying,
"What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey
him." (Matthew 1:21-27) 
, mistakenly translated as
"rebuke" in the RSV and most modern versions, actually corresponds to a Hebrew verb,
, that is used in the Bible and elsewhere when the writer wants to express
God's total domination over the demonic world.
than the usual
"kingdom." There is no doubt, however, that this practical exercise of spiritual authority on
Jesus' part was one way in which he contributed to ensuring God's victory over the forces lined up against him. 
] Satan falling like lightning from
heaven." (Luke 10:17) 
] to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. (Matthew 11: 27)
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