If One Does Not Have the Spirit of Christ, One Does Not Belong to Him

Spirit possession in early Christian groups led by Paul served social and ethical functions, shaping social structures, moral agency, and individual identities. Drawing on recent ethnographic studies of possession's productive role, this analysis shows similar traits in Pauline communities. Possession enabled a unique form of engaging with the past, distinct from modern archival history. By embodying the spirit of Christ, Paul and group members could make Christ present, affecting their remembrance, moral choices, and formation as believers.

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Abstract

This chapter attends to the social and ethical functions of the religious experience of possession in the Pauline groups. Recent ethnographic literature has illustrated how spirit possession can have a truly “productive” role in shaping social structures, ways of knowing, moral agency, and even the formation of individual subjectivities. This chapter shows that these same traits are recognizable in the Pauline Christ groups. Specific attention are given to the forms in which possession enables a poiesis of the past. The sense of temporality underlying such an experience is remarkably different from the archival and academic study of history typical of western modernity. Through his very embodiment of the πνεῦμα‎ of Christ, Paul (and arguably the other members of his groups) could make the person of Christ present in a way that affectively and effectively informed not only their remembrance of and interaction with the past but also their moral agency and even their subjectification as Christ believers.