7. Religious Experience
The study of religious experience in biblical literature has seen ups and downs
in the modern history of Biblical Studies.^1 While religious experience played
an important role in the history of religions school and form-critics like
Martin Dibelius considered it a relevant subject of study (Theissen, 2007a,
p. 11), German biblical scholarship in the post-war period shied away from the
topic due to its role in Nazi ideology (Bonheim & Regehly, 2013). Widespread
suspicions against psychological interpretation in biblical scholarship
(Theissen, 2007a, pp. 15–32) as well as the religious and esoteric agendas
associated with the interest in subjective experience in religious studies
(Flannery, 2008) also prevented a serious engagement with the topic. In the
past few years, however, there has been a renewed interest in religious
experience among biblical scholars. The monograph of James Dunn (1975)
on Jesus’experience of the Spirit was an important but mostly isolated
contribution to the discussion. In the late 1990s, Luke Timothy Johnson
(1998, pp. 12–26) could still call religious experience a“missing dimension”
in New Testament scholarship. Heikki Räisänen (1999, pp. 215–26, 2000,
pp. 189–202) criticized Johnson for limiting the concept of religious experi-
ence in early Christianity to the“numinous experience of power”and not
making a difference between experience and its interpretation. He suggested
taking into consideration social realities, pre-existing interpretative frame-
works, and everyday experience. Räisänen also recognized the significance of
negative experience. Räisänen’s own approach can be criticized, in turn, for
its too broad, almost limitless scope. In an article Larry Hurtado (Hurtado,
2000) proposed that religious experiences had a causative significance in the
innovations that marked the development of early Christianity. He cited
examples such as Paul’s revelatory experience, Stephen’s vision, Jesus’
(^1) Parts of this chapter have been previously published in I. Czachesz,“Religious Experience in
Mediterranean Antiquity: Introduction to the Special Issue,”Journal of Cognitive Historiography
2 (1), pp. 5–13; and“Tours of Heaven in Light of the Neuroscientific Study of Religious
Experience,”Journal of Cognitive Historiography 2(1), pp. 34–54. I thank Equinox Publishing
for granting me permission to use the articles.