I now turn to another non-canonical text connected with Paul, one of the most famous throughout the Middle Ages, an account of his journey to observe the fate of souls in the afterlife, both the glories of the saints in heaven and the torments of the sinners in hell.   This tale is not simply meant to convey factual information about what happened to Paul once.  It is intended to teach a clear lesson.  Isn’t all interesting history like that?

Here’s how I discuss it in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press).  This will take two posts.

 

The Apocalypse of Paul

 

Is anyone ever interested in the past for purely antiquarian interests – that is, they just want to know what happened but for no other reason?  Well, not usually.  Most people think about the past because they are interested in the present. One of the ways that people who are interested in the present use history is by making the past itself present—that is, by making it relevant to the present day. 

The ancient traditions about Paul did this: they told stories about Paul not because they wanted to know what Paul was really like, but because by remembering Paul in certain ways they could present Paul to their own day and convey the message that they thought needed to be heard by their listeners or readers.

Sometimes these re-presentations of Paul (making him present anew for the new situation) have fooled subsequent readers of Paul into thinking that they—the later traditions—reflect what Paul was really like.  This happens, for example, when the book of Acts, or even the Acts of Paul and Thecla, is taken as a historically accurate narrative.

At other times, hardly anyone is fooled.  That’s the case with the final text I’ll be considering in this chapter, the Apocalypse of Paul, which appears to have been originally written near the end of the third century, two hundred years after Paul had passed off his mortal coil.  The author of this particular text, at least, was not driven by purely antiquarian interests.  He wanted Paul to speak to his own day.  And he penned a fabricated account of Paul’s journey to the afterlife in order to make it happen.

Some passages in the Apocalypse of Paul are reminiscent of the guided tour of heaven and hell that I’ve earlier discussed on the blog in the Apocalypse of Peter, written possibly a century earlier.  Scholars are reasonably sure that these reminiscences are easily explained: the author of Paul’s journey had access to the account of Peter’s, and copied part of it for his own narrative.  This is a very different narrative in other respects, however, and so deserves to be discussed on its own terms.  (It was very famous through the middle ages, and appears to have been one of the sources that inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy.)

The account is based on an enigmatic statement that Paul himself made in his letter of 2 Corinthians, which I discussed in an earlier post.  If you’ll recall, Paul was confronted in Corinth with a group of leaders who believed they were spiritually superior, as proven by their superior knowledge of God.  Paul wants to show that he too has superior knowledge, but since his entire point is that it is his weakness, not his strength, that shows him to be an apostle, he is reluctant to do more than indicate that he too has been given insider knowledge.  This came in an ecstatic vision that he had, which he refers to only cryptically, in the third person:

I must boast; I will gain nothing from it, but I will move on to describe visions and revelations from the Lord.  I know someone in Christ who fourteen years ago was snatched up to the third heaven, whether in the body, or outside the body, I don’t know: God knows.  And I know this certain person – whether in the body or outside the body, I don’t know (God knows) — that he was snatched up to paradise and he heard words that cannot be spoken, which no one must tell.  On behalf of this person I will boast, but on my own behalf, I will not boast, except in my weaknesses.  For if I want to boast, I will not be foolish, for I speak the truth …. (2 Corinthians 12:1-6)

Well, what actually did Paul see when he was taken up to the “third heaven” (which I assume means the highest heaven of all) and was given a vision of paradise, hearing those ineffable words?

This later text, the Apocalypse of Paul, tells us.[1]  Paul in fact is described as having a range of visions in the account.  He sees and hears the sun, moon, stars, sea, and earth accuse humans for sinning against God.  He sees angels who watch over the righteous here on earth, who come before God to praise the upright with words that should strike a chord with anyone familiar with Paul’s supposed gospel of renunciation (from, say, the Acts of Thecla):

We come [say the angels] from those who have renounced this world for the sake of your holy name, wandering as pilgrims in the caves of the rocks, and weeping every hour in which they inhabit the earth, and hungering and thirsting because of your name … restraining and overcoming themselves.

Then other angels come, weeping before God, for “they have been set to watch over those who called upon your name, and the impediments of the world made them wretched.”  In this text, many of the damned, as it turns out, are Christians, who have not lived on the straight and narrow. No longer for this Paul, as he is remembered here, is the atoning death of Jesus sufficient for salvation. What really matters is how a person lives after joining the church.