DeConick A.D

117
PAUL AND GNOSTIC DOGMA
knocked to the ground. When Paul calls out, “Who are you?” he hears
the response, “I am Jesus, the one you have been persecuting” (Acts 9:1–5,
22:4–16, 26:9–18).
Here, Paul’s encounter is presented as a religious revelation much like
Bethany Sloane’s vision of Metatron in the film Dogma . But in Paul’s case,
it is not Metatron who appears as YHWH’s manifestation, but Jesus (see
Segal 1992, 34–71). According to Jewish biblical stories, when YHWH
appeared to prophets like Ezekiel, Isaiah, or Daniel, he manifested himself
as a luminous man or a great angel. What is so remarkable about Paul’s
encounter with YHWH’s luminous manifestation on the road is that the
manifestation is not identified with a great angel from Paul’s ancestral
past, like Michael or Gabriel, but with Jesus the Messiah.
On the road to Damascus, Paul comes face-to-face with a manifestation
of the Lord YHWH that does not jibe with his Jewish past. Jesus? As
YHWH? This was out of the blue. And it was utterly devastating to Paul,
the self-described Jewish fanatic.
Paul himself describes the experience as “a revelation of Jesus Christ,”
when he received a “blessed message” that changed the course of his life
as a Jew. He says that the message he received did not come from a human
source but from a direct experience of a God he never knew. What he
learned from this experience forms the basis of Paul’s new understanding
of God and of his mission to tell non-Jews about him (Galatians 1:11–12).
The mystical event was so acute—simultaneously disorienting and reorienting—that
he saw it as his own death when he was “crucified with
Christ” in order to “live to God” (2:19–20). He sees his life before the
experience as a “former” or earlier life in Judaism. He describes his previous
self as a Jewish fanatic who was overly zealous about the religious
traditions of his ancestors, more advanced in his religious education than
his peers (1:13–14). He says that he was circumcised on the eighth day, according
to the law, that he was born into the tribe of Benjamin, and that
he considered himself an Israelite and a descendant of Abraham. He had
been trained as a Pharisee to live his life according to the law. He was so
zealous in this regard that no blame could be found with him (Philippians
3:5–6; 2 Corinthians 11:22).
The encounter with Jesus the Messiah as YHWH’s glory, however, was
so riveting that Paul said it surpassed everything he had ever experienced
or ever identified with. It was an extra-ordinary Gnostic incident, which