Possessing Jesus: The Human Bodies of God in Luke-Acts

Abstract

This dissertation examines divine possession in Luke–Acts in conversation with anthropological work that treats “spirit possession”—rather than the pure pathology of Western imagination—a socially structured relational status in which human beings mediate additional subjectivities. The project draws especially on scholarship that treats possession as a historiographical phenomenon by which the possessed rehearse and creatively extend their hosted spirit’s history within a community. On these models, possession relies on inherited historical “scripts” to recognize a spirit’s activity in the present, but it also extends and sometimes reevaluates the possessed subject’s history by bringing it into relationship with new times and places. (This innovative potential is sometimes labeled poiesis). Applying these insights heuristically to Luke and Acts as works of narrative, the dissertation argues that Luke consistently renders divine “history” visible through possessed bodies that, in long succession, preserve and extend it in the public domain. The study first applies its frameworks to the Elijah–Elisha narratives as important Lukan source material, material that already depicts possessed bodies preserving and creatively adapting divine history. I then turn to Luke’s Gospel to explore Jesus’s possession in particular, arguing that for Luke it is, while hardly sui generis, of decisive historical significance. The next chapter reads Jesus’s followers in Acts as possessed prophets themselves, mediating a God whose history with Jesus now rescripts possessions going forward—even as Luke continues to adapt to new historical problems using the medium of the possessed. In the course of the study, then, possession brings together several conversations in Luke–Acts sometimes pursued separately, from Lukan Christology and ecclesiology to Luke’s thoroughly prophetic intertexture.