The God Came to Me in a Dream: Epiphanies in Voluntary Associations as a Context for Paul's Vision of Christ

Abstract

Much of the written evidence for Greco-Roman associations provides information about meeting frequency, group activities, venues for gathering, and membership requirements. At the same time, many inscriptions and papyri also contain short narratives that directly contribute to the common identity of the association. These narrative elements often take the form of a vision, a dream, or an oracle that a patron receives that encourages him or her to found the association or direct its practices in some way. I suggest in this article that many of Paul's audiences would have received his story about encountering the risen Christ as rather commonplace given the frequency of these similar claims among voluntary associations. In other words, the article explores how Paul's (mainly non-Judean) audiences would have slotted his claims into their cultural repertoire of ideas, especially if they considered his Christ group to be just like the many other associations with which they were already familiar. Association inscriptions offer an important collection of examples that can be analyzed alongside Paul's claim to have seen the risen Christ.