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STEVAN L. DAVIES, Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1995). Pp. 216. $22.95.
Stevan Davies's argument is blunt, provocative, ambitious, and only partially successful. He finds in the NT a "bedrock" image of Jesus as a spirit-possessed healer and exorcist. Seen from that angle, Jesus' baptism by John becomes his initial experience of possession by a holy spirit. D. understands Jesus to be experiencing, then cultivating, and ultimately communicating the ability to enter into a "dissociative state" in which another "persona," in his case the Spirit-Son of God, displaces one's usual everyday persona. Setting his argument within the ongoing quest for the historical Jesus, D. rejects as incoherent its dominant paradigm of Jesus as a teacher and strives to replace it with that of Jesus the healer. That central focus leads him to intriguing reinterpretations of Jesus' self-understanding, his parables, the preaching of Paul, and other things yet. To flesh out his portrait of Jesus the healer D. makes extensive and effective use of anthropological and psychological studies of spirit possession.
Davies argues that Jesus "could present himself as the manifestation of God...