Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (Society of Biblical Literature: Symposium Series)
The studies in this volume explore a wealth of diverse types and traditions of religious literature, and they deploy a similarly intriguing diversity of analytic methods to this end. Various authors take up the question of performance, theories of ritual, textual transmission and cultural memory, gender theory, and topics of the spatiality of experience and its relation to textualization. Readers will .nd here a provocative mapping of types, texts and analytic models for the interpretation of mystical experience within early Jewish and Christian groups. --Ward Blanton, Journal for the Study of the New Testament (30/5 [2008]: 108-9)