Christian Identity and Practices of Contact with the Supernatural

The paper wishes to study the question of the continuity or discontinuity between Jesus and the communities of his followers after his death from the point of view of the «cultural forms» that made possible contact with the divine world, as conceived in the cultures of the 1st and 2nd centuries. The results of the enquiry on the baptism, the temptations in the desert, and the transfiguration suggest that Jesus introduced some of his disciples to some of these experiences. The Hellenistic-Roman world in which the groups of Jesus’ followers proliferated, was itself familiar with a variety of practices for contacting the divine sphere. This may have inevitably been a source of modification and contamination, which distanced early Christian practices from the forms experienced by Jesus.