ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that Jane Lead's religious imagination was heavily indebted to Paul in four distinct ways: in her imagination of herself and those around her as a kind of Pauline community; in her allegiance to the mystical event that initiated her evangelical mission; in her evident flesh-spirit dualism; and particularly in the way she abides in the tension between chronos and kairos in relationship to the Parousia. Lead's reading of the Bible, and Paul's epistles in particular, impelled her to engage in her own missionary activity following her spiritual awakening in the early 1670s. Certainly, she quotes liberally from Paul, but there is more to Lead's story than citation. First of all, Paul is the only figure from the Bible with whom Lead compares herself or her trials. The theological aesthetic which sees God as immanent in the natural world, present, for instance, in Lead's exact contemporaries, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, is absolutely foreign to Lead.
