Paul’s transformation and the Resurrection of Jesus
Paul is definitely an important figure in human history, from Christian and non-Christian perspectives. His teachings about Jesus, God, and man were creative, compelling, and controversial, and “Nothing would ever be quite the same again” after him.[1] Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan define him as the “second only to Jesus as the most important person in the origins of Christianity.”[2] This is an especially remarkable fact, considering his letters all put together have fewer than eighty pages.[3]
A very important point of his story is that he persecuted the group of people who followed Jesus before writing all these letters. So in this post we will start examining who was Paul and what motivated him to persecute first century Christians. As Paul supposedly said that he has seen the risen Jesus, we will start by presenting what Paul understood of the resurrection event from a second temple Jewish perspective. Then, the event on the road to Damascus will be discussed followed by other early resurrection reports Paul himself proclaimed. Finally, we will see why historians studying the resurrection of Jesus consider Paul’s life and teachings so important to their tasks.
Historical sources of Paul’s life
In order to understand the life of Paul, there are two main sources of information: his own letters and the book of Acts. Raymond Brown describes three possible views when analyzing these sources:
“(a) Virtually complete trust in Acts … fitting and adapting information from the letters into the Acts framework (b) Great distrust of Acts … some scholars have constructed Paul’s career entirely or largely leaving out the Acts information … (c) A mediate stance uses Paul’s letters as a primary source and cautiously supplements from Acts.”[4]
It is certain that using Paul’s own words about his story is better than Luke’s words about Paul. The critical hypothesis is that Luke added some theological interpretation in Acts, thus the stories reported in the text are not historically reliable.[5]
Scholars such as Dale Allison agree that we can a high confidence that Luke had access to a narrative that goes back to Paul’s own narrative.[6] German New Testament professor Gerd Lüdemann also notes “(1) Acts remains an important source for the history of early Christianity alongside the letters of Paul. (2) This is because much of its content is historically reliable and provides information about Primitive Christianity that goes beyond that contained in Paul’s letters.”[7] That said, we will proceed with the third approach described by Raymond Brown, using Paul’s letters as primary source of information, and Acts as a source of supplementary value.
Paul’s persecution of the early Christians
According to Paul’s own writings and corroborated by two passages in Acts, it is plausible to assert that Paul was a Pharisee (Acts 23:6; Acts 26:5; Philippians 3:5). This is a very important part of his background, since the Pharisees were a group within Second Temple Judaism who had a very clear opposition to the Hellenization of Jewish culture and anything that might violate the law.[8]
Israel’s prophets had said that Yahweh abandoned his people because of their sin, but he also promised to return one day (Isaiah 49:18–23; Ezekiel 37:1–14). Considering this fact, Paul and his fellow Pharisees were rigorous in their practices because they thought that failures could mean a delay in God’s promise of return. Wright concludes, “That is why Saul of Tarsus persecuted Jesus’s early followers. And that is why, when Paul the Apostle returned to Jerusalem for the last time, there were riots.”[9] In other words, Paul was trying to keep Israel pure in their practices and he was zealous about the traditions of his fathers (Galatians 1:14), so he tried to stop Christian Jews from failing to keep their promise to God.
For agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, Paul was not only trying to keep Christian Jews from breaking the law, he was troubled by the scandalous statement that the Jewish messiah was crucified, since anyone who is “hanged on a tree” was under God’s curse (Deuteronomy 21:23).[10] Pope Benedict XVI, in a series of Catechesis about the apostle Paul, says that he saw this new movement following Jesus as “a threat to the Jewish identity” due to his strict training among the Pharisees.[11]
It is clear now that Paul was a persecutor of the early Christians and very strict in his beliefs about Jewish law, which turns his transformation on the road to Damascus an even more important fact to be analyzed. However, before moving to the real event, it is necessary to explain what Paul and the Jews from the second temple period believed about the resurrection theme and how that affects the understanding of Paul’s encounter with Jesus.
Second temple Judaism beliefs about the resurrection
In his work on the resurrection of Jesus, Professor N. T. Wright notes that the belief in the resurrection was not simply a doctrine of the Pharisees, but it was widely believed by Jews of the second temple period.[12] The crucial point here is to define the exact nature of his belief.
Wright observes that some passages became much more clear in the translation of the Old Testament to Greek (Deuteronomy 32:39; Psalms 1:5; Psalms 21:30), and cites some passages that even in Hebrew were already clear with regard to a bodily resurrection (Daniel 12:2–3,13; 2 Maccabees 7:9; Isaiah 26:14,19).[13] When the Jewish texts mention the resurrection, though, they are talking about the resurrection at the end of times, which has not yet occurred, and Wright observes an interesting fact related to that:
“There can be no room for doubt that those who believed in the future resurrection believed also that the dead were alive in some intermediate state, place or manner. The language of souls being stored away in cupboards, or dwelling in a temporary Paradise, is as we saw developed in one or two writings of this period … clearly some kind of intermediate state was as popular a belief as resurrection itself.”[14]
In other words, in order to have a bodily resurrection at the end of times, our souls would be resting in a temporary place called Paradise. Wright’s point is that the Jewish view of the resurrection had to be of a bodily type if they also believed in this intermediate state. It would not make sense to have an immaterial resurrection if our souls were already “alive” in this intermediate state.
Bart Ehrman differs on this subject. He says that the idea about the resurrection of the dead only came into Jewish teachings a couple of centuries before Paul, that most of the Hebrew Bible does not talk about this.[15] It is interesting to notice that Wright cites passages from Deuteronomy and the Psalms in his bodily resurrection argument (Deuteronomy 32:39; Psalms 1:5; Psalms 21:30). Besides, pre-exilic and exilic prophets, such as Isaiah and Daniel, talked about God’s future restoration, which would not only be bringing Israel back to the promise land but also restore the whole world at the end of times.
Regarding Paul’s beliefs, Ehrman himself agrees later in the same book that Paul believed that God would have the last word about this age, he would initiate judgment to all the forces of evil, and at the end of this age, the dead would be raised.[16] Besides, “if the resurrection was an event that was to happen at the end of the age, what would an apocalypticist such as Paul naturally conclude if he came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead? He would conclude that the resurrection at the end of days had started.”[17] That is why it is now necessary to move to the analysis of what happened on the road to Damascus.
Transformation on the road to Damascus
Paul writes in several of his letters about how he was a persecutor of the church and converted to become a defender of Jesus (Galatians 1:12–16; 1 Corinthians 15:8–10; Phillipians 3:6–7). In his survey of the historical bedrock pertaining the resurrection of Jesus, Michael Licona observes that some scholars see the passage in Galatians 1 (including the part of “For neither from man did I receive it or was taught it, but through a revelation of Jesus Christ”) as a suggestion that Paul’s “conversion experience did not involve an external appearance of the resurrected Jesus but rather was something that occurred inside of him.”[18] Considering that Paul uses the same term in several other occasions to refer to a physical experience,[19] and the fact that Paul believed in some form of bodily resurrection, it seems that this argument is not sound.
Another passage that may contain information about Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus is 2 Corinthians 4:6: “For God, the one who said ‘Light will shine out of darkness,’ is he who shined in our lights with light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” On this passage, Licona notes that some scholars say the light described by Paul is the same light described by Luke in the book of Acts (discussed below), but Licona argues that this is highly unlikely, given that Paul “appears to include the Corinthian believers” in this passage, and it is equally unlikely that this light would be the whole experience that Paul had with the risen Jesus.[20] As stated before, Paul’s letters were used as the primary source of information about Paul’s own life, but it seems that they do not offer much knowledge about exactly what happened on the road to Damascus, so let us consider the texts in Acts.
The main passages about the Damascus’ event are Acts 9:3–20, 22:6–16, and 26:12–18, and they mention specific circumstances such as a light from heaven, a voice calling his name, and the voice answering explicitly that he was Jesus. Marcus Borg affirms that, since Paul saw a great light and heard the voice, but those traveling with him “did not share the experience,” this was a private moment, “commonly called a vision.”[21] Nevertheless, Licona rebukes this argument from Borg by considering that 1 Corinthians 15:8 describes his experience as the last time Jesus appeared to others after the resurrection, and Luke also reports in Acts “that Jesus appeared to Ananias ‘in a vision’ … sometime after appearing to Paul, indicating that it is not the same sort that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus.”[22]
Licona points out that the major part of modern scholars agree that Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus convinced him of an appearance to him of the risen Jesus.[23] Nevertheless, considering that the passages about the experience on the road to Damascus are not exactly clear about this, it is essential to observe other texts where Paul teaches about this subject.
Paul’s teachings about the Resurrection of Jesus
After his transformation on the road to Damascus, it is possible to find several passages that mention Paul’s teachings about the resurrection of Jesus as an indisputable fact:
“Though they found no proper ground for a death sentence, they asked Pilate to have him executed. When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead, and for many days he was seen by those who had traveled with him from Galilee to Jerusalem. They are now his witnesses to our people.” (Acts 13:28–31)
In this text, Paul is preaching to Jews and Gentiles and talking about the fact of the resurrection of Jesus. It is possible to see that Paul grants as trustworthy the reports about Jesus’ death, Jesus buried in a tomb, God raising Jesus from the dead, and Jesus being seen by several people. However, as Luke reports this in the book of Acts, it is possible it includes Luke’s own theological interpretations.
Thus, in another very important passage, which talks primarily about the resurrection of Jesus, and it refers to a creed used as soon as AD 30–35,[24] Paul says:
“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8)
Paul’s set of events is the following: Christ died, he was buried, he was raised from the dead, and he appeared to many people, including Paul himself.
Those two passages show the level of Paul’s confidence about all the facts concerning the resurrection of Jesus. As we have seen, Paul looks at the end of times culminating from a bodily resurrection, and the resurrection of Jesus gives him hope that God has initiated the process.
As the letter to the Corinthians was written around twenty years after these events,[25] most of the people referred in them were still alive and that is important for the strength of this argument. If Jesus did not appear for any of these people or any of them knew that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, for example, they were able to just deny this fact to anyone who asks them about. William Lane Craig notes that we have a genuine letter written by a man familiar with the first disciples, and this man reports that those disciples saw Jesus alive after his death.[26]
Regarding the importance of the writings of Paul about the resurrection, Michael Licona affirms that Paul must be a priority as he is the earliest source to cite the fact of the resurrection of Jesus. Besides, “Paul’s letters are the only verifiable reports by a verifiable eyewitness of the risen Jesus himself.”[27]
Conclusion
We have explored the life of Paul before his transformation experience, explained the motives behind his persecution, and how scandalous Jesus’ statements would be to a Pharisee. After analyzing Paul’s teaching about the resurrection, it is possible to see he was certain about his view of the risen Jesus, and that Jesus appeared to several others. More than that, Paul claimed all these facts from a very early date and his letters are reliable from a historical perspective. Considering also the change in his beliefs about the followers of Jesus, converting from a persecutor to a preacher of the message, it is possible to affirm that Paul’s transformation is a very strong argument in favor of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.
William Lane Craig says apologetics has three main goals: shape the culture, strengthen believers, and evangelize unbelievers.[28] On this sense, the analysis of Paul’s transformation and how that impacts our confidence in the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus shapes the culture by getting miracles to at least be part of the discussion again and not discarded beforehand; it strengthens believers by giving them confidence that their core belief is trustworthy; and it evangelizes unbelievers by giving historical reasons for the belief in the resurrection, grounded on reliable texts which goes back to the very first years after the event.
[1] N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018), 1.
[2] Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 1.
[3] Wright, Paul: A Biography, 2.
[4] Richard E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 422.
[5] Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: the followers of Jesus in history and legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96.
[6] Dale C. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: the earliest Christian tradition and its interpreters (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 263.
[7] Gerd Lüdemann, The Acts of the Apostles: what really happened in the earliest days of the church (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 397.
[8] Robert H. Gundry, A Survey of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 86.
[9] Wright, Paul: A Biography, 22.
[10] Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene, 111.
[11] Pope Benedict XVI, Saint Paul (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 15.
[12] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: Fortress Press, 2003), 146, Kindle.
[13] Ibid, 147.
[14] Ibid, 194.
[15] Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene, 119.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 375–376.
[19] Ibid, 376.
[20] Ibid, 380–381.
[21] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, 277, quoted in Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 394.
[22] Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 394.
[23] Ibid, 399.
[24] Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 319.
[25] Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, 512.
[26] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 360–361.
[27] Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 437.
[28] Craig, Reasonable Faith, 16–23.
