Damascus Hunter

What SOLID proof that support Paul’s claim of vision of Jesus?

Paul claimed that he met Jesus’s ghost on the way to Damascus.

We know from multiple sources that Paul, who was then known as Saul of Tarsus, was an enemy of the church and committed to persecuting the faithful. But Paul himself says that he was converted to a follower of Jesus because he had personally encountered the resurrected Jesus. So we have Jesus’ resurrection attested by a friend and foe alike, which is very significant.

Then we have six ancient sources in addition to Paul, such as Luke, Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Tertullian, Dionysius of Corinth, and Origen, reporting that Paul was willing to suffer continuously and even die for his beliefs. Also, lairs make poor martyrs. So we can be confident that Paul not only claimed the risen Jesus appeared to him, but that he really believed it.

People convert to other religions all the time. What’s so special about Paul?

When virtually all people convert, it’s because they’ve heard the message of that religion from secondary sources, that is, what other people tell them. Yet that’s not the case with Paul. He says he was transformed by a personal encounter with the risen Christ. So his conversion is based in primary evidence, Jesus directly appeared to him. That’s a big difference.

You can’t claim that Paul was a friend of Jesus who was primed to see a vision of him due to wishful thinking or grief after his crucifixion. Saul was a most unlikely candidate for conversion. His mind-set was opposed the Christian movement that he believed was following a false Messiah. Hid radical transformation from persecutor to missionary demands an explanation, and I think the best explanation is that he’s telling the truth when he says he met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus.

He had nothing to gain in this world, except his own suffering and martyrdom, for making this up.

Does Paul has Jesus’ photo? Who took the photo? Or painting? Are you serious? The fist-century community in the Palestine lacked the technology, everyone was committed to memorization and oral tradition.

You said: “Don’t quote the New Testament Bible as it is written by Paul, so that is not a proof.”

Let me clarify something: For the purposes of examining the evidence, I’m not considering the Bible to be inerrant, inspired, or scripture of any kind. I’m simply accepting it for what it unquestionably is, a set of ancient documents that can be subjected to historical scrutiny like any other accounts from antiquity. In other words, regardless of my personal beliefs, I’m applying the same historical standards to it that I would apply to Thucydides or Suetonius.

@microsoft404, the disciples of Jesus claimed to have seen the risen Jesus because they really believed that they had seen him. Shortly after Jesus’ crucifixion, their lives were radically transformed to the point that they were willing to endure imprisonment, sufferings, and even martyrdom.

This indicates that their claim of seeing the risen Jesus was the result of a strong and sincere belief that they truly had seen him. In all the political scandals that occurred over the recent generations, one or more from the guilty party was often willing to tell the truth rather than face prison term. The disciples of Jesus, on the other hand, boldly proclaimed the risen Christ in the face of severe persecution and death.

They faced dungeons, torture, and brutal executions, not the white collar prisons that hold today’s corrupt politicians. And yet, we are not aware of a single disciple who recanted. An accomplice to the 1972-73 Watergate scandal that toppled U.S. President Richard Nixon, Charles Colson elaborates:

“Watergate involved a conspiracy to cover up, perpetuated by the closest aides to the President of the United States, the most powerful men in America, who were intensely loyal to their president. But one of them, John Dean, turned states evidence, that is, testified against Nixon, as he put it, ‘to save his own skin,’ and he did so only two weeks after informing the president about what was really going on, two weeks! The real cover-up, the lie, could only be held together for two weeks, and then everybody else jumped ship in order to save themselves. Now, the fact is that all that those around the President were facing was embarrassment, maybe prison. Nobody’s life was at stake.”

“But what about the disciples? Twelve powerless men, peasants really, were facing not just embarrassment or political disgrace, but beatings, stonings, execution. Every single one of the disciples insisted, to their dying breaths, that they had physically seen Jesus bodily raised from the dead.”

“Don’t you think that one of those apostles would have cracked before being beheaded or stoned? That one of them would have made a deal with the authorities? None did.”

One need only to think of the devotion of Islamic terrorist. But this misses the point. It is not being argued that the sincerity of the apostles proves that Jesus rose from the dead. The point is that their sincerity to the point of martyrdom indicates they were not intentionally lying. No one holds that Muslims enlisted for the horrible suicide missions of September 11, 2001, sat in front of their recruiters and thought, “Okay, Muhammad is a false prophet and Islam is a false religion. If I do this, I’m going straight to hell when the plane crashes. Sounds good! Where do I sign?” They really believed in their cause. Deceived? Yes. Lairs? No.

You’re claiming that the disciples lied about the risen Jesus. Their willingness to suffer continuously and die for the gospel points to their sincerity, and points out a fatal flaw in the conspiracy theory.

Second, a mere story propagated by the disciples would not have convinced Paul, who was an enemy of the church. Fraud on their part would have been the first thing he would have suspected, just as we would be suspicious today if someone claimed that a recent cult leader like David Koresh of the Branch Davidians had risen form the dead after dying in the 1993 fire when federal officers attacked their Texas compound. Instead of rejecting the claims of Jesus’ resurrection as fraud, Paul was convinced by what he described as the risen Jesus appearing to him.

Third, it is doubtful that fraud on the part of the disciples would have convinced James who, even though he may have heard of Jesus’ miracles, had rejected him prior to his resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead would likely have been perceived merely as another lie from Jesus’ disciples. Like Paul, James appears to have been convinced by what he believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus to himself.

In summary, the strong and abiding conviction of the disciples that the risen Jesus had appeared to them, shown in their willingness to suffer continuously and even die for these beliefs, speaks strongly against lies and theft of Jesus’ body on their part. Moreover, the skeptics Paul and James would have been looking for fraud on the part of the disciples. For these reasons and others, only a small number of critical scholars have opted for this view during the last 200 years.

Even atheist New Testament critic Gerd Ludemann conceded: “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” Now, he claims this this was the result of visions, which I simply don’t believe is a credible explanation. But he’s conceding that their experiences actually occurred. Elsewhere he says, “Isn’t reasonable to grant that Paul… had the same experience that the others had, and to conclude from his statement that the others had visionary experiences too?”

As Paula Fredriksen of Boston University put it, and, again, she’s not an evangelical but a very liberal scholar: “I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attests to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.”

In fact, Fredriksen says elsewhere that “the disciples’ conviction that they had seen the risen Christ… is [part of] historical bedrock, facts known past doubting.” I think that’s pretty much undeniable, and I believe the evidence is clear and convincing that what they saw was the return of Jesus from the dead.

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