Evidence · Case 02 · Resurrection of Christ
Paul, the former persecutor
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Sources
Galatians 1:13 to 16, NASB,
Objections & responses
- Paul’s conversion has natural explanations: guilt, a seizure, heatstroke, a psychological crisis. Acts describes a light and a voice, which sounds like a vision, not a bodily encounter.
Any of those is possible in the abstract, and Paul’s experience should not be pictured as identical to touching Jesus in a locked room. What the natural explanations struggle with is the aftermath. Paul did not merely feel differently; he went to Jerusalem to check his understanding with Peter and James, adopted their specific claims about the resurrection, and held to them through beatings, prison, and eventually execution. A guilt-driven hallucination would not be expected to match, in content, what the Jerusalem apostles were already preaching before he arrived.
- Didn’t Paul have a motive? Converting gave him leadership of a growing movement.
In the mid 30s there was no growing movement to lead, only a small, persecuted Jewish sect whose founder had been executed as a criminal. Paul traded his standing as a rising Pharisee with authority from the high priest for a life he describes as constant danger, hunger, and imprisonment. If ambition was the motive, he chose the worst possible vehicle for it.