Two passages in particular have been adduced : 2 Co 12'-9, Gal l"'-. To take the latter first: ' When it was the good pleasure of God, who separated me even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me (iv ifxoL), that I miglit preach him among the Gentiles.' That this revelation refers to his ex- perience near Damascus is indicated in v."; and it IS urged that in these words St. Paul unequivocally asserts the inward character of the revelation granted to him, and that this meaning must in consequence be applied to all other passages in his writings where the point is spoken of.
But St. Paul's assertion here of the inward char- acter of the revelation does not require us to resolve the whole manifestation into an inward experience and exclude an accompanying or preceding appear- ance vouchsafed to the senses. Lightfoot (m foe.) maintains that the words, ' when it pleased God to reveal his Son in me,' should be taken in close connexion with the words immediately following, ' that I might preach him among the Gentiles ' (this giving the content of the inner and spiritual revelation); while the words, 'called me by his grace,' should be understood as a reference to the actual event on the Damascus road on which the inner revelation supervened. However this may be, the admission of an inner revelation does not exclude an external manifestation as well. Even such a negative critic as Meyer admits this : ' It is not therefore (because of the inward revelation) to be denied that Paul conceived the appearance of Christ to him to be objective and external ' (Die Auferstehung Christi, p. 186). The revelation of God to him was two-fold, the inward supplementing the outward. Such an inward revelation indeed, as Knowling points out, was necessary to complete and interpret the outward. Without this ' the outward appearance could never have been recog- nised for what it was in its full meaning, nor could the Apostle have been assured against all suspicion of an illusion of the senses ' (Testimony of St. Paul, p. 184). The outer revelation separated from the inner would have been valueless, and would have left St. Paul in the same bewildered state as the companions of his journey. But the outward revelation, though valueless without the inward, was a necessary condition and presupposition of it.
In the other passage referred to, 2 Co 12'^-, St. Paul writes, ' I must needs glory, though it is not expedient ; but I will come to visions and revela-
tions of the Lord,' etc. May not the Apostle, it ia urged, have ' seen ' the Lord in one of these ecstatic visions, visions with regard to which he could nut even allirm whether he was in the liody or out of it? But this very passage, as Sahatier truly ob- serves, ' shows that Paul, so far from comparing the manifestation of Christ to him at his con- version with the visions he afterwards enjoyed, laid down an essential dillerence between them ' ('I'lic A/iustle Paul, p. 65). Of the latter he speaks with the utmost reserve and reticence — ' of which it is not expedient that he should glory.' But the former he places in the forefront of his preaching, as containing not only the grounds of his con- version, but, as we have seen, the basis of his claim to apostleship. Moreover, St. Paul describes the appearance of Christ here referred to as the last of a series — ' last of all ' (^ffxarov ttiivtiop). The force of the words is often overlooked. They do not mean merely that St. Paul was the last of the particular series of per.sons named in the previous verses ; ' he does not say . . . that Christ appeared to him the last ; but that He appeared to him for the last time, i.e. as in a series which was now closed' (Knowling, p. 182). St. Paul, we know, had many visions and revelations of tne Lord after this, and he could not therefore tell us more definitely than he does by this expression ' last of all ' how fully and clearly he distinguished between the Damascus vision and every other vision of the Risen Saviour (cf. Weiss, on 1 Co 15": 'All later visions of Christ belong for Paul to a ditl'erent category, they cannot be viewed in the same way as proofs of the Resurrection ').
This external objective character of the appear- ance of the Kisen Christ to St. Paul is corroborated by an examination of the three accounts of it given in Acts (9'-=2 '22'-"' 26'-'»). The first occurs in the course of Luke's own narrative of the circumstances of St. Paul's conversion. The second occurs in the report of St. Paul's defence before Lysias, when Luke was probably present (a ' we ' section). The third is in the report of St. Paul's defence before Agrippa, when Luke again was probably present. Of these diH'erent accounts Schmiedel says that ' they contradict one another so violently . . . that it is difficult to imagine how it could ever have been jjossible for an author to take them up into his book in their present forms' (EBi iv. 4063). Tlie divergences, however, relate to details, not to the essential facts. ' In the essential point there is the same impression throughout ' (H. Weinel, iit. Paul, Eng. tr., London, 1906, p. 77).