The advocates of this theory throw the appearances of the risen Lord to the older disciples, the later visions of Peter, Philip, and John in the Apocalypse, into the same category of subjective illusions in the high tide of nervous excitement and religious enthusiasm. It is plausibly maintained that Paul was an enthusiast, fond of visions and revelations, [392] and that he justifies a doubt concerning the realness of the resurrection itself by putting all the appearances of the risen Christ on the same level with his own, although several years elapsed between those of Jerusalem and Galilee, and that on the way to Damascus.
But this, the only possible argument for the vision-hypothesis, is entirely untenable. When Paul says: "Last of all, as unto an untimely offspring, Christ appeared to me also," he draws a clear line of distinction between the personal appearances of Christ and his own later visions, and closes the former with the one vouchsafed to him at his conversion. [393] Once, and once only, he claims to have seen the Lord in visible form and to have heard his voice; last, indeed, and out of due time, yet as truly and really as the older apostles. The only difference is that they saw the risen Saviour still abiding on earth, while he saw the ascended Saviour coming down from heaven, as we may expect him to appear to all men on the last day. It is the greatness of that vision which leads him to dwell on his personal unworthiness as "the least of the apostles and not worthy to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church of God." He uses the realness of Christ's resurrection as the basis for his wonderful discussion of the future resurrection of believers, which would lose all its force if Christ had not actually been raised from the dead. [394]
Moreover his conversion coincided with his call to the apostleship. If the former was a delusion, the latter must also have been a delusion. He emphasizes his direct call to the apostleship of the Gentiles by the personal appearance of Christ without any human intervention, in opposition to his Judaizing adversaries who tried to undermine his authority. [395]
The whole assumption of a long and deep inward preparation, both intellectual and moral, for a change, is without any evidence, and cannot set aside the fact that Paul was, according to his repeated confession, at that time violently persecuting Christianity in its followers. His conversion can be far less explained from antecedent causes, surrounding circumstances, and personal motives than that of any other disciple. While the older apostles were devoted friends of Jesus, Paul was his enemy, bent at the very time of the great change on an errand of cruel persecution, and therefore in a state of mind most unlikely to give birth to a vision so fatal to his present object and his future career. How could a fanatical persecutor of Christianity, "breathing threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," stultify and contradict himself by an imaginative conceit which tended to the building up of that very religion which he was laboring to destroy! [396]
But supposing (with Renan) that his mind was temporarily upset in the delirium of feverish excitement, he certainly soon recovered health and reason, and had every opportunity to correct his error; he was intimate with the murderers of Jesus, who could have produced tangible evidence against the resurrection if it had never occurred; and after a long pause of quiet reflection he went to Jerusalem, spent a fortnight with Peter, and could learn from him and from James, the brother of Christ, their experience, and compare it with his own. Everything in this case is against the mythical and legendary theory which requires a change of environment and the lapse of years for the formation of poetic fancies and fictions.
Finally, the whole life-work of Paul, from his conversion at Damascus to his martyrdom in Rome, is the best possible argument against this hypothesis and for the realness of his conversion, as an act of divine grace. "By their fruits ye shall know them." How could such an effective change proceed from an empty dream? Can an illusion change the current of history? By joining the Christian sect Paul sacrificed everything, at last life itself, to the service of Christ. He never wavered in his conviction of the truth as revealed to him, and by his faith in this revelation he has become a benediction to all ages.
The vision-hypothesis denies objective miracles, but ascribes miracles to subjective imaginations, and makes a he more effect ive and beneficial than the truth.
All rationalistic and natural interpretations of the conversion of Paul turn out to be irrational and unnatural; the supernatural interpretation of Paul himself, after all, is the most rational and natural.
Remarkable Concessions.
Dr. Baur, the master-spirit of skeptical criticism and the founder of the "Tübingen School," felt constrained, shortly before his death (1860), to abandon the vision-hypothesis and to admit that "no psychological or dialectical analysis can explore the inner mystery of the act in which God revealed his Son in Paul (keine, weder psychologische noch dialektische Analyse kann das innere Geheimniss des Actes erforschen, in welchem Gott seinen Sohn in ihm enthülte). In the same connection he says that in, "the sudden transformation of Paul from the most violent adversary of Christianity into its most determined herald" he could see "nothing short of a miracle (Wunder);" and adds that "this miracle appears all the greater when we remember that in this revulsion of his consciousness he broke through the barriers of Judaism and rose out of its particularism into the universalism of Christianity." [397] This frank confession is creditable to the head and heart of the late Tübingen critic, but is fatal to his whole anti-supernaturalistic theory of history. Si falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. If we admit the miracle in one case, the door is opened for all other miracles which rest on equally strong evidence.
The late Dr. Keim, an independent pupil of Baur, admits at least spiritual manifestations of the ascended Christ from heaven, and urges in favor of the objective reality of the Christophanies as reported by Paul, 1 Cor. 15:3 sqq., "the whole character of Paul, his sharp understanding which was not weakened by his enthusiasm, the careful, cautious, measured, simple form of his statement, above all the favorable total impression of his narrative and the mighty echo of it in the unanimous, uncontradicted faith of primitive Christendom." [398]
Dr. Schenkel, of Heidelberg, in his latest stage of development, says that Paul, with full justice, put his Christophany on a par with the Christophanies of the older apostles; that all these Christophanies are not simply the result of psychological processes, but "remain in many respects psychologically inconceivable," and point back to the historic background of the person of Jesus; that Paul was not an ordinary visionary, but carefully distinguished the Christophany at Damascus from his later visions; that he retained the full possession of his rational mind even in the moments of the highest exaltation; that his conversion was not the sudden effect of nervous excitement, but brought about by the influence of the divine Providence which quietly prepared his soul for the reception of Christ; and that the appearance of Christ vouchsafed to him was "no dream, but reality." [399]
Professor Reuss, of Strasburg, likewise an independent critic of the liberal school, comes to the same conclusion as Baur, that the conversion of Paul, if not an absolute miracle, is at least an unsolved psychological problem. He says: "La conversion de Paul, après tout ce qui en a été dit de notre temps, reste toujours, si ce n'est un miracle absolu, dans le sens traditionnel de ce mot (c'est-à-dire un événement qui arrête ou change violemment le cours naturel des choses, un effet sans autre cause que l'intervention arbitraire et immédiate de Dieu), du moins un problème psychologique aujourd'hui insoluble. L'explication dite naturelle, qu'elle fasse intervenir un orage on qu'elle se retranche dans le domaine des hallucinations ... ne nous donne pas la clef de cette crise elle-même, qui a décidé la métamorphose du pharisien en chrétien " [400]
Canon Farrar says (I. 195): "One fact remains upon any hypothesis and that is, that the conversion of St. Paul was in the highest sense of the word a miracle, and one of which the spiritual consequences have affected every subsequent age of the history of mankind."
[364] Acts 9:4, the Hebrew form Saoul, Saoul, is used instead of the usual GreekSaulos, 9:8, 11, 22, 24, etc.
[365] 2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15.
[366] Acts 9, 22, 26. These accounts are by no means mere repetitions, but modifications and adaptations of the same story to the audience under apologetic conditions, and bring out each some interesting feature called forth by the occasion. This has been well shown by Dean Howson in Excursus C on Acts 26, in his and Canon Spence's Commentary on Acts. The discrepancies of the accounts are easily reconciled. They refer chiefly to the effect upon the companions of Paul who saw the light, but not the person of Christ, and heard a voice, but could not understand the words. The vision was not for them any more than the appearance of the risen Lord was for the soldiers who watched the grave. They were probably members of the Levitical temple guard, who were to bind and drag the Christian prisoners to Jerusalem.
[367] Gal. 1:15, 16; 1 Cor. 15:8, 9; 9:1; 2 Cor. 4:6; Phil. 3:6; 1 Tim 1:12-14.
[368] 2 Cor. 4:6.
[369] Gal. 1:1, 11, 12, 15-18.
[370] This is implied in his words to King Agrippa, Acts 26:19.
[371] Acts 26:14. Christ said to him: skleron soi pros kentra laktizein. This is a proverbial expression used by Greek writers of refractory oxen in the plough when urged by a sharp-pointed instrument of the driver. The ox may and often does resist, but by doing so he only increases his pain. Resistance is possible, but worse than useless.
[372] Rom. 7:7-25. This remarkable section describes the psychological progress of the human heart to Christ from the heathen state of carnal security, when sin is dead because unknown, through the Jewish state of legal conflict, when sin, roused by the stimulus of the divine command, springs into life, and the higher and nobler nature of man strives in vain to overcome this fearful monster, until at last the free grace of God in Christ gains the victory. Some of the profoundest divines-Augustin, Luther, Calvin-transfer this conflict into the regenerate state; but this is described in the eighth chapter which ends in an exulting song of triumph.
[373] Phil 3:6, kata dikaisune ten en nomo genomenos amemptos.
[374] Mark 10:21.
[375] In his address to Peter at Antioch, Gal. 2:11-21, he gives an account of his experience and his gospel, as contrasted with the gospel of the Judaizers. Comp. Gal. 3:24; 5:24; 6:14; Rom. 7:6-13; Col. 2:20
[376] 1 Cor. 2:2; Gal. 6:14; Rom. 4:24, 25.
[377] 1 Cor. 15:9, 10; comp. Eph. 3:8: "Unto me who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given;"1 Tim. 1:15, 16: "to save sinners of whom I am chief," etc.
[378] Rom. 9:2, 3; comp. Ex. 32:31, 32.
[379] Paul never numbers himself with the Twelve. He distinguishes himself from the apostles of the circumcision, as the apostle of the uncircumcision, but of equal authority with them. Gal. 2:7-9. We have no intimation that the election of Matthias (Acts 1:26) was a mistake of the hasty Peter; it was ratified by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit immediately following.
[380] On the testimony of Paul to Christianity see above § 22. I will add some good remarks of Farrar, I. 202: "It is impossible," he says, "to exaggerate the importance of St. Paul's conversion as one of the evidences of Christianity .... To what does he testify respecting Jesus? To almost every single primary important fact respecting his incarnation, life, sufferings, betrayal, last supper, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly exaltation .... The events on which the apostle relied in proof of Christ's divinity, had taken place in the full blaze of contemporary knowledge. He had not to deal with uncertainties of criticism or assaults on authenticity. He could question, not ancient documents, but living men; he could analyze, not fragmentary records, but existing evidence. He had thousands of means close at hand whereby to test the reality or unreality of the Resurrection in which, up to this time, he had so passionately and contemptuously disbelieved. In accepting this half-crushed and wholly execrated faith he had everything in the world to lose-he had nothing conceivable to gain; and yet, in spite of all-overwhelmed by a conviction he felt to be irresistible--Saul, the Pharisee, became a witness of the resurrection, a preacher of the cross."