Jonathan McLatchie and Alex O'Connor (CosmicSkeptic) recently debated the topic "Theism or Naturalism, which provides a better account of reality?". I want to comment on a couple of issues related to Jesus' resurrection that came up in the debate. I'll address one of those issues here and the other in a later post.
There was some discussion of the resurrection appearance to Paul. Go here to see the segment I'm responding to. At 1:39:13, Alex says the appearance to Paul was "nothing like" the appearances to the other disciples and that what Paul saw was "not a physical Jesus" and was "just a bright light".
A problem for critics of Christianity is that there's some resurrection material that goes against their interests both in Paul's letters and in Acts, yet there's also some material they want to appeal to in both places. So, they often make a selective appeal to both sources that doesn't make adequate sense of either. I don't know to just what extent Alex was accepting particular portions of Acts for the sake of argument and to just what extent he thinks the portions of Acts in question are historical. Whatever the case, what he says in the part of the debate I've cited is inaccurate.
Paul does see a light in Acts. But he also sees Jesus (Acts 9:27, 22:14). And he refers to his having seen Jesus in his letters (1 Corinthians 9:1). Resurrection in Paul's letters and early Christianity in general involves the raising of the physical body that died, so a physical appearance of Jesus would make more sense than a non-physical one in that context. Similarly, the context of the remainder of Luke and Acts and earlier resurrection appearances in general is a context in which all of the earlier appearances were physical ones. So, it makes more sense for the appearance to Paul to be physical than it does for the appearance to be non-physical. The objective, physical nature of how Paul and his companions heard Jesus' voice, with different people having heard him to different degrees, makes more sense if the voice came from Jesus' body than if Jesus wasn't physically present. And passages like Acts 22:15 group the hearing and seeing involved together, suggesting that both the hearing and the seeing of Jesus were of a physical nature. 22:14 refers to the voice coming from the "mouth" of Jesus. That terminology normally refers to a portion of the human body. Jesus is a human who was speaking in the context of a resurrection appearance, which involves a raised physical body, so the reference to a mouth in 22:14 is most naturally taken as a reference to Jesus' being bodily present during the appearance to Paul. There's no reason to think that something like an anthropomorphism is involved in 22:14. The passage is most naturally taken to refer to Jesus' bodily presence. Furthermore, Paul groups the appearance to him with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5-8), and early Christian tradition, reflected in a large number and variety of sources, portrays the appearances to the other resurrection witnesses as bodily appearances. Like Paul's writings, the book of Acts portrays Paul as a resurrection witness in the same category as the others (13:31-32, 22:15), and those other witnesses are said to have seen bodily appearances of Jesus.
We should also take into account the multifaceted later corroboration of Paul's experience: Ananias' paranormal knowledge of what had occurred, the healing of Paul's blindness, Paul's acquisition of the ability to perform miracles, etc. Those later events and the experiences of Paul's travel companions are poorly explained by a hypothesis like Alex's involving a guilt hallucination. Alex refers to how Paul may have told his travel companions what he thought Jesus had said to him, but the passages in Acts refer to how they heard the voice (9:7), saw the light (22:9), and fell to the ground (26:14). Alex's appeal to the possibility that the travel companions heard Paul describe what Jesus said to him is a poor explanation of what 9:7 tells us, and neither scenario Alex suggests (epilepsy or a guilt hallucination) offers a sufficient explanation of the three physical responses of Paul's travel companions (hearing a voice, seeing a light, falling to the ground). See here regarding the likely historicity of the Acts accounts of Paul's conversion experience, and see here and here regarding Luke's general historical trustworthiness.
Furthermore, as Jonathan mentioned in the debate, what Paul says about his pre-conversion life, such as in Philippians 3, suggests he was nowhere close to being in a state likely to produce a guilt hallucination. At the particular time in question, he was in the process of traveling to persecute Christians, which suggests a lack of a sense of guilt, not the presence of so much guilt as to produce a guilt hallucination. Paul refers to being "furiously enraged" as he persecuted Christians (Acts 26:11), then refers to how the resurrection appearance occurred "while so engaged" (26:12). Both Paul's letters and Acts agree that he was in that sort of state leading up to his conversion. What Paul says in Acts 26 is similar to how Galatians 1 and Philippians 3 move from Paul's persecuting of the church and other such behavior to his conversion, without referring to any stage between. Other people reacted to his conversion by referring only to his persecution of the church and his becoming a Christian, with no reference to a third stage between those two involving guilt, remorse, and such (Galatians 1:23). There is no source in the earliest generations of Christianity - Christian, heretical, Jewish, or pagan - who suggests that there was such a third stage.
Jonathan also mentioned some of the research on guilt conversions that makes it unlikely that Paul had that sort of experience. See here for more about the unlikelihood of Paul and his companions having the sort of polymodal hallucinations needed to explain what's reported in Acts. Even a merely visual hallucination by Paul alone is highly unlikely. That he would have the particular type of visual hallucination in question is even more unlikely.
To expand on the point just made, notice that guilt is a broad category. You can have guilt about persecuting a group, such as Christians, without agreeing with their beliefs. Why would Paul hallucinate something as contrary to his Judaism as a resurrected Jesus if Paul had a sense of guilt about persecuting Christians he didn't agree with? Or if Alex wants to combine Paul's guilt with his being persuaded of the truthfulness of Christianity prior to his road to Damascus experience, which would be even more speculative, complicated, and unlikely, why think the resulting hallucination would involve Jesus risen from the dead? Alex mentions Paul's involvement in the stoning of Stephen, for example. Why didn't Paul hallucinate seeing Stephen, then, since Paul was more guilty of Stephen's death than he was of the death of Jesus, and Stephen's death was more recent? And why does Paul have to ask who it is who just appeared to him (Acts 9:5)? If you have a strong sense of guilt, and that guilt is producing a hallucination, why is it taking so long for you to figure out who's appearing to you? Furthermore, why would the risen Jesus have such a high calling for Paul, like what we read about in the Acts passages and Paul's letters? If Paul had such a sense of guilt, why wouldn't the Jesus he hallucinated call him, instead, to a lower status more consistent with that sort of guilt?
Paul is a poor candidate for something like a guilt hallucination. Even if one had occurred, it probably wouldn't have been the type of experience we see in Acts and Paul's letters. And even if that particular type of guilt hallucination had occurred, it would only explain part of what Paul experienced while not explaining the rest (regaining his sight through Ananias, acquiring the ability to perform apparent miracles, etc.). And it wouldn't explain the experiences of his travel companions.
Typically, the skeptic would take a low view of the historicity of Acts and try to avoid some of the force of the points I've made that way. But that approach would have to address the evidence we have for the general trustworthiness of Luke and Acts and the evidence we have for the accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts in particular, like what I cited earlier.
1 Timothy 5:18 refers to the gospel of Luke as scripture, which carries with it an implication that the author would have a high view of Acts as well. The two documents are companion pieces written by the same author. Luke 1:1 anticipates Acts, since "the things accomplished among us" aren't completed by the end of Luke, and Acts 1:1 refers back to Luke. As my article just linked explains, the passage in 1 Timothy would still have some significance even if Pauline authorship of the document is rejected. If some kind of Pauline community or other source who thought highly of Paul produced the letter, for example, then it reflects the thinking of some early sources with a high view of Paul. Their view of material like what's found in Luke/Acts is more likely to be continuous than discontinuous with what Paul would have thought of such material. And anybody producing a forgery would have had an interest in trying to make it seem realistic. So, having Paul express a high view of the gospel of Luke (with the implications that follow for Acts) must have seemed realistic at the time. And so on. So, dismissing 1 Timothy as pseudonymous doesn't adequately address all of the issues involved. We should also consider the widespread use of Luke and/or Acts in the early patristic sources, like the ones discussed in Bruce Metzger, The Canon Of The New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). The accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts are widely accepted and corroborated in the earliest sources, and there's no early alternative.
Furthermore, even if we limit ourselves to the letters most commonly accepted as genuinely Pauline, much of what I argued earlier in this post still applies. Those Pauline letters, not just Acts, suggest that Paul was confident in his persecuting Christianity rather than having some significant amount of guilt. The point I made about distinguishing between guilt in general and having a particular type of guilt, namely a type that would be pro-Christian in a relevant way, is applicable to the Pauline letters in question as well, not just Acts. And it isn't just Acts that says nothing of Paul having any significant involvement in Jesus' death while saying more about his involvement in persecuting Jesus' followers. Rather, the Pauline letters under consideration have the same characteristics. So, as with Acts, Paul's letters should lead us to ask why he didn't hallucinate one or more of the Christians he was so involved in persecuting rather than hallucinating Jesus. The former seem like more plausible candidates for the subject of a hallucination in Paul's letters also, not just in Acts. (And there wouldn't have been a need for him to hallucinate any person or group of people to begin with, much less Jesus in particular. He could have had some kind of hallucination not involving any person. Or he could have hallucinated an angel rather than a human, had a merely auditory hallucination of God speaking to him from heaven, etc.) Similarly, Paul receives an unexpectedly high calling from the risen Jesus in the Pauline letters also, not just in Acts. If Paul was experiencing so much guilt, wouldn't a lower calling make more sense, such as being called to be a Christian with a low status who would suffer in a way similar to the suffering of the Christians with a low status who had been persecuted by Paul? Paul's letters make much of his unworthiness (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:9). And it isn't just Acts that refers to various historical events connected to Paul's conversion that would be poorly explained by a hallucination on the road to Damascus. For example, like Acts, Paul's letters refer to his performance of miracles after his conversion. In fact, Paul is so confident of those miracles that he cites them as a vindication, against his critics, in 1-2 Corinthians and Galatians.
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