Does Galatians 1:16 suggest that Paul's experience with the risen Jesus only occurred inwardly?

Critics of Christianity sometimes bring up the reference to how Jesus was "revealed in me" in Galatians 1:16 as evidence that Paul's experience with the risen Christ was of a more subjective nature than Christians have traditionally believed. Supposedly, Paul was only claiming to have experienced a vision or something similar within his mind, which the critic dismisses as a hallucination or something like that. I want to discuss some problems with that sort of view.

Whatever Paul experienced, it was multifaceted. A hallucination scenario, for example, would involve not only a multifaceted hallucination (what was seen, heard, etc., how the different aspects of what was hallucinated related to each other, and so on), but also Paul's multifaceted response (thoughts, emotions, etc.). And a multifaceted experience can be addressed in multiple ways. You can focus on one thing in one context and something else in another. Let's say I go to a grocery store. I get some groceries and talk to two people I know who are there, Tom and John. If I have a conversation with somebody who knows Tom, I might mention my discussion with him, but not say anything about John or about buying groceries. If I'm talking to somebody who knows both men, I might mention my conversations with both, but not mention the groceries I bought. If my wife doesn't know or doesn't have much interest in either man, I may tell her about the groceries I bought, but not mention either of the conversations I had with those two men. I'll focus on different things in different contexts. Galatians 1 is largely about Paul's conversion, so a reference to his inner transformation is relevant accordingly. It doesn't follow that nothing else was involved in the context of his encounter with the risen Jesus. The presence of an inward revelation doesn't prove the absence of the risen Jesus outside Paul. When he discusses his experience elsewhere, he uses different language (for example, language normally associated with physical sight) and includes different details: seeing Jesus, being appeared to by Jesus, the experiences of other witnesses, etc. (1 Corinthians 9:1, 15:1-11)

And some of what Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians he describes as material he'd passed on to the Corinthians significantly earlier, some of it apparently coming from a creed typically dated within a decade of Jesus' death. So, the material in 1 Corinthians, which is of a more objective and evidential nature than the phrase that's cited in Galatians 1:16, predates Paul's writing of Galatians. It's unlikely that Paul's views or claims would have changed significantly from the time of Galatians to the time of 1 Corinthians, but that time difference is irrelevant insomuch as 1 Corinthians includes material that predates Galatians.

The language in passages like 1 Corinthians 9:1 and Acts 1:21-22 suggests that the apostles saw Jesus as we'd typically speak of seeing anybody else. The references to seeing the risen Jesus in such passages are more straightforwardly taken to involve seeing the resurrected Christ in that typical manner, not having an inner vision of him.

And given the significance of the apostolic office, you'd expect something more than an inner vision to be required to qualify somebody to hold that office. About two decades after his experience with the risen Christ, Paul refers to his encounter as "last of all" (1 Corinthians 15:8) and doesn't mention any further witnesses. Inner visions, dreams, and other such experiences involving Jesus continued to be reported during the rest of the apostolic era and beyond. By contrast, resurrection appearances were thought to have ended shortly after Jesus' death, and the apostolic office ended with Paul and his contemporaries. The sort of inner vision critics are associating with Galatians 1:16 resembles a sub-apostolic more than an apostolic experience and so makes less sense of Galatians' apostolic context. A scenario in which an apostle thinks that his apostolic status was brought about by an appearance of Jesus that only occurred within him is a less likely scenario than one involving the sort of outward appearance associated with Paul in Acts. The Acts scenario better explains why Paul considered himself an apostle and why others considered him one.

For further discussion of the evidence that Paul's encounter with the risen Jesus was more than just an inner experience, see here. That post addresses a lot of subjects, including the popular abuse of Acts 26:19 by critics and how poorly something like a hallucination hypothesis can explain the evidence as a whole. For the remainder of this post, though, I want to focus on something else related to Galatians 1.

Let's move forward three verses, to verse 19. We read about James, Jesus' brother. Critics make much of the skepticism of Jesus' family. They often bring it up in the context of Christmas, for example, when criticizing the infancy narratives. If the events in those narratives occurred, why would Jesus' family respond so negatively to him? See here and here for my responses to that objection as it was raised by Annette Merz and Bart Ehrman, for example. How do they know that James and other members of Jesus' family had been skeptical of Jesus? From the gospels. Similarly, it's common for skeptics to refer to Jesus as "Jesus of Nazareth", often because they want to emphasize Nazareth in the context of their rejection of the claim that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Where is his residence in Nazareth mentioned in the letters of Paul that are typically accepted by skeptics? Nowhere. They're getting the Nazareth residence from sources outside Paul, including the gospels, all of which they typically date past the time of Paul's writings. Or think of the common skeptical appeals to Josephus, Tacitus, and other sources postdating Paul when arguing against Christianity (e.g., citing Josephus against the infancy narratives). And all of us interpret Paul's writings in light of many outside sources, including ones that postdate Paul's letters, in a lot of other contexts, such as when determining how to define the terms Paul used.

If you limited yourself to Galatians and the other writings of Paul in the manner in which critics often want us to limit ourselves to Paul's letters, what would you conclude about a subject like whether James had ever been a skeptic? Since Galatians and the other letters don't mention his skepticism, brothers are typically supportive of one another, he's referred to as a prominent believer, and his prominent position in Christian leadership makes less sense if he had a skeptical background, we'd conclude that James probably hadn't ever been a skeptic. But that isn't the conclusion critics reach about James. Rather, they take the evidence from the gospels into account and harmonize it with Paul. (Yes, skeptics are harmonizers.) Most likely, James had been skeptical for a while, then became a believer. Critics of Christianity recognize that later sources (the gospels, Josephus, Tacitus, etc.) can report, and often do report, reliable information not found in earlier sources and that such information needs to supplement what we find in the earlier sources.

So, why can't Christians do the same on the topic of the nature of the resurrection appearances, including the appearance to Paul? Doing so is especially unproblematic when the later sources in question postdate the earlier sources as little as the gospels postdate Paul under skeptical dating scenarios. If Paul wrote from the late 40s to the mid 60s, and Mark was published less than a decade after Paul's last letter, how much significance does that time difference have? And I've argued elsewhere that at least two of the gospels were circulating while Paul was still alive. If critics are going to accept some material from the gospels and sometimes even change how they read Paul in light of that material (e.g., James' skepticism), and if they're going to appeal to sources later than the gospels when arguing against the gospels (e.g., citing Josephus against the infancy narratives), and if the time difference between the earlier sources and the later ones isn't of much significance, then critics need more of an argument than appealing to the earliness of Paul's letters or Galatians in particular.

The phrase in question in Galatians 1:16 makes the most sense as a description of something that happened in connection with the resurrection appearance to Paul. It's not a description of the appearance itself, much less the totality of the appearance. Critics have no good explanation of the Pauline resurrection evidence as a whole, and their explanation of the resurrection evidence more broadly is even worse. If the phrase in Galatians 1:16 meant what these critics suggest it means, the remainder of the evidence probably would be a lot different than it is.