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Wednesday, May 06, 2020

Paul's eyewitness testimony to the Resurrection

From  a recently conversation:

Paul had not been a companion of Jesus prior to the crucifixion and hence cannot testify that this is a person he knows well whom he is seeing again...I admit to being astonished that anyone would find this controversial, much less offensive. Have we become so committed to "doing the resurrection argument through Paul" that we cannot even recognize what is obvious right on the face of the text? Paul openly asks Jesus who he is! He had not known him well personally while on earth. This is all intrinsic to the story. Disagree with me if you will about Jesus' "being in heaven" when Paul saw him. But if you try to insist that Paul verified that Jesus was risen from the dead in exactly the same way that the disciples verified it as reported in the Gospels and Acts 1, you're defending something that is utterly indefensible based on the nature and brevity of his encounter and his lack of previous personal acquaintance with Jesus.

Hays 
Actually, a strong argument can be made that Paul knew Jesus by sight prior to the Resurrection:


Well, if he did, he didn't recognize him on the road! He has to ask who he is. And there is no evidence that he ever recognizes him in that encounter. (Unlike Mary Magdalene or Cleopas, who do eventually recognize him.) You can say that is because Jesus was shining and glorified. That's fine. But the fact remains that in that encounter he does not verify of his own knowledge that it is the same Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.

Hays 
Paul is literally stunned by this unexpected encounter, and there's been a 3-year interval between the Resurrection and Paul's out-of-the-blue encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road. This quite different from Jesus appearing to the disciples a few days later.

Okay, if you insist that he knew him by sight, you can say that. I think it's an ad hoc attempt to hang onto the idea that he knew Jesus by sight, which is by no means a given. At best it's a conjecture. But even so, your theory there is a way of acknowledging the epistemological point I'm making--namely, that he doesn't verify Jesus' resurrection by way of the same type and quantity of evidence that the disciples had.

Hays
i) It's not ad hoc when I point you to a detailed academic monograph which makes that case. No, it may not be a given, but your self-confident denial, uniformed by Porter's scholarly argumentation, is hardly a given.

ii) I for one haven't indicated that I'm offended by you interpretation. And I realize you are pushing back against overemphasis on the testimony of Paul in 1 Cor 15 to the demotion of the Gospels. But in the NT, Paul's witness to the Resurrection is a major apologetic argument.

iii) There's a point of tension between your insistence that this must be a psychological vision, on the one hand, and you objection to Dale Allison appealing to "grief hallucinations" on the other hand as an alternative to a physical resurrection.

I don't know why people take offense at the word "vision." Real visions are a pretty big deal. Why insist that it was "much more than a vision"? Nobody is denying that Paul had a sensory experience. But isn't that why visions are called visions? Because you see something! If Jesus appeared to me tonight and gave me a message, that would be huge, but it wouldn't mean that I thought of him as physically present in the same sense that he was with the disciples.

Hays 
I don't object in principle of psychological visions. However, you're quite critical of how Dale Allision proposes postmortem apparitions as an alternative to appearances of a physically resurrected Jesus, so there are contexts in which you think the distinction is all-important.

I answered that on the other thread. If all we had were Paul's experience on the Damascus Road, Allison would be in far better shape epistemically! It would still be weird, but Paul's experience was relatively brief and far less polymodal and unambiguously intersubjective than the disciples' reported experiences were. I'm critical of the way that people strip themselves of the capacity to respond to Allison!! The way we respond to Allison best is by emphasizing aspects of the disciples' experiences that are precisely those that go far beyond anything Paul experienced. These posts are in fact a continuation of my critique of any form of minimalism that is more vulnerable to Allison's type of approach. The distinction is very important. Extremely. That's why it's good that we have the other disciples' experiences and not just Paul's to go on!

Hays
The problem is that you're undercutting Paul's testimony to the Resurrection to build up the testimony of the Gospels. You're treating Paul's testimony as secondrate. Yet in Acts and the Pauline epistles, Paul's encounter with Jesus on the Damascus road has always been a fixture for Christian belief the in the Resurrection. You're now pitting these against each other, where the price of the testimony in the Gospels is to downgrade Paul's testimony.

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