05. IV. Did Paul See Jesus?
IV. Did Paul See Jesus?
One of the most fundamental questions in regard to the point of view from which Paul regarded the Saviour is whether Jesus in life had been a complete stranger to him or had been personally known to him. The article by Professor J. H. Moulton in the Expositor for July, 1911, p. 16, therefore, profoundly interested me; and still more Professor Johannes Weiss’s Paul and Jesus, which I immediately procured on Professor Moulton’s recommendation. In the Expositor, May, 1901, p. 362, I published an article stating reasons for the same view, that Paul knew Jesus in the vision on the road near Damascus, because he had seen Jesus in life and recognised the man whom he had known.
It must have been about the year 1901 that I ventured to express the same opinion in an address at Sion College; and, in the discussion which followed, the Rev. Mr. Relton (as I think) expressed the opinion that I must inevitably regard the words of 2 Corinthians 5:16 very much the same way as Professor Weiss does in his book, pp. 42-53. I had not myself observed the bearing of this passage from Second Corinthians; nor should I have been able to argue so subtly and skilfully as Professor Weiss has done for his interpretation; but, since Mr. Relton drew my attention to the passage, I have regarded it as a possible, but far from the most convincing, argument on this side.
More than ten years have passed since that article was printed; and the more I have thought over the subject, the more has its importance been impressed on me. Often I have had to speak on the subject; and as time passed the clearer grew in my thought a certain picture and vision of the Apostle. With much that appears in Weiss, I gladly find myself in perfect agreement. As he says (p. 29) that near Damascus “the figure of the Messiah, whose coming from Heaven was the object of such deep desires and prayers, might appear to the Apostle; he was profoundly moved by these longings. . . . But . . . by what signs did Paul recognise the figure as Jesus? “Peter and others recognised Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:5 ff.): Paul also recognised Him. In both cases they recognised Him because they had seen Him. I can only quote the words of Weiss (p. 31): “Paul’s vision and conversion are psychologically inconceivable except upon the supposition that he had been actually and vividly impressed by the human personality of Jesus”.
Paul describes himself as a witness that Jesus was living quite in the same way in which he describes Peter and the rest as witnesses. They were witnesses, because they knew the man whom they had seen. Paul would not offer his evidence as in the same category with theirs, if he merely believed what he was told. He believed, because he recognised the man whom he had seen in life. For this recognition it is necessary that the event should have occurred not too long after the death of Jesus. Recognition would be most effectual and would weigh most with others, in the case of a person who had not been very long dead. When Paul classes himself as a witness with Peter and the rest, he does not mean that they recognised Jesus within a few days or weeks of His death, while he recognised Jesus after eight years (as would be the case according to the chronological theory — hopelessly wrong, in my opinion, on other grounds — that the Crucifixion occurred in A.D. 29, and the Vision of Saul after A.D. 37). This consideration furnishes a subsidiary, though not in itself an absolutely conclusive argument, against that chronological theory. The point of view which has been taken in the preceding paragraphs is after all external, though, as put by Professor Weiss, it is very strong. To my own mind the most conclusive reason lies in its bearing on the development of Saul’s mind and thought. In this respect I find myself in diametrical opposition to the Heidelberg theologian. To him Paul’s Conversion was the outward and final culmination of a long and slow inward process. He says on p. 35 (referring to the view which he quotes from Kölbing), that Paul “possessed a very close and clear knowledge of the person and work of Jesus; it would almost appear that Paul before his conversion had read that Gospel of Mark from which Kölbing takes the essential features of his picture of Jesus”. Weiss then proceeds: “At any rate, the main idea is undoubtedly correct . . . he must already have been half-persuaded, and have plunged into the task of persecution with forced zeal and an uneasy conscience”. On p. 36 he proceeds: “It is certainly correct to assume that the faith of the first disciples also influenced Paul”; and on p. 37, “we may therefore adhere to the opinion that the ‘Spirit of Jesus,’ working through His disciples, eventually conquered Paul: the figure of Jesus was so convincingly apparent through the lives and characters of His adherents that Paul’s powers of resistance eventually grew wearied, and mentally he was prepared for the ultimate change that he himself realized”. With this picture of the process in Paul’s mind, I regret to find myself in absolute disagreement. One may pass over what is, in my opinion, the hopeless incongruity that a man like Paul, in order to still an uneasy conscience and to force himself to resist the conviction which was gradually growing in his mind, “plunged into the task of persecution “and of murder. Had Saul felt a moment’s doubt he must have satisfied himself before he slew his neighbours and outran all his contemporaries in cruelty and desire to imprison, and even to kill, those about whom a suspicion was growing in his mind that they might after all be right. This psychological impossibility might be insisted on at more length, but we pass over it, and we rest our case on the statement of Paul himself, corroborated by Luke, but quite independent of Luke’s evidence. In the first place, Paul lays the strongest emphasis on the fact that his change of mind and life was wholly independent of the older Apostles. He came to his new career through a sudden and direct relation between Christ and himself He stood over-against God, and he was struck down by God and grasped by Jesus. If we give up that, what are we to accept from Paul about his own past life? We are plunged in a sea of uncertainties; some things we accept and some we reject in his testimony. We accept or reject in virtue of some prepossession or psychological theory, and not in virtue of Paul’s own statements. In the second place, Paul states in the strongest way that he was in the full course of unhesitating and fanatical persecution. He had no doubt. He hated that impostor, and he was resolved to exterminate all that were deluded by Him, and to trample out the embers of the dying fire. There was in the mind of Paul, according to his own emphatic words, no preparation for the great change in his life, no process of gradually assimilating this teaching. He had, once for all, been convinced by that shameful death on the cross, that the man Jesus was an impostor who had degraded and brought into contempt the most sacred belief of the Jews, the belief in a coming Messiah and in an elevation of the whole race once more to its rightful position in the world.
Now take into account Paul’s nature and his acquired character. He was fully possessed by all the Jewish obstinate and fervent belief in what he considered right. He hated the Man that had parodied the Messianic idea and shamed the chosen people. What process of reasoning would have convinced such a man? What argument would have weighed with him? He was blind and deaf to all human evidence. One witness, or fifty, or five thousand, would have weighed equally with him; and their weight would have been nought. Their evidence was all delusion, all untrustworthy. They had some virtues, for they were, after all, Jews; but they were destroying the hope of Israel by their perverted delusion. That Israel might live, they must die, so far as the Roman law allowed; in Damascus, governed by a foreign king, there was more hope of massacre than there was under Roman law in Judaea, and there for some reason the Christians had taken refuge in considerable numbers. To Damascus, therefore, Paul went.
Human reasoning and testimony could have had no effect on Paul, as he describes his own condition. He was suddenly convinced: Christ seized him: the power of God irradiated him. He recognised as living in the Divine glory the man whom he had believed to be a dead impostor. He knew the man by sight. He heard His voice and His words.
I assume here, because this is not the place to discuss it more fully, that there are occasions when one man can hear what another cannot hear, and when one man can see what another cannot see. That Paul knew to be true. He had felt it; he had seen and he had heard. On this the rest of his life was built. You cannot get away from this. So he says; and on this belief he founded his career, and conquered the world.
I believe, and know from experience, that the thought of one mind may, in certain circumstances, be heard by another. No one can take from me what I know to be true; although, as a whole, the circumstances and comforts of modern life alike in Britain and in Germany are unfavourable to the development of that sensibility. Yet the power exists potentially in most people, though often weakened and deadened by the fortunes of life; and it can and does become active in a few. The view that seems to emerge from the long discussion of the subject is the same view that Paul himself states, and Luke and others believed. Saul, with his perfect confidence in the truth and righteousness of his own opinions — a kind of belief such as may be found among young men, trained by great masters and leaders, venerating their teachers, intensely desirous of knowing the truth, enthusiastic to the highest degree, zealous for the right as they conceive it, and strenuously bent on living the Divine life and spending themselves in their career of duty — was wholly impervious to reason and to evidence. He knew far better than these followers of Jesus.
Some other way than mere word was needed to move him. He had to be convinced that Jesus, whom he had thought a dead impostor, was a living God, He saw the man, and recognised Him. He would believe no other person; he believed his own senses and his own knowledge. Nothing except himself would convince him. He was a witness that Jesus was living. As he says: “Have I not seen
There was a motive cause, sudden and overwhelming. This cause was that he saw alive and recognised the man whom he had believed to be dead. The permanent effect on Paul was most striking in respect of one detail. The cross, which had hitherto been the “stumbling-block” in his way, which he regarded as typical of the triumph of Rome over his own race, the Chosen People, and as the visible expression of the disgrace and shame inflicted on Israel by its conquerors, that cross he henceforth regarded as typical of the triumph of Jesus over Rome, and as symbolical of the powerlessness of the mighty Roman Empire to touch the man whom it had condemned and tried to kill, but tried in vain. In His Crucifixion, Jesus celebrated a triumph over all His enemies: He nailed to the cross the condemnatory document: He leads in the long train of His triumph (as the Roman general led through the Roman streets) His conquering soldiers who trust in Him (Colossians 2:15; 2 Corinthians 2:14). Paul henceforth gloried in this symbol of victory and Divine power more than in anything else. He learned by eyesight, as well as in other ways, what the cross really meant. In 1 Corinthians 9:1 and 1 Corinthians 15:8 Paul emphasises specially that he had seen Jesus. This is the point on which he lays great stress. He is comparing himself with the Apostles. He saw Jesus as they saw Him. He is an eye-witness as they were. The evidence of the Acts seems at first sight somewhat different. To those who are ready to accept the evidence of the Acts when it suits them, and to throw it overboard whenever they dislike it, the statements on this subject contained in that book will matter little; they take just what they want, and leave the rest. But to those who treat the Acts seriously and rationally as a historical work from which the modern critic is not free to pick what he likes and throw aside what he likes, but which he has to judge as a whole, the case is different. Why does Luke in his three accounts mention only once (Acts 26:13-20) that Jesus appeared to the eyes of Saul?
Yet, although this detail is not explicitly stated in the other two accounts which Luke gives of the scene, yet in both it is implied that Paul saw Jesus at that time, Luke’s space was narrow and his accounts are brief; but he implies much that he does not expressly record. In the first account given in the Acts 9:4-8 Luke mentions that the men who were with him “stood speechless, hearing the voice but beholding no man”. We are to gather that they were half aware of something which was happening, and the statement that they beheld no man naturally implies that Paul did see some man. There was much to tell about that scene; some of the details are omitted in this, as in every account, because in Luke’s brief narrative it was not possible to mention everything. In the second account, which Luke in Acts 22 quotes from Paul’s own mouth, there is no direct mention by Paul himself that he saw Jesus. But as to this we notice two facts. In the first place, Paul’s object is not to compare himself with the older Apostles, as it is in 1 Corinthians. His purpose in this hurried, almost breathless, address to the Jews, who had been on the point of tearing him in pieces, was simply to touch their hearts. This was not the most suitable detail to select at the moment. In the second place, he quotes from Ananias, a Jew of high character and standing among the people, some details of this incident: the evidence of Ananias was likely to weigh with this audience. Ananias, as Paul says, visited him after some days, and recited to him as proof of his authority the whole incident; he reminded Paul of what had happened, and among other things, that he had been chosen “to see the Righteous One, and to hear a voice from His mouth”, The point which seemed afterwards so important to Paul, when he was writing to the Corinthians, is here put first in the words of Ananias.
Accordingly, in every one of Luke’s three narratives, we find that the detail on which Paul lays such stress in writing to the Corinthians appears as a feature of the incident, sometimes more emphasised, sometimes less, but always either implied or formally expressed. In every case the details which were selected stood in some relation to the urgent pressure of the moment. Neither Paul nor Luke ever gives an absolutely complete account, such as we should like to possess, of all the things that happened on this wonderful occasion: to do so would have required a book on a much larger scale than the Acts.