1.9 Paul's Conversion

I watched an interesting video on YouTube of a talk by Gary Habermas that aimed to demonstrate the historicity of the resurrection. His approach to this was novel for me at the time because it ignored the gospel records entirely on the grounds that they are late traditions and less reliable than Paul’s letters which were completed much earlier. Since he used Paul’s testimony in his letters alone as the basis for what he said the whole thing hung together pretty well. It wasn't until afterwards that I started to compare Paul’s account of his conversion with the account recorded in Acts that Paul's ‘facts’ used by Gary Habermas used came into conflict with the ‘facts’ recorded in Acts.

The sequence of events around Paul’s conversion are key to the argument used by Gary Habermas and he looks to Paul’s record of what happened in Galatians to obtain his ‘facts’. We are told in Galatians 1:16-19 that Paul didn't speak to anyone or go to Jerusalem after his conversion but instead went immediately into Arabia before returning to Damascus. It was only three years later that he went to Jerusalem and spoke to Peter but none of the other apostles except for James. The same period of Paul’s conversion is narrated in Acts 9, but there we read a different story. Acts 9 tells us a more familiar version of the events. Three days after the blinding light on the road to Damascus Paul meets Ananias who restores Paul’s sight, he then is baptised and takes some food. After that He stays in Damascus and immediately starts to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues there. Some days later the Jews, who didn't like his message, plotted to take Paul’s life so he escaped the city and went to Jerusalem. The apostles in Jerusalem were suspicious of him so they didn't want to meet him until Barnabas took him to see the other apostles. Both of these accounts can’t be factually right as they diverge from each other.

I think it’s also worth commenting that the greatest advocate of early Christianity never met Jesus in the flesh, wasn't an eyewitness of Jesus life, and didn't have the gospel records. This means that he was hugely reliant on oral tradition and second hand information as the basis for his beliefs.

So looking at only one record and using the minimum facts is one way to remove a lot of the inconsistencies, but in doing so you also have to remove the claims recorded elsewhere in the Bible about the same event. If we only have one record of something there is no way to tell if it is accurate or not (other than guess work based on the previous credibility and perceived biases of the witness, likelihood of the event, etc.). Something this highlights to me is that you need a wider context in which to place any claim in life before you can accept is as factual, and this is as true of Bible claims as any other. The claims made in the Bible need to be considered in a wider context before their credibility can be validated. My experience of placing the Bible into a wider context is that the claims it makes come to be viewed as less credible rather than more – something that is investigated further in section 2.

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