DAVID INGRAM
In the last two articles, I responded to two points raised by an acquaintance who approached me in a spirit of dawah, the Islamic practice of inviting others to consider Islam. The first article addressed whether Paul had any real connection to Jesus since he never walked with him in person. The second addressed Paul’s violent past as Saul, before his conversion. Now I want to turn to his third complaint.
His argument was that Paul claims that Jesus spoke to him in a vision on the road to Damascus, not in a physical, in person meeting. Since this was only a vision, the argument goes, it carries less weight than an actual, physical encounter with Jesus, and he claimed that it raises doubt about whether Paul truly received authority to teach in Jesus’s name.
I want to respond to this honestly and directly.
It’s true that the accounts in Acts describe Paul encountering a bright light and hearing a voice while traveling to Damascus, rather than sharing a meal with Jesus or walking beside him on a road the way the twelve disciples did. But the word “vision” can be misleading if we assume it means something imagined. According to Acts 9, the men traveling with Paul also experienced this event. They saw the light and heard something, even if they didn’t fully understand the words. Paul was struck blind for three days afterward, a physical effect that lingered well past the initial moment. This was not a private daydream or an inward feeling. It had outward, physical, and lasting consequences that other people around him witnessed.
Paul also describes this event elsewhere in a way that treats it as a genuine appearance of the risen Christ, not a lesser kind of experience. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lists the people Jesus appeared to after the resurrection, including Peter, the twelve disciples, more than five hundred believers at once, and then he adds, “last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” Paul places his own encounter in the same category as the others, as a real appearance of the risen Jesus, not a separate or lesser category of religious experience.
It’s also worth remembering that the resurrection itself is central to the Christian message. If Jesus rose from the dead, then he was no longer limited to walking dusty roads with a small group of followers in Galilee. A postresurrection appearance to Paul, even if it came through blinding light and a voice rather than a shared meal, fits within the pattern of how the risen Jesus is described appearing to others in the Gospels as well, sometimes recognized immediately, sometimes not, sometimes appearing suddenly in a locked room.
So while the nature of Paul’s encounter was different from how the twelve disciples first met Jesus during his earthly ministry, it does not follow that this makes it less real or less authoritative. It was a genuine encounter with the risen Christ, with physical effects witnessed by others, and Paul treats it with the same weight as the other resurrection appearances recorded in the New Testament.
This is the third point my acquaintance raised. The next article will address his claim that the details of this event are described differently across different verses in Acts, which he offered as evidence of contradiction.
