Paul's Experience: Sighting or Theophany?

Extract

What did Paul have to say about the resurrection, Geoffrey Turner asks (New Blackfriars, April 1977), as he goes on to say that I have suggested that “Paul had a simple spiritual experience”. Well, if that is the impression that I have left, I must try to make myself a little clearer.

Geoffrey Turner appeals to I Cor 15 and interprets that reference to the appearance of the risen Christ to Paul in terms of Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles of the Damascus road experience. Is it so obvious that this move is legitimate? Admittedly it has frequently been made, at least since the middle of the second century when readers of the New Testament were first in a position to turn from one text to another and begin the process of harmonising the different accounts which it is one of the major effects of modern New Testament studies to bring into question. We need to remind ourselves, however, that Luke shows no knowledge of any of Paul’s letters. In fact the picture of Paul that Luke gives in Acts is remarkably unlike the picture that emerges from Paul’s own letters. The account that one man gives of another would of course differ a good deal from a self portrait, but the differences between Paul’s own theology and Luke’s account of it in Acts are so obvious and numerous that we must reckon with the possibility, and even the likelihood, that Luke did not have much access to Pauline material. Methodologically, if we are to be cautious, we must leave open the possibility that the Lukan accounts of the Damascus road experience were not derived from Paul himself but were Luke’s reconstruction of what must have happened.