In what way am I “worked up?” What do you think I’m upset about?
Your language seemed a bit sweeping. “It has been determined” like it was a Scotus decision. I take you at your word that you aren’t worked up and take it back.
Where did I use the phrase, “it has been determined?”
All those reports are myths. Why do you think they’re historical records that could benefit from a reasonable analysis?
Paul’s claim that he persecuted the early church is a primary attestation. It’s not somebody writing a story about him, he made the claim himself. It’s not mythological that he claimed it, so it is valid to ask what kind of authority he was implying he had. It appears from the tone of the letter that he expects his audience to be aware of whatever he had done, and he is trying to assuage them, (“yes, I DID persecute the Jebus lovers, but now it’s all good”). There is a backstory in this letter that is known by Paul and apparently his audience, but it isn’t clear what that was.
It should be pointed out that he claimed to persecute the church not only in his letter to the Galations, but also in his letter to the Philippians.
The author of Luke-Acts also backs this up with additional detail, although of course this is a secondary source. Tradition ascribes authorship to Luke, Paul’s traveling companion, but that is open to debate. It does seem clear that the author of Luke-Acts had some source for Paul’s conversion story other than Paul’s surviving letters.
The Gospel account suggested that the religious authorities were out to get him, and looked for ways to get him in trouble with the Romans (since they no longer had the ability to put him to death under their own authority). For example, the question about paying tribute to Caesar, which was supposed to force a choice between telling people to not pay (sedition that would get him arrested by the Romans) or telling people to pay (accomodation that would offend the more hardcore followers). Of course, Jesus cleverly evaded the trap by explaining that Ohio was not really a state when the tribute was first levied – er, by pointing out that the coins bore a graven image, and that pious Jews really ought to avoid handling them anyway and might as well let the guy whose picture was on them have them.
Obviously, friction between early Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians shaped the spin placed on the story.
The Gospel accounts of friction between Jesus and Jewish authorities are post hoc attempts to shift the blame for the crucifixion away from the Romans. The fact is that Jesus wasn’t teaching anything contrary to Jewish law or anything that would have been bothersome to the Pharisees (arguing about nuances of scripture the law was and still is part and parcel of Jewish religious practice) or the Temple authorities, except for the assault at the Temple, which would have bothered not only the Priests, but the Romans even more so. Crucifixion was an exclusively Roman method of execution used in the provinces exclusively for crimes against the Roman state. If Jesus was crucified, it was because he pissed off the Romans, not because of any tension with Jewish authorities. The Romans couldn’t have cared less about internecine Jewish religious squabbles, they just wanted to keep the pax.
It’s also worth noting that the author of Matthew was apparently a Jew writing to a Jewish audience; hence the repeated allusions to the Old Testament. But he was also guilty of taking OT verses completely out of context to try to show that Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, even to the extent of claiming a certain text was prophecy when it clearly was not.
Given that, it’s not too difficult to make the leap to the conclusion that Matthew may have used unreliable sources in his retelling of the Jesus story that had been passed down to him.
Here’s a devilish thought I had one time. IF Paul was indeed a persecutor of the early church …consider … no one saw the conversion on the road to Damascus except for his traveling companions and there are discrepancies in the reports about them. (One account says that saw a light but didn’t hear a voice; another says they heard the voice but didn’t see anyone.)
So, Paul is on the way to Damascus and he gets this weird idea: instead of persecuting them for the outside, how about if I infiltrate them and control the thing from the inside. So, he claims a huge conversion, takes over the church from Peter, and essentially turns Christianity from a Christ centered religion into a Paul centered one.
I know … I read spy novels too much …
Like any collaborationist regime, the local authorities were alert to anything that might cause friction with their overlords, lest said overlords decide to find themselves a better class of quisling (or, worse, decide that they needed to step in and just run the place without middlemen). Thus, it’s really a distinction without a difference.
That would have been true of the Temple Priests, but probably not the Pharisees. The Temple Priests were handpicked by the Romans and were viewed by the Jewish public at the time as collaborators. It’s believable that they would have assisted with the arrest of Jesus, though the trial and conviction by the Sanhedrin is not. Mark’s trial is not credible as history for a number of reasons, but something like what’s described in John is not implausible - a capture and informal interrogation (not a trial), followed by turning him over to Pilate.
For the record, Paul never actually desribes his conversion in his own letters. The Damascus story is told only in Acts (though there are different versions of it as you said). Paul himself never really tells us much about the nature and circumstances of his experiences except to say that Jesus “appeared” to him after he appeared to the Twelve (and another appearance to group of 500, which is mentioned only by Paul and not found in the Gospels). Paul also tells us that he got his Gospel only from Jesus and “not from any man,” which raises some intriguing questions about early Christian beliefs.
And it should be noted as well that one of the requirements for being an apostle (and thus, a leader of the church) was having seen a post-resurrection Christ. Paul couldn’t become a leader of the church as he did without claiming to have seen Jesus after the alleged resurrection, which makes his claim necessary. To him, at least.
How long after the crucifixion was the appearance to Paul supposed to have taken place? I’ve always assumed that it was years later, but recently I’ve been listening to some debates about various things like the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for the resurrection, and I hear Christians claiming that Paul was one of the people who saw a physically resurrected Jesus.
Paul himself describes that when we go to heaven we will have “spiritual” bodies, not physical ones, just like Jesus had, so to claim that Paul saw the physically resurrected Jesus is laughable. But was he supposed to have had his vision pretty soon after the crucifixion?
I guess my impression of the timing is that Jesus had a very small band of people who hung out with him, but then after his execution the band grew, developing their own legends about him, so the authorities sent soldiers, including Paul, to suppress them. After doing this a while, he had a vision and became a Christian himself. But this timeline would necessitate that it was years between the execution and the road to Damascus incident.
From various calculations having to do with Paul’s own given timeline and with historically dateable personages mentioned in Acts and the Pauline corpus, Paul’s conversion is generally dated to around 35 CE.
How long after the crucixion this was is an open question since the date of the crucifixion is unknown, but if it was under Pilate, it happened between 26-36 CE. According to the synoptic Gospels, Jesus was crucified on a Passover that started on a friday (the Gospel of John disagrees with this, but let’s not complicate things too much). In the ten year window that Pilate was Prefect in Judea, there are three years that Passover could have fallen on a friday - 27, 30 and 33.
There is no hard consensus on which of these dates is the one, but Luke says that Jesus started his career shortly after John the Baptist began baptizing “in the 15th year of Tiberius,” which was about 29 CE, so depending on whether Jesus’ career lasted a year (as the synoptics seem to indicate), or three years (as John sems to imply), either 30 or 33 are viable. That would mean that Paul saw the light either 2 or 5 years after the crucifixion. I don’t know, but I would guess the 30 CE date is more likely, since that would give the early Jesus movement more time to generate heat from Jewish authorities, then for Paul to get some persecutin’ in before his conversion.
Either way, Paul does not claim to have seen a physically resurrected Jesus, but he doesn’t claim the other disciples did either. In Paul’s formula, Jesus:
…appeared to Cephas; then to the twelve; then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep; then he appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to the child untimely born, he appeared to me also.
(1 Cor. 15:5-8)
Paul does not say that any of the “appearances” were physical, nor does he draw any distinction between the appearances to the disiples and to himself. It is also true, as you say, that Paul said resurrected bodies were spiritual, not physical.
In any case, Jesus. “appearance” to Paul would have happened after the alleged ascension, and not as part of his physical, post-resurrection tour described in the Gospels.