The Origin of Paul's Religion. John Gresham Machen

regarded as due to the fortunate chance of an hallucination, induced by the weakness of the apostle and the heat of the desert sun, but rather to a spiritual development which the hallucination merely revealed. Thus the modern view of Paul's conversion, it is thought, may face bravely the scorn of Beyschlag, who exclaimed, when speaking of the naturalistic explanation of Paul's vision, "Oh blessed drop of blood … which by pressing at the right moment upon the brain of Paul, produced such a moral wonder."[33] The drop of blood, it is said, or whatever may have been the physical basis of the Damascus experience, did not produce the wonders of the Pauline gospel; it merely brought into the sphere of consciousness a psychological process which had really been going on before.

      The existence of such a psychological process, by which the apostle was coming nearer to Christ, is sometimes thought to receive documentary support in one verse of the New Testament. In Acts xxvi. 14, the risen Christ is represented as saying to Paul, "It is hard for thee to kick against the goads." According to this verse, it is said, Paul had been resisting a better conviction, gradually forming in his mind, that the disciples might be right about Jesus and he might be wrong; that, it is said, was the goad which was really driving him. He had indeed been resisting vigorously; he had been stifling his doubts by more and more feverish activity in persecution. But the resistance had not really brought him peace; the goad was really there. And at last, near Damascus, the resistance was overcome; the subconscious conviction which had brought tumult into his soul was at last allowed to come to the surface and rule his conscious life.

      At this point, the historian is in grave danger of becoming untrue to his own critical principles. Attention to the Book of Acts, it has been maintained, is not to be allowed to color the interpretation of the Pauline Epistles, which are the primary sources of information. But here the procedure is reversed. In the interests of a verse in Acts, standing, moreover, in a context which on naturalistic principles cannot be regarded as historical, the clear testimony of the Epistles is neglected. For Paul was certainly not conscious of any goad which before his conversion was forcing him into the new faith; he knows nothing of doubts which assailed him during the period of his activity in persecution. On the contrary, the very point of the passage in Galatians, where he alludes to his persecuting activity, is the suddenness of his conversion. Far from gradually coming nearer to Christ he was in the very midst of his zeal for the Law when Christ called him. The purpose of the passage is to show that his gospel came to him without human intermediation. Before the conversion, he says, there was of course no human intermediation, since he was an active persecutor. He could not have spoken in this way if before the conversion he had already become half convinced that those whom he was persecuting were right. Moreover, throughout the Epistles there appears in the apostle not the slightest consciousness of his having acted against better convictions when he persecuted the Church. In 1 Tim. i. 13 he distinctly says that he carried on the persecution in ignorance; and even if Timothy be regarded as post-Pauline, the silence of the other epistles at least points in the same direction. Paul was deeply penitent for having persecuted the Church of God, but apparently he did not lay to his charge the black sin of having carried on the persecution in the face of better convictions. When he laid the Church waste he thought he was doing God service. In the very midst of his mad persecuting activity, he says, apart from any teaching from men—apart, we may certainly infer, from any favorable impressions formed in his mind—the Lord appeared to him and gave him his gospel. Paul stakes everything upon the evidential value of the appearance, which was able suddenly to overcome an altogether hostile attitude. Such is the self-testimony of the apostle. It rests as a serious weight upon all attempts at making the conversion the result of a psychological process.

      Certainly the passage in Acts will not help to bear the weight. When the risen Christ says to Paul, "It is hard for thee to kick against the goads," He need not mean at all that the presence of the goad had been known to Paul before that hour. The meaning may be simply that the will of Christ is resistless; all opposition is in vain, the appointed hour of Christ has arrived. Conscious opposition on the part of Paul to a better conviction is certainly not at all implied. No doubt Paul was really miserable when he was a persecutor; all activity contrary to the plan of Christ brings misery. But that he had the slightest inkling of the source of his misery or even of the fact of it need not be supposed. It is even possible that the "hardness" of resistance to the goad is to be found only in the very moment of the conversion. "All resistance," says the risen Christ, "all hesitation, is as hopeless as for the ox to kick against the goad; instant obedience alone is in place."

      The weight of the apostle's own testimony is therefore in no sense removed by Acts xxvi. 14. That testimony is unequivocally opposed to all attempts at exhibiting a psychological process culminating in the conversion. These attempts, however, because of the importance which has been attributed to them, must now be examined. In general, they are becoming less and less elaborate; contemporary scholars are usually content to dismiss the psychological problem of the conversion with a few general observations about the secret of personality, or, at the most, a brief word about the possible condition of the apostle's mind. Since the direct interposition of the risen Christ is rejected, it is held that there must have been some psychological preparation for the Damascus experience, but what that preparation was remains hidden, it is said, in the secret places of the soul, which no psychological analysis can ever fully reveal.

      If, however, the problem is not thus to be dismissed as insoluble, no unanimity has been achieved among those who attempt a solution. Two principal lines of solution of the problem may perhaps be distinguished—that which begins with the objective evidence as it presented itself to the persecutor, and that which starts with the seventh chapter of Romans and the persecutor's own sense of need. The former line was followed by Holsten, whose monographs still constitute the most elaborate exposition of the psychological process supposed to lie back of the conversion.[34] According to Holsten, the process centered in the consideration of the Cross of Christ. That consideration of course resulted at first in an attitude of hostility on the part of Paul. The Cross was a shameful thing; the proclamation of a crucified Messiah appeared, therefore, to the devout Pharisee as an outrageous blasphemy. But the disciples represented the Cross as in accordance with the will of God, and supported their contention by the evidence for the resurrection; the resurrection was made to overcome the offense of the Cross. But against the evidence for the resurrection, Holsten believes, Paul was helpless, the possibility of resurrection being fully recognized in his Pharisaic training. What then if the resurrection really vindicated the claims of Jesus to be the Messiah? Paul was by no means convinced, Holsten believes, that such was the case. But the possibility was necessarily in his mind, if only for the purposes of refutation. At this point Paul began to advance, according to Holsten, beyond the earlier disciples. On the assumption that the resurrection really did vindicate the claims of Jesus, the Cross would have to be explained. But an explanation lay ready to hand, and Paul applied this explanation with a thoroughness which the earlier disciples had not attained. The earlier disciples removed the offense of the Cross by representing the Cross as part of the plan of God for the Messiah; Paul exhibited the meaning of that plan much more clearly than they. He exhibited the meaning of the Cross by applying to it the category of vicarious suffering, which could be found, for example, in Isaiah liii. At this point the pre-Christian development of Paul was over. The Pauline "gnosis of the Cross" was already formed. Of course, before the conversion it was to Paul entirely a matter of supposition. On the supposition, still regarded as false, that the resurrection had really taken place, the Cross, far from being an offense, would become a glorious fact. All the essential elements of Paul's gospel of the Cross were thus present in Paul's mind before the conversion; the validity of them had been posited by him for the purposes of argument. The only thing that was lacking to make Paul a disciple of Jesus was conviction of the fact of the resurrection. That conviction was supplied by the Damascus experience. The unstable equilibrium then was over; the elements of the Pauline gospel, which were all present before, fell at once into their proper places.

      The other way of explaining the conversion starts from the seventh chapter of Romans and the dissatisfaction which Paul is thought to have experienced under the Law. Paul, it is said, was a Pharisee; he made every effort to keep the Law of God. But he was too earnest to be satisfied with a merely external obedience; and real obedience he had not attained. He was