Of course, no one, either a believer or a skeptic, can prove one way or another exactly what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul and all he spoke to are long dead, and, besides, we are pretty much dependent on Paul’s own witness. All we can do is look at what Paul did and wrote, and what Luke reported about Paul’s experience, as well as the result of Paul’s ministry and his relationship with the leaders in Damascus, Antioch and Jerusalem. We can then infer from this evidence what is the most likely inference about Paul’s supposed vision on the road to Damascus.
Here is what we can say with great assurance. Paul’s description of what happened on the road to Damascus was accepted at face value by Ananias (Acts 9, 22, 26), as well as by Peter, John and James, the brother of Jesus. Paul’s subsequent life, his extreme physical courage, his one-minded devotion, and the success of his ministry logically would lead one to believe that Paul was absolutely and without reservation convinced that he had had some sort of direct experience with Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. He was not lying! Whether the “appearance” was a physical thing (as it was when Jesus appeared to the apostles in Jerusalem and in Galilee) or whether it was more like a vision, such as Daniel had in Ch 10-11, it does not seem to be an absolutely essential difference. All the evidence, to me, points to an actual physical vision, as Paul points out a bright light and to have heard actual words from Jesus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me.” What matters is, whether the “vision” was a physical thing or more of internal thing (I strongly lean toward the former), the key point is that Paul actually had an experience of the actual risen Christ. Or put it this way. Paul clearly believed that he did, and those he witnessed to did as well. That is the best we can do, and, to me, it is more than sufficient. We cannot prove what happened on the road to Damascus, but this seems to me to be the most reasonable conclusion from the evidence we have, which is the best anyone can do.
In Paul’s list of witnesses to the physical resurrection of Jesus in 1 Cor 15:5-8 his own witness is listed nearly as an afterthought. The real question is whether Jesus did indeed resurrect from the dead. The witness of Paul is not an essential part of that witness. Jesus was indeed raised from the dead, as the 500+ eye-witnesses confirmed publicly, and questions about the nature of his appearance to Paul are not particularly germane to the question of the resurrection. If Jesus was in fact bodily raised from the dead, and if Paul was absolutely convinced he had an experience of the resurrected Christ–enough to completely turn his life in the opposite direction it was headed before, that is sufficient for me.
John Oakes