Paul's Resurrection Experience

In which I give a crack at answering profMTH's question about the nature of the resurrected Christ, and give an example of how the book of Acts shows how Religious experience is structured through human paradigms, concepts, etc...

Category:

Education

Tags:

• christianity
• resurrection
• nature
• of
• christ
• body
• randy
• helzerman

[wanman0813]

is... a contradiction. It simply cannot be inferred.

[randyhelzerman]

Hi wanman0813, what is contradictory is what is happening to Pauls companions. Sometimes they are standing, sometimes they fall to the ground. Sometime they hear the voice, sometimes, they don't hear the voice.

[wanman0813]

POST1

Likewise with my comments concerning "hear", the word "stood" in Acts 9:7 may mean: A prolonged form of a primary word στάω staō (of the same meaning, and used for it in certain tenses); to stand (transitively or intransitively), used in various applications (literally or figuratively): - abide, appoint, bring, continue, covenant, establish, hold up, lay, present, set (up), stanch, stand (by, forth, still, up).

[randyhelzerman]

LOL wanman0813, if you think that "stood" can be make noncontradictory with "fell to the ground" then obviously I'm not going to be able to convince you :-)

[StormTrek]

Gal 1:11-17 intends to make the point that Paul received his revelation directly from God rather than the twelve. Paul is not trying to hint that Jesus was a ghost (or, in naturalistic terms, had a subjective experience).

Paul experienced Jesus in his glory which led Paul to convert. In other words, Paul viewed Jesus as a regular guy one moment and as the Lord of Israel the next.

Debating a bodily resurrection was not Paul's goal in this passage.

[randyhelzerman]

(cont, to StormTrek) our purposes are _exactly_ trying to figure out what Paul would count as an encounter with the risen Christ, so as to get some idea of what his experience was, and thus, to get some idea of what he might have been talking about when he said that Christ appeared to Peter, James, the 500, etc..... the very contradictory nature of the accounts makes any firm conclusion very problematic, but it seems to me that an encounter with _a_physical_body_ was not required.

[hailsofbay]

:) :) :)

[randyhelzerman]

Hi variablast *sigh* yes, but barely. Its really hard to name one good thing which comes of it.  Perhaps it would make somebody more tolerant, perhaps it would make them less homophobic or judgemental, but in my experience, your character has a lot more to do with whether you are a good person or not than your religion does.....

[wanman0813]

I'm just simply indicating the meanings of the Greek word and offering a very plausible explanation. But if you think that "stood" means stood erect, in contradiction to much of the meaning of the original word, I'm sure Western 21th Century interpretation suits you ;-) Fact is, stood can mean literally or figuratively:abide, appoint, bring, continue, covenant, establish, hold up, lay, present, set (up), stanch, stand (by, forth, still, up).

[StormTrek]

randyhelzerman cont'd -

But I think the real clincher is the way 1st century judaism understood the word resurrection. The account in Acts 23:6 is one example that the word was understood a specific way.

Paul never argued for a new understanding of the word resurrection. And he specifically leveraged the way the Pharisees and Sadducees understood the word.

[StormTrek]

I left out the part about 1 Cor 15 in my video response. Basically, it comes down to the fact that people cannot share hallucinations. In fact, one of the ways we gauge reality is when multiple people are able to independently witness the same event.

[wanman0813]

So, considering Acts 9:7, I watched Randy's video and stood speechless - although I'm sitting on my office chair right now. The word doesn't necessarily imply the erect (no jokes!) condition of man.