The Conversion of Paul: Bayes Factor Analysis
The fourth of our
salient facts is the conversion of Paul. It is a striking event, difficult to
explain. Saul of Tarsus, fanatical and implacable foe of the Christians and
rising star in the Jewish community in Jerusalem, on his way to Damascus with
letters of authorization from the high priest in Jerusalem for the explicit purpose
of stamping out this upstart sect, was suddenly transformed into an utterly
convinced believer in the risen Christ and became Paul the apostle, tireless missionary
and ultimately martyr for the religion he had so vigorously persecuted.
From the accounts of
Paul’s experience given in Acts we know that he took the experience to be an encounter,
albeit not an earthly one like that of the disciples, with Jesus—the very Jesus
whose followers he was bent on persecuting And those followers were from the
earliest days proclaiming that Jesus had risen physically from the dead,
a theme on which Paul elaborates in several places. The connection, then, to
the resurrection is more direct than it might appear; Paul considered himself commissioned
directly by God to preach the resurrection and messiahship of Jesus, and his
teaching corresponded to that of the apostles in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:2). His
unwavering conviction of that commission permeates with the record of his teaching
in Acts and his own epistles (see, e.g., Acts 22:10-6; Acts 26; 2 Corinthians
1:1; Galatians 1:1, 11-16; Philippians 3:4-8; Colossians 1:1; 1 Timothy 1:1,
12-3).
The suggestion that
Paul was deliberately promulgating something he knew to be false is too absurd
to detain us; his ardor for Judaism, his rising status among the Jews, and the
opprobrium that attached to Christianity leave no room for any human motive for
deceit. He had everything to lose and nothing earthly to gain. Nor need we take
seriously the suggestion that he was the victim of an audacious prank, fooled
somehow into thinking that Jesus was speaking to him out of heaven while his dumbfounded
companions looked on. The fearful Christians were wary of approaching him even
after receiving word of his conversion; and even if they wanted to deceive him,
there are no means by which they could have contrived, on the open road and in
the presence of his companions, any deception that they might hope would
convert so determined and powerful an adversary.
Perhaps aware of just
how feeble these explanations would be, Strauss suggests delicately that Paul
might have been overcome by feelings of doubt and guilt during a thunderstorm
(Strauss 1879, pp. 420-25). This remarkable conjecture might be worth
discussing were it not for the fact that the doubt, the guilty, and the
thunderstorm are all invented out of whole cloth. Having made the insinuation.,
Strauss wisely drops this hypothesis and takes refuge behind the claim that the
book of Acts cannot possibly be historical.
The field of possible
explanations for Paul’s conversion is therefore reduced to this: either he was subject
to an extraordinary—and extraordinarily effective—delusion, or else what he declared
to be the cause of his conversion really happened, in which latter case we have
as strong an argument as one could wish both for the resurrection and for the
truth of the Christian religion. The strength of the evidence for the
resurrection from the conversion of Paul is therefore all practical purposes
inversely proportional to the probability that on the road to Damascus he suffered
from a hallucination. But as with the hallucination theories invoked to explain
the testimony of the disciples, this theory requires layer upon layer of improbability.
Delusions that change the minds of vicious persecutors and transform them into
faithful martyrs are unfortunately quite rare; one looks in vain for comparable
conversions among the notorious murdering zealots of the ages. And it is not
just any hallucination we need here, but a complex waking one of the despised
Jesus in glory, remonstrating with him. It is, moreover, an odd sort of hallucination
that is followed by several days of blindness.
The layers of improbability
involved in this hypothesis cannot be evaded without abandoning the text itself
and striking off into creative fiction in the manner of Strauss. Taking the
secularly described component of the relevant texts at face value, we would
suggest that P(P|~R) is at best on the order of 10-4 and plausibly a
good deal lower, whereas on the assumption of R there is no difficulty
whatsoever accounting for P. As a consequence, we conservatively take the Bayes
factor for the conversion of Paul in favor of the resurrection to be at least
103. (Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew, “The Argument from Miracles:
A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth,” in William Lane
Craig and J.P. Moreland, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
[Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012],593-662. here pp. 628-30)