Derek Thomas

There's a little footnote in some of your versions that to me can also be translated in me.

Not just...

that the Lord Jesus was revealed objectively to him as a reference to the Damascus Road incident where he saw the risen Jesus.

But he was revealed in Paul, close to his heart, convincing his heart.

So the real reason why Paul is a Christian is because Jesus was revealed in him.

A French atheist by the name of Renan said about the Damascus Road experience of the Apostle Paul that Saul of Tarsus had an uneasy conscience.

He was unstrung in his nerves.

He was fatigued, his eyes inflamed by the hot sun, feverish, hallucinating all the time.

And that's just a humanistic way of trying to explain the experience of the conversion of the Apostle Paul.

And Paul, of course, would laugh in his face and say to him, you weren't there.

I know what I saw.

And I wasn't hallucinating or feverish or sick in any way.

He was in full possession of his faculties.

And in the course of his journey to snuff out the Christian church, he was arrested in every faculty of his being by the reality of the risen, ascended Jesus.

And it changed his life.

So, he had a past, and he had a conversion, and then he tells us about his gospel.

The accusations are that Paul never learned this gospel from the apostles in Jerusalem.

Now, you have to go back to around 50 AD, and who are the important people?

You know, there are important people.

There are people with names and influence in the church.