This man, named after Apollo and shining forth Tyana,
Extinguished the fault of men.
The tomb in Tyana (received) his body,
But in truth heaven received him
So he might drive out the pains from men.23
As with Jesus there were debates among his devotees as to whether his body remained in a tomb or whether he was assumed bodily into heaven. The early-third-century Roman emperor Caracalla built a shrine to Apollonius, and Caracalla’s successor, the emperor Alexander Severus, is alleged to have had a private shrine in which the images of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ, and Apollonius were given divine honors.24
If Jesus’ followers came to believe in his resurrection only after a period of despair, and in Galilee, far removed from the empty tomb in Jerusalem, based on visionary experiences, they were surely open to the charge that the entire phenomenon was mass hallucination. That Matthew, who gives us our first and earliest account of such a group appearance, says it took place on a mountain but that some of the eleven disciples doubted, while others believed, was clearly quite problematic for Luke and for John, writing a generation later (Matthew 28:17).
That is also why Luke, alone of our four gospels records a scene in which Jesus ascends bodily from the earth, taken away in a cloud from the Mount of Olives, just east of Jerusalem, as the eleven apostles stand gazing into the sky (Acts 1:9–10). To leave him bodily on earth, eating and drinking, in his physical form, simply would not do, since one would presume that like others “raised from the dead” by Jesus, he would have eventually died again as he grew older. And John, although he has no ascension scene per se, records that Jesus said that he was “ascending to where he was before” (John 6:62).
These New Testament gospels and the book of Acts take us decades beyond Paul, into a time and place that he never lived to see. It is deeply ironic that Paul is in some ways the shadow behind all four of our gospels, yet to understand Paul we need to put the gospels aside, which means, at least in terms of sources, to learn to read the New Testament backward. If we can resist making assumptions and pick up Paul’s letters with fresh eyes, we will capture an amazing moment in time, for which he is our only firsthand source. We will learn how Paul transformed the original Christianity into a new religion that claimed to abrogate and supersede the “old” by moving everything from earth to heaven.
FOUR
LAST BUT NOT LEAST
Paul believed that God had selected him before his birth for a singular and pivotal mission that would determine the future of the cosmos. Though Jesus had directly chosen the twelve apostles, and in that order of things Paul came after them, God’s choosing him before birth would actually make Paul the first apostle. Paul was further convinced that his specific role in God’s plan of salvation was predicted in various prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, just as was the role of Christ. Although Jesus had instructed the twelve apostles over a period of three years, Paul did not believe that he had disclosed to them the hidden mystery of God’s secret plan, nor revealed to them “the Announcement” that Paul referred to as “my Gospel.” That came later, when God chose to reveal his Son, the heavenly glorified Christ, to Paul and to Paul alone:
But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia. (Galatians 1:15–17)
Arabia, as Paul uses the term here, refers to the desert area south of the Land of Israel, where Mount Sinai was located (Galatians 4:25). This rather extraordinary decision of Paul, to go to Arabia, is not mentioned at all in the book of Acts, where Paul heads up to Jerusalem right after his Damascus road revelation and even meets the apostles—something Paul swears was absolutely not the case (Acts 9:26–28). Either the author of Acts knows nothing about the Arabian sojourn, or he is so keen to have Paul linked with the Jerusalem apostles that he purposely ignores it. So why did Paul go to Arabia?
Mount Sinai, also known as Mount Horeb, is called the “mountain of God” in the Torah. It was the sacred place, the “holy ground” where God first spoke to Moses in a burning bush, giving him his critical mission to gather the people of Israel and bring them into the Promised Land. It was also on this mountain, over a forty-day period, that God delivered to Moses the revelation of the Torah (Exodus 3:1–6; 34:27–28). When Moses came down from the mountain the skin of his face was glowing, because he had been talking directly with God, exposed to God’s glory (Exodus 34:29). As a result of this revelation Moses made a covenant between God and the people of Israel. The covenant and the giving of the Torah became the foundational pillars of Judaism, as Paul points out (Romans 9:4). Mount Sinai was also the place to which the prophet Elijah retreated, and it was there, in a cave in the same mountain, that he had his own extraordinary encounter with God, speaking with him face-to-face and also witnessing God’s glory (1 Kings 19:1–18).
It was neither accident nor arbitrary choice that drove Paul into the Arabian desert immediately after he received his initial vision of Christ. Paul traveled to that desolate area not to confer with any human being, but to hear directly from Jesus Christ: “For I would have you know brethren, that the Gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from a man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12). Paul doesn’t say how long he stayed in Arabia, but he does note that it was three years after his vision of Christ when he finally went up to Jerusalem to meet Peter and James (Galatians 1:18). That visit appears to have been a clandestine one, in that he swears he did not meet any of the other apostles, only these two leaders. One must assume he wanted to convey to them his own experience of seeing Christ and to gain, if possible, some measure of acceptance from them.
It is certainly not far-fetched to imagine that Paul spent his time in Arabia in isolation, perhaps at one of the mountains that he identified as Sinai, praying, meditating, and trying to sort through his dramatic experiences. Like the Twelve he had his own “three years” with Jesus—but now as the glorified heavenly Christ!
In 2 Corinthians 12 Paul mentions an ecstatic experience that he had “fourteen years ago” in which he was taken up into the heavenly realms, and even entered paradise, seeing and hearing things that were so extraordinary he was not permitted to reveal them. He uses the third person, for irony’s sake, but in the context he is obviously talking about himself: