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Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God (Romans 1:1, ESV).
In the book “Trustworthy,” the author Benjamin Shaw writes…
It is an incredible fact that within the New Testament, we have the writings of someone who persecuted the church. His name is Paul, and he aggressively and violently persecuted early Christians.
Paul writes about himself in 1 Corinthians 15:9, “For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.” Those who have read the Book of Acts know of the bright shining light through which Jesus said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
Reason #4 for the Reliability of the New Testament: the conversion of Paul.
Saul’s (aka Paul’s) world was upended when Jesus spoke to him. When I read the Saul/Paul conversion, I think of my own upending when I became a Christian on a beach in Florida. How about your upending?
But Paul’s conversion was totally unique, as another scholar writes…
It is reasonable to believe that the evidence which convinced such a man of the out-and-out wrongness of his former course and led him so decisively to abandon previously cherished beliefs for a movement which he had so vigorously opposed must have been of a singularly impressive quality. The conversion of Paul has long been regarded as weighty evidence for the truth of Christianity. The conversion and apostleship of St. Paul alone, duly considered, was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation.
After his conversion, Paul spent 14 years in spiritual hibernation until Barnabas grabbed him out of his hometown of Tarsus and brought him back to help with the huge revival in Antioch. After being set aside by church leaders in Antioch, Paul traveled on three recorded mission trips in the Book of Acts, wrote 13 books of the New Testament, and finally died a martyr.
Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that he was trained by Jesus in the deserts of Arabia. Understanding all of Paul’s writings in the New Testament, we must conclude that his ideas have a supernatural origin. His concepts of grace and mercy are so revolutionary that they cannot be found in any other writings of the ancient world. His new ideas about “love” so upended the self-serving concepts of the ancient world that Paul had to take an obscure existing word, dust it off, and give it a new meaning, and then wrote 1 Corinthians 13 to help us understand the true meaning of love!
Amazing — a former Pharisee trained at the Judaic Harvard of his day, an ardent persecutor of the church, then a Christian, and then writing not just brilliant theology, but teaching ideas that can only be explained by divine inspiration.
I believe in the reliability of the New Testament because Saul, the persecutor, became Paul, the apostle.