In Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus appeared to his disciples for a limited period of forty days, after which his body ascended to Heaven. So Luke believed that Paul’s vision, which happened years after the ascension, was essentially distinct from the Easter visions of the Twelve.42 But Luke was writing decades after the Damascus experience. When Paul was dictating his letters in the 50s, the stories of Jesus’s physical meetings with the Twelve had not yet become part of the tradition. Paul knew nothing about the forty-day period and had never heard of Jesus’s ascension as a
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