Insofar as there was a view we might label “apocalyptic” in Paul’s day, he shared it. He believed that Israel’s God, having abandoned the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile and never having fulfilled his promise to return in visible and powerful glory, had revealed himself suddenly, shockingly, disruptively, in Jesus, breaking in upon an unready world and an unready people. Paul believed that this had happened not only in the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the gift of the spirit, but in his own case, and perhaps in other cases, in a moment of blinding and
...more
