I didn't say it was. My critique regarded demanding. Requesting is far, far superior to demanding. My point about requesting is that even it is not necessary. And the point there is that the non-necessity be kept in mind when assessing the expressive capabilities of the interlocutor.
Whether you label it a “request” or a “demand,” seeking objective grounding for an extraordinary claim is unavoidable if you want to distinguish fact from fiction. The moment someone asserts that their gospel came through a supernatural channel, you need more than goodwill or rhetorical flair—you need evidence. Claiming that asking for it is “not necessary” doesn’t change the reality that, without some form of corroboration, you’re left with pure assertion. Epistemic rigor isn’t an optional courtesy; it’s the difference between reasoned belief and blind acceptance.
I am going to change that word ordering so that the nature of the "authority" at issue is more precise for the purposes of your context: Paul’s claim of receiving the gospel by direct revelation on the Damascus road underpins every assertion he makes about church authority, orthodoxy and order.
I have no problem with you, um, cherrypicking from amongst Paul's statements; those are what seem to most interest you. But, the idea that the alleged Damascus road experience underpins everything he says is either too broad or too ambiguous, but a bit of a problem in any event. I just do not have the sense of Paul as a guy going around saying he had this experience therefore he is not to be questioned/challenged, and that is the impression I get from the "Damascus road underpins every assertion" notion.
Fair enough—Paul didn’t literally preface every line with “as revealed on the road to Damascus.” But the substance of his apostolic legitimacy flows from that vision: every time he claims the authority to set doctrine, rebuke false teachers, or establish churches, he implicitly invokes that direct encounter. In Galatians he contrasts his gospel with “another” gospel and insists his message came “not from man but through Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:1–2, 11–12). In 2 Corinthians he defends his ministry by pointing to “signs of a true apostle” granted through divine power rather than human persuasion. Those arguments aren’t isolated anecdotes; they form the backbone of how he justifies his teaching and how early Christians distinguished him from others. So while he didn’t shout “Damascus” on every page, that revelation remains the keystone of his entire claim to authority, orthodoxy, and church order—remove it, and the architecture of his argument collapses.
I do not doubt that some - maybe even many - early Christians thought "he spoke with divine sanction" whenever he spoke. That is them - but not him - saying he had this experience therefore he is not to be questioned/challenged. In any event, stripping that away does not leave his statements as indistinguishable from other writings. For instance, his notions about dietary restrictions can be presented as a reasoned extension from a combination of Jewish principles.
Paul’s discussion of food laws isn’t a simple extrapolation of Jewish dietary codes—it reframes the entire identity of believers around union with a crucified and risen Messiah. In Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8–10, he argues that the body is a temple of the Spirit and that love for a weaker conscience must govern practice, even if the law permits something. No preexisting Jewish or Hellenistic text intertwines eschatological new-creation theology, Christ’s atoning death, and communal ethics in the way Paul does. Remove his claim that this theology came via a direct revelation, and you have moral commentaries with no coherent center—nothing to explain why first-century congregations abandoned centuries of covenantal identity to follow his radical gospel.
That flowed from does not mean that his teachings were supposed to be regarded as not humanly composed - even if it is accepted for the sake of argument that he indeed did have a direct encounter with the divinity.
If Paul meant only that a vision spurred him, he would have described himself as a passionate teacher transformed by inspiration. Instead, he insists his gospel was delivered “not by human will nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:1–2, 11–12) and challenges anyone—Jews or Gentiles—to match the authority of his revelation. That’s not humble rhetoric; it’s a categorical denial of ordinary human authorship. Every time he defends his apostleship, he appeals to that non-human source. Stripping away that assertion destroys the very structure of his letters, which rest on an absolute distinction between visionary commission and mere human composition.
My impression of Paul is that he was better trained as a Hellene than were the other early Christian leaders, particularly those in Judaea. I would like to have seen how engagements with the relatively Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria would have gone. Regardless, the point here is that it has long been my impression that there were very few - if any - people in Paul's circle who would have been well suited for pressing him about how he regarded any relationship between his Damascus road experience and his later thinking.
Paul didn’t hide from challenge—he recounts it in his own letters. In Galatians 2:11–14 he describes openly confronting Peter in Antioch over table fellowship, revealing that his arguments and claims were scrutinized by respected leaders. In 2 Corinthians he spends entire chapters defending his apostolic credentials against critics who accused him of being “inferior” and “crafty.” Those exchanges show Paul’s Damascus road vision never replaced debate; it became the very premise he defended with human arguments, exactly the opposite of an unchallenged, secretly divine claim.
In particular, if the epistles attributed to Paul were actually written later than when Paul would have lived, then I would like to have seen an engagement between the author(s) of those epistles and Jewish scholars from around that time who were addressing the nature of prophecy, which is here to say the nature of divine inspiration.
Seven undisputed Pauline letters date to the 50s CE—well within Paul’s lifetime—and show no hint of Alexandria-style academic debate, because early Christians met in house churches, not formal schools. Pseudonymous letters (Ephesians, Pastoral Epistles) came later, but they too never record public disputations with Jewish exegetes. That absence reflects the social reality of a marginalized movement, not proof of supernatural authenticity. True oration on divine inspiration leaves no transcript; the only surviving record is letters shaped by human contexts and conventions.
But, none of that ever happened. Yet, it can happen now, because the issues are not settled by history.
History offers the data we have—archaeological finds, manuscript evidence, contemporaneous citations, and internal critiques. No record of a first-century rabbinic debate on Paul’s inspiration survives, and that vacuum cannot be filled by retrospective discussion. Modern debates may clarify interpretation, but they cannot rewrite the past or produce new evidence of divine origin. The only reasonable conclusion, based on existing evidence, is that Paul’s vision remains unverifiable personal testimony, and his epistles bear all the hallmarks of human composition and editorial transmission.
Or, on a different interpretation, my assertion emphasizes the importance of imagination so that considerations in terms of multiple possibilities can best be assured in the attempt to realize the most trans-perspectival understanding. That sort of understanding - not consensus - is the most worthwhile goal. Interpretation always transcends rote repetition inasmuch as interpretation necessarily involves some amount of - some sort of - understanding, and that is the case even in the absence of objective standards.
Invoking “imagination” and “multiple possibilities” without objective criteria is a recipe for unrestrained speculation, not insight. Serious exegesis employs well-established tools—Koine Greek grammar, manuscript comparison, first-century historical context, lexicon studies—to narrow down readings to the most plausible meaning. Those methods aren’t arbitrary consensus-building; they’re repeatable, evidence-based procedures that converge on a text’s likely intent.
If we abandon them in favor of pure “trans-perspectival” fancy, every conjecture—from Paul’s words being literal divine dictation to them being cryptic codes—becomes equally valid. No stable understanding could emerge. Consensus arises precisely because independent scholars apply the same rigorous standards and reach the same core interpretation of Galatians 1:11: Paul frames his gospel as a revelation he received, using familiar human rhetoric. That shared result proves that interpretation, governed by objective methods, transcends mere parroting without dissolving into endless flights of imagination.
NHC
