Saul of Tarsus
In 1994, well-respected cosmologist Frank Tipler published The Physics of Immortality, which, he writes, is "a description of the Omega Point Theory, which is a testable physical theory for an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God who will one day in the far future resurrect every single one of us to live forever in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven." How well Tipler proved his "Omega Point Theory" is debatable. Well, maybe not debatable; physicists excoriated the book, and one reviewer called it "a masterpiece of pseudoscience."
In 2007, Dr. Tipler published a sequel (of sorts)—The Physics of Christianity—which, as the title says, promotes his claims that physics can explain much of Christianity, from Jesus' miracles to the fulfillment of end-time prophecies. And even God Himself. "The Cosmological Singularity is the Judeo-Christian God," he writes in the introduction; the "Cosmological Singularity" is the infinitely hot and infinitely dense whatever-it-was that supposedly exploded at the big bang and out of which space, time, matter, and energy—at least the space, time, matter, and energy of our universe—emerged.
Voilà! Yahweh Himself, as Creator, reduced to modern physics.
In the book, Tipler also uses science to show, for instance, how Jesus walked on water:
If Jesus had a mass of 178 pounds, or about 80.8 kilograms (I shall justify this mass shortly), then the force that must be exerted to support his weight against the force of gravity is F = Mg = (80.8 kg)(9.80 m/sec2) = 792 newtons. But the force is the momentum p carried away by the neutrinos per unit time, and for nearly massless particles, such as neutrinos, the momentum equals the energy divided by the speed of light. But if the energy of the neutrinos comes from the annihilation of matter, then this energy equals the mass of the matter annihilated times the speed of light squared (E = mc2). Thus p/t = (E/c)/t = (mc2/c)/t = mc/t = Mg. Thus, the amount of mass that must be annihilated per second, or m/t, must equal Mg/c = (792 Newtons)/(3.00 × 108 m/sec) = 2.64 milligrams per second. Thus, if the field responsible for converting matter into neutrinos extends a short distance into the water below Jesus' feet, and if this field is capable of directing all the neutrinos downward, Jesus would walk on water. Or ascend into the clouds after His Resurrection.
This isn't a caricature, farce, nor satire. He's serious!
Jesus' resurrection, he says, can be explained by physics as well. Tipler writes about such things as baryon annihilation and electroweak tunneling, which "would convert all the matter in Jesus' body into neutrinos, which interact so weakly with matter that a person in a room with Jesus would see Jesus vanish." However, he then says that "reversing the process could carry out materialization apparently out of nothing. The Resurrection is then merely an example of the first dematerialization of Jesus' dead body, followed by the materialization of a living body."
However well-meaning Tipler's intent, his book represents how powerful scientism is. Scientism is the idea—a philosophical (not a scientific) idea, wrong in every aspect—that "natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth."
Yet it's a myth. (You think that ours is the only era that doesn't believe in myths? But it's not myth, you say, it's true because it is science. But that sentiment itself—that because it's science, it must be true—is the great myth of the modern age.) Thus, the "entire domain of truth" includes the resurrection of Jesus, which, as Tipler argues, comes down to physics. Once we understand the physics, even the resurrection of Jesus Christ becomes more believable.
Yet one doesn't need to understand baryon annihilation and electroweak tunneling to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. We have been given powerful reasons to believe, without the fanciful physics of a quixotic cosmologist. We have eyewitness testimony and multiple historical sources, and even these far-fetched and ad hoc attempts to deny it (Space aliens? Hallucinations? Jesus' twin brother?), which have had the opposite effect, help to make the resurrection of Christ the most plausible explanation for the events. After all, these are what these people have to come up with to try to explain it!
And we have even more evidence as well: the testimony and witness of Saul of Tarsus (a.k.a. the apostle Paul).
One of the ironies of truth (yes, truth can be ironic) is that the most explicitly detailed theological explanation in Scripture of the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection came from someone who wasn't there for any of it and didn't appear in Scripture until years after it all happened.
Saul of Tarsus wasn't among the original Twelve. He wasn't at the baptism of Jesus; he didn't hear the voice from heaven: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17).
Saul was nowhere near when Jesus spoke the Beatitudes, when He healed the lepers, or when He raised Lazarus from the dead. Where was Saul when, in the upper room, "as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them and said, 'Take, eat; this is My body' " (Mark 14:22)?
Saul was not in the Garden when Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Saul was not there when Jesus was interrogated by Herod, Pilate, or the high priest. He didn't see the scourging, nor was he present when Jesus was mocked by the soldiers: "And having blindfolded Him, they struck Him on the face and asked Him, saying, 'Prophesy! Who is the one who struck You?' " (Luke 22:64).
Who knows where Saul of Tarsus was when Jesus was led to the cross and was crucified, crying out:
"Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do."
And they divided His garments and cast lots (Luke 23:34).
Where was Saul when, after Jesus died, His body was taken down and put in Joseph's tomb? Where was Saul when Mary, having seen the empty tomb, ran and told the disciples about it? Where was Saul when, on Sunday morning, the women came to the empty tomb?
And when Jesus first emerged after His resurrection, to whom did He appear? Not to Saul of Tarsus, but to Mary, to a group of women, to the two travelers on the road to Emmaus, and to those in the shut room. "Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, 'Peace be with you.' When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord" (John 20:19, 20).
Saul of Tarsus, wherever he was, was not among them, and so he neither saw nor experienced any of these events.
Nor was Saul there when Jesus later appeared at the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus then came and took the bread and gave it to them, and likewise the fish.
This is now the third time Jesus showed Himself to His disciples after He was raised from the dead (John 21:13, 14).
And where was Saul of Tarsus during the final days of Christ's earthly ministry, when the resurrected Christ "presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God" (Acts 1:3)?
There's no record of Saul's presence during the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost or when Peter stood up before the crowd and preached Jesus. And, certainly, Saul of Tarsus was not among those early Jews who, hearing the preaching of Peter, accepted Jesus and were baptized. "Then those who gladly received his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls were added to them" (Acts 2:41).
During all of these world-changing events, Saul of Tarsus, at least according to the biblical texts, was a nonperson—a no-show. He had nothing to do with any of the incidents regarding the birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and early post-resurrection appearances of Jesus of Nazareth. Nothing at all.
Instead, Saul of Tarsus's chronological debut in Scripture doesn't occur until a few years later, with the stoning of Stephen—the first recorded martyr in the church.
An early Jewish follower of Jesus, Stephen was besting his Jewish contemporaries over discussions of whether or not Jesus was the Messiah. "Then there arose some from what is called the Synagogue of the Freedmen (Cyrenians, Alexandrians, and those from Cilicia and Asia), disputing with Stephen. And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the Spirit by which he spoke" (Acts 6:9, 10). Unable to "resist the wisdom," his opponents—having convinced people to lie about him (as they had with Jesus)—did the next best thing: they had him arrested and brought before a tribunal where the charges against him were similar to what Jesus had been charged with. "This man does not cease to speak blasphemous words against this holy place and the law; for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses delivered to us" (verses 13, 14).
Unlike Jesus before His accusers, Stephen then began a monologue recounting the history of the Hebrew people as revealed in Scripture. Starting with Abraham, he worked his way through: from Joseph going alone into Egypt to Moses with the whole Hebrew nation leaving it, their entrance into the Promised Land, and to King David and then King Solomon, who built the first temple.
Then, after quoting Isaiah about the transcendence and sovereignty of God, Stephen shifted gears abruptly. Something must have happened, not recorded, between him and the council because, instead of continuing the history (he never got to other major events, such as the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, the return from captivity, and the rebuilding of the temple), Stephen suddenly aimed his discourse directly at the tribunal: "You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers, who have received the law by the direction of angels and have not kept it" (Acts 7:51–53).
In short, your fathers killed those who prophesized about the Messiah, but you—you killed the Messiah Himself!
It's hard to imagine a more direct attack, telling these people that instead of being the guardians of the truth that they had been entrusted with—"who have received the law by the direction of angels" (verse 53)—they, like their forefathers, had worked against it, even though nothing their ancestors had done compared to betraying and murdering Jesus.
"Cut to the heart" (verse 54)—that is, furious (perhaps with some unconscious guilt?)—they revealed that fury when "they gnashed at him with their teeth" (verse 54). Probably not helping matters was Stephen, who was then gazing upward toward heaven and proclaiming, "Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!" (verse 56). Claiming to see the Messiah in heaven next to the Father? In a rage, the crowd "ran at him with one accord; and they cast him out of the city and stoned him" (verses 57, 58).
It was amid this outrageous fury and this expression of the antagonism and hatred against these early Jewish believers in Jesus—it is now, at this moment, when these leaders made "official" their rejection of Jesus—that Saul of Tarsus first appears.
In the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, two British secret agents during the Cold War were discussing their number one Soviet nemesis, code-named "Karla."