Paul Had A Near Death Experience On The Road To Damascus

     The Apostle Paul had a Near Death Experience on the road to Damascus. He didn’t just fall down, and it wasn’t just a waking vision. This is the only known experience which can account for his sudden and dramatic transformation, and which can account for how he describes things in his letters. But what about those men who were with him who heard a voice, but saw no one? This can also be accounted for by a similar phenomenon called a “shared death experience.”
     Near Death Experiences, or NDEs, occur when a person is clinically dead for a certain length of time, either the brain has died or the heart has stopped or both, and has then resuscitated back to life. These experiences are marked by specific events that, while tailored to the individual, show a remarkable degree of consistency across all cultures, religions, languages, and societies. These experiences generally include one or more of the following: a displacement from one’s body, being removed to a place where time is not experienced, meeting relatives or friends who are deceased whether or not the person knows about either them or their death, meeting a “Being of Light” or religious figures like Jesus Christ, a life review where a person experiences their lives from the point of view of those they’ve interacted with positively or negatively,  an experience of union with God or Source, and being either told they’re returning to their body or being given the choice to stay or return. An NDE can take place over mere minutes, hours, or even, in Dr. Eben Alexander's case, a week of being brain dead from a bacteria that had reduced his cerebral cortex to pulp. By 2013, Dr. Bruce Greyson, M.D. states in his article for the medical journal “Missouri Medicine” that “around nine million people in the United States alone have reported this kind of experience.” P.M.H. Atwater writes, “There's no denying that experiencers become quite intuitive afterward. Psychic displays can be commonplace, such as: out-of-body episodes, manifestation of "beings" met in near-death state, "remembering" the future, finishing another's sentence, "hearing" plants and animals "speak." This behavior is not only worrisome to relatives and friends, it can become frightening to them. A person's religious beliefs do not alter or prevent this amplification of faculties and stimuli. Yet, experiencers willing to learn how to control and refine these abilities, consider them beneficial.” She also writes, “Life paradoxes begin to take on a sense of purpose and meaning, as forgiveness tends to replace former needs to criticize and condemn. Hard driving achievers and materialists can transform into easy-going philosophers; but, by the same token, those more relaxed or uncommitted before can become energetic "movers and shakers," determined to make a difference in the world. Personality reversals seem to depend more on what's "needed" to round out the individual's inner growth than on any uniform outcome. Although initially bewildered, families can be so impressed by what they witness that they, too, change-making the experience a "shared event."
     People who have Near Death Experiences typically will remember their experience with perfect or near perfect clarity. They will describe it as being “more real than real.” According to Dr. Greyson, “A recent review of research into the characteristic changes following NDEs found the most commonly reported to be loss of fear of death; strengthened belief in life after death; feeling specially favored by God; a new sense of purpose or mission; heightened self-esteem; increased compassion and love for others; lessened concern for material gain, recognition, or status; greater desire to serve others; increased ability to express feelings; greater appreciation of, and zest for, life; increased focus on the present; deeper religious faith or heightened spirituality; search for knowledge; and greater appreciation for nature. These aftereffects have been corroborated by interviews with near-death experiencers’ significant others and by long-term longitudinal studies."
     A shared death experience is when someone literally starts seeing or experiencing all or part of what a dying person is experiencing. They can happen to people in the same room and they can also happen remotely to people in a different room or even in another country. Like near death experiences, there are some doctors who study and document this phenomenon, and there are many doctors, nurses, and "death doulas"who have experienced it themselves. One doctor and nurse who weren't related to the dying patient at all literally saw a spectral image of the dying man's already passed wife hovering over him waiting to receive him as recounted in the book "Not Yet" by Dr. Jeff O'Driscoll, M.D.
     There are literally thousands of NDE testimonies available to read on the website for the International Association of Near Death studies, as well as many, many recorded videos of people relating their experiences in interviews and podcasts on YouTube. Two however stand out at the moment for this purpose and these are Howard Storm’s and Betty Guadagno’s (also known as “Buddha Betty”), both of whose testimonies I highly recommend finding and watching. Howard Storm was a former, extremely atheist art professor who experienced a near-death event in June 1985 after suffering a catastrophic duodenal perforation while traveling with students in Paris, France. He describes himself as being an arrogant, selfish man prior to his NDE. His near death experience led him to not only turn away from atheism, but to become a pastor in the United Church of Christ. Betty Guadagno’s near-death experience occurred in March 2019 following a severe drug overdose, completely transforming her life from a multi-decade battle with homelessness, trauma, and severe addiction into a journey of recovery and spiritual teaching.
      The more information I read and consume about NDEs and their after effects, the more I recognize a pattern that feels very, very familiar, and should to anyone who's studied Paul the Apostle. Paul’s pattern of behavior, extreme change in beliefs and practices away from Pharisaic Judaism, previously uncharacteristic yet extreme Christo-centric spirituality and mysticism as documented explicitly in Philippians 3, demonstrations of supernatural abilities, extreme increase in compassion and love, loss of attachment to material things, and near total loss of the fear of death fits the pattern of NDE after effects perfectly. Add to this his statement in his letter to the Galatians that he wasn't taught his gospel by human beings but by Jesus Christ Himself. Numerous near death experiencers report speaking with Christ, asking questions, and getting clear answers during their encounter in a completely timeless setting. While only minutes might pass for the rest of us, these encounters feel like years, centuries, or even millennia have passed as well as no time at all. Everything about Paul's narrative in the book of Acts, and what he writes about his own experiences fits the pattern of an NDE perfectly. 
      According to Acts chapter 9, Paul was on his way with a group of other men to hunt down followers of the Way and drag them in chains back to Jerusalem, "breathing murderous threats against them." Suddenly, he's engulfed in light and falls to the ground. He and those with him were on their feet and Paul suddenly drops to the ground. In the middle of this light, he then sees Jesus who asks him why he's hunting Him down. During the conversation, the men who are with him hear the voice of Jesus but see no one. Jesus then, literally in the Greek, tells him to "resurrect," and head for Damascus. Jesus uses two words in the Greek which are usually translated in this account something akin to "get up," but these two words are usually translated as "resurrect" and "awaken." Everything about this short account screams Near Death Experience by Paul, and shared death experiences on the part of those men with him.
     Why then, if Paul was dead and then resuscitated does the account in Acts not say this directly? Luke would have only learned of it from Paul. I can only speculate, but it could be that neither Paul himself nor the men with him knew he was dead during the time he was on the ground because of how fast it happened within time. When someone experiences an NDE they always report it occuring in a “timeless” state. They can’t tell if minutes, hours, years or even centuries are passing, or if no time is passing at all. They can watch their entire lives play out one event at a time, and yet when they return, only minutes have passed if that. If Paul had more of a conversation with Jesus, why doesn’t Acts record it? Honestly, because that wasn’t Luke’s purpose and Paul would later consider the things he heard and saw there things he wasn’t to speak of, at least not directly.
     What Paul records having done after the event in his letter to the Galatians also evokes many NDE testimonies. He states that, after it happened and presumably after he regained his sight in Damascus, he didn’t talk to anyone about what he heard and saw from Jesus, but spent several years in the deserts in Arabia trying to sort it all out. Many people who have NDEs don’t tell anyone about what they experienced for long periods of time as they try to sort it out and understand what they experienced, but once they do, frequently they speak with a boldness and a confidence about it regardless of anyone’s criticism or rejection. They don’t just “believe” about what happens after death, they “know” what happens and no one can tell them otherwise. This too follows Paul’s pattern.
     Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, like many people who have near death experiences, was a sharp dividing point in his life. It was the point when the Pharisee “Saul of Tarsus” died and was resurrected Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ.
     But if Paul did actually have a near death experience on the road to Damascus, why doesn’t his teaching reflect what most near death experiencers return with? First, Paul was a Roman Jewish man of the first century who was going to interpret everything through that lense. Near death experiences are always tailored to the individual, and Paul was no different. He was going to interpret anything he saw and learned through the lense of first century Judaism and Roman culture. Second, as I have written about many times, what Paul actually said in the original language and how it is translated and interpreted at times are two very different things. Much of Paul’s writings are today interpreted through the lense of theologies which were developed hundreds of years after he wrote his letters, and which frequently take his words well out of the contexts in which he wrote them. The basis of what Paul wrote about Christian practice and belief centered around the equality of everyone, union with God, the supreme importance of love, and functioning from a consciousness which has it’s Source in God rather than one’s own body. All of these things can be found spoken of in different ways within modern NDE testimonies.
     Paul the Apostle had a near death experience on the road to Damascus, and like virtually all other near death experiences which are documented, he was never the same man again.