Do you know what these people have in common:

The widow of Zarephath’s son

The Shunammite woman’s son

An unnamed man — After Elisha’s death and burial, some men burying another body threw the corpse into Elisha’s tomb to escape raiders. When it touched Elisha’s bones, the man came back to life and stood up (2 Kings 13:20–21).

The widow of Nain’s son

Jairus’ daughter

Lazarus of Bethany

Many saints (holy people) — At the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross, the tombs broke open, and many bodies of saints who had died were raised. After Jesus’ resurrection, they came out of the tombs, entered Jerusalem, and appeared to many people (Matthew 27:50–53). These are unnamed but described as a group.

Jesus Christ

Tabitha (also called Dorcas)

Eutychus

As you might have guessed, these people were raised from the dead in the bible.  If many people were raised from the dead in the bible, why was Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, so special? After all, Paul said if the dead are not raised then we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we die, and if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!  Why does this matter? 

At the resurrection Paul thought Jesus’ body was exchanged for a spiritual body (pneumatikos), which allowed him to simultaneously indwell in all willing believers as the mind of Christ/Christ in you, supercharging you in you war against the fleshly and the demonic.

Part of Paul’s problem was that he wanted to be worthy of Christ, yet he struggled to reconcile his issues with his calling (I do what I don’t want to do), and he was at odds with the ones he should have been closest to (the other Christ factions like Apollus and Cephas).  In Paul’s theology, Christ’s return was expected imminently, and his churches were the fruit of his labors. He worked tirelessly to keep them pure, unified, and growing so he could “present” them—unblemished, as a virgin bride, a sanctified offering, or a cause for boasting—rather than have his efforts prove “in vain.” This was about fulfilling his apostolic calling to deliver faithful communities to the returning Lord.

The Apostle Paul expressed a strong desire to present the churches he founded (particularly the Gentile believers he evangelized) as a pure, acceptable offering or “gift” to Christ at his return.  The “gift” language aligns with the biblical idea of an offering or sacrifice (prosphora in Greek), which Paul applies to the churches themselves.  As I said, what is notable in all this that if Christ is not raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sin, the cross then is not enough for dealing with sin for Paul.

Jesus’s raising was special for Paul because he thought Jesus was the “first fruits” of the general resurrection harvest of souls, which in other words meant Paul thought the apocalypse had begun, just as Jesus before him thought it was imminent.   We generally see the gospel resurrection accounts as legendary apotheosis (becoming a god) narratives, but what we see in Paul goes back to the beginnings of the faith. 

When Paul talks about the appearances of the risen Jesus, he uses the same word Luke uses to indicate “All flesh will ‘see’ the salvation of the Lord,” and so could be figurative seeing just as well as literal seeing.  So, the followers could have seen anything from a glimpse of what could have been Jesus in the marketplace, to a celestial anomaly like as comet as in the case of Caesar’s deification.  Whatever things they thought they saw or felt/experienced, it was enough to make them think Jesus’ death may not have been random but was in fact a sacrifice.  We have no reason to suppose it was part of the plan for Jesus to be arrested and executed, as we are told the followers were armed and got violent with the arresting party.

It’s odd that Paul, coming from Tarsus, the birthplace of the stoic enlightenment, would have refashioned his entire life because he encountered Jesus as a ghost.  Analogously, the closest thing to a Stoic engagement with ghosts is a popular anecdote from Pliny the Younger (Letters 7.27, ~AD 100), about Athenodorus Cananites (a 1st-century BC Stoic philosopher and tutor to the future Augustus). He rents a suspiciously cheap haunted house in Athens. A chained ghost appears at night, beckoning him. Athenodorus calmly follows it (while finishing his writing first, in true Stoic fashion), marks the spot where it vanishes, and has the authorities dig up the courtyard the next day. They find a shackled skeleton, give it proper burial, and the haunting ends.  This aligns with Jesus being given a dishonorable burial, for instance.  Scholars like McGrath, Ehrman, and Crossan point to a dishonorable burial of Jesus.   Crossan famously argues Jesus was likely left on the cross or tossed into a common/mass grave for animals (no individual burial at all).

As Nietzsche noted, another reasonable approach for Paul was that he was hallucinating Jesus.  Bereavement hallucinations for the disciples and mass hallucination for the 500 makes sense, as with the Fatima mass sky hallucination.  Paul might have been feeling cognitive dissonance for killing forgiving Stephen, or because he was persecuting a movement he had cousins in like Junia. 

The Stoics distinguished between healthy perceptions and “defective” ones using two main concepts: 

• Empty Representations (kenon phantasma): These are impressions that occur without any external object striking the senses at all. A classic example used by Stoic sources (like Sextus Empiricus) is the hero Orestes, who, in his madness, believed he saw Furies that were not actually there.
• Misprinted Representations: These occur when an external object is present, but the mind perceives it incorrectly. An example is Heracles in his madness, who looked at his own children but saw them as the children of his enemy, Eurystheus. 

For a Stoic, the primary goal of wisdom was to only give assent (internal agreement) to “kataleptic” (clear and accurate) impressions. The Stoics argued that even if a hallucination “strikes” the mind, a wise person—if they are in their right mind—should recognize the impression as unreliable and refuse to believe it is real.  Hallucinations were labeled as “not-somethings” by some Stoics because they have no place in the physical world of existing objects. While we can think or talk about them, they do not “exist” in the same way a tree or a person does.

Certainly, if Jesus’ followers thought God’s especially beloved Jesus who was sent to restore the Davidic (seed of David) throne, the sinless one who was wrongfully brutally tortured and killed and given a dishonorable burial to the extent later thinkers would blame the destruction of the temple as punishment for the Jewish elite killing Jesus, well the followers may have expected something supernatural, such as a ghost protesting its dishonorable burial.  All of this may have led to confirmation bias hallucinations.

In any case, people will die to make the world a better place, even if the vehicle of this is a lie, and so there is no reason to think Paul is being honest about his conversion experience.  He might have seen how passionately the Christians he was persecuting stuck to their faith and morality despite torture, and thought this would be a wonderful trait for the entire world: “The end is near so you better get right with God and start loving one another!”