two great pillars of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the conversion of the apostle Paul — James M. Boice

“In the eighteenth century there were two young men in England whose names were Lord Lyttleton and Gilbert West. They were unbelievers. In fact, they were strong in their unbelief. They were also both lawyers, with keen minds, and they thought they had good reasons for rejecting Christianity. One day in a conversation one of them said, “Christianity stands upon a very unstable foundation. There are only two things that actually support it: the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ and the alleged conversion of Saul of Tarsus. If we can disprove those stories, which should be rather easy to do, Christianity will collapse like a house of cards.”

Gilbert West said, “All right, then. I’ll write a book on the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ and disprove it.”

Lord Lyttleton said, “If you write a book on the resurrection, I’ll write on the alleged appearance of Jesus to the apostle Paul. You show why Jesus could not possibly have been raised from the dead, and I’ll show that the apostle Paul could not have been converted as the Bible says he was—by a voice from heaven on the road to Damascus.”

So they went off to write their books. Sometime later they met again, and one of them said to the other, “I’m afraid I have a confession to make. I have been looking into the evidence for this story, and I have begun to think that maybe there is something to it after all.” The other said, “The same thing has happened to me. But let’s keep on investigating these stories and see where we come out.”

In the end, after they had done their investigations and had written their books, each had come out on exactly the opposite side he had been on when he began his investigation. Gilbert West had written The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, arguing that it is a fact of history. And Lord Lyttleton had written The Conversion of St. Paul.

By treating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the conversion of the apostle Paul as two great pillars of Christianity, these men were saying that if the apostle Paul was not converted as the ninth chapter of Acts says he was and as he himself declares in his own recorded testimonies both before the Jews and the Gentiles, then Christianity loses one of its two most important bulwarks. Moreover, it loses its most able theologian and is considerably weakened.”

— James Montgomery Boice