In my mind, I hear their rhetoric: "Who is Paul?" "Did he live and travel with Jesus?" "Was he one of the original twelve?" "If he didn't live and travel with Jesus and if he's not one of the original twelve, then what makes his teaching any more right than what we are telling you?" It was most likely that kind of reasoning that had the churches in a state of confusion.

That's why it's so important to pay careful attention to Paul's opening statements. Notice the first verse, "Paul, an apostle - sent not from men nor by men, but by Jesus Christ and God the father, who raised him from the dead."

Paul wasn't on an ego trip, but sometimes you have to make your credentials known before you can speak. If a stranger walks into my office and says "I have some questions I want to ask you. Where were you on the night of January 1?" If that stranger doesn't identify himself, I may say, "it's none of your business." On the other hand if the stranger shows me a badge and other credentials that identify him as a FBI agent, I'm probably going to get pretty nervous and answer his questions as truthfully as I know how. In declaring he was an apostle, Paul was showing his ID.

He made it clear that he was a not pretender, not an apostolic impersonator. The Lord Jesus Christ appointed him. The Damascus road experience would not have been required to convert Paul. Paul was an honest man and sooner or later the preaching of the gospel would have led him to Christ. If you doubt the validity of that conclusion, let me point out the fact that the gospel was not presented to him on the road to Damascus. Instead he was told in Acts 9:6 "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." In the city of Damascus, God used an ordinary man named Ananias to communicate his responsibility under the gospel. And Ananias did exactly that in Acts 22:16 when he said, "And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name.'" Paul became a Christian exactly the same way we become Christians by hearing and responding to the gospel.

The Damascus road experience qualified him as an apostle. God spoke to Ananias concerning his plan for Paul in Acts 9:15 "This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel." Later on when Paul was speaking to Agrippa in Acts 26:19, he said, "So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven." In 2 Corinthians 11:5, he said, "But I do not think I am in the least inferior to those 'super-apostles.'" In 1 Corinthians 15:8, he said, " last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born." The accumulated evidence of all these statements about Paul clearly show that his apostleship was just as genuine as that of the twelve. Some people have thought the gospel is too Pauline. There are those who believe that Paul tinkered with the original gospel and made it something other than what it should be. One writer even suggested that if you look only at Jesus, you still have Judaism and that's only when you add Paul to Jesus that you have Christianity. Those perspectives are seriously flawed. Paul made it very clear that his teaching came from the Lord. As a matter of fact we are dependent on the apostles for all our knowledge about Jesus. You don't go to a cookbook to find a phone number and you don't go to a dictionary to find baseball scores. You don't go to secular historians, modern day theologians or even the patristic writers of the early centuries to find out about Jesus. You to go to the apostles. The only authentic information that we have about Jesus is from the apostles. His writings about Jesus are just reliable as the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

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