The Cast: Paul, The Abducted

Paul in a UFO

Saul, circa 42 CE, travelling a country road to Damascus to work some havoc among the Christians, was met on the way by a brightly shining flying saucer.  What Saul saw was so bright that it blinded him for three days.  While the light was shining on him, he also heard a voice, and Saul said to the voice, who are you?  The speaker from the spacecraft said I am Jesus, and by hurting the Christians you are hurting me.

Saul retells his UFO experience in the third person, as though it happened to another man, so as not to seem to be boosting, but many Bible scholars agree that he meant himself. 

Visions were very popular in the early church.  The foundation for the new structure must be laid very carefully, and Christ himself was looking after its erection since He is the main cornerstone of the colossal organism. 

1. Ananias, in a vision, was told to go and lay his hands on Saul to restore his sight. 
2. Cornelius saw an angel, which asked him to call Simon to his house so that Simon could preach to them all. 
3. Simon said that he would not have come except that he had just seen a vision. 
4. In the vision, the Lord had told him that the new message was not for the Jews only but for all four corners of the earth. That was a truth that the Jews found hard to accept, for until that time Jehovah had told the Jews repeatedly that He was the God of the Jews only. 
5. In the book of The Revelation, John, the supposed writer, saw many interesting scenes.  He saw scenes of the phases through which humanity would be passing and he saw portrayals of the troubles our globe would be experiencing in its last days.  He was also reminded of the promise given to the disciples, two-thirds of a century earlier, namely, that Jesus, the Son of God would return to earth in a spacecraft.

These various “visions” were given to early church leaders; to an unscientific world, in a superstitious time.  Consequently, they were and are effective.  The fact that we now know how the visions could have been presented does not destroy or even minimize the message.  No longer do we need to take all the impossible to understand passages of Scripture by faith alone.  Now, our faith in Jesus Christ can also be based on scientific manifestation.

Saint Paul, formerly known as Saul, the writer of about half of the New Testament, said that boasting was not expedient but that if he was going to boast about anything it would be of the visions and revelations he had received in the past, and of being caught up into paradise. 

Paul admits that he does not know whether he went in the body or out of the body, but that he was caught up to the third heaven. 2 Cor. 12:2.   It is interesting that he should have specified the third heaven. The first heaven may be the plane in which the birds fly, the stratosphere; the second heaven perhaps the mesosphere, the space above earth's clouds; the third heaven is space (where UFO’s feel at home)!  

he was caught up.  The word which is used here (ἁρπάζω harpazō) means, to seize upon, to snatch away, as wolves do their prey; or ... to hurry off by force or involuntarily. In the case before us there is implied the idea that Paul was conveyed by a foreign force; or that he was suddenly seized and snatched up to heaven. The word expresses the suddenness and the rapidity with which it was done. Probably it was instantaneous, so that he appeared at once to be in heaven. Barnes commentary. Barnes.  Most likely, Barnes was not thinking of UFO involvement, however, his definition most certainly fits that possibility.

Saint Paul and The Hills

The report of Paul’s incident sounds like a forerunner of the “Barney and Betty Hill case”. They, also, were caught up in a spacecraft and were hypnotized.  Paul writes about his hypnosis this way. He did not know whether he had gone with or without his body and now that he was back, he could not repeat the words that he had heard.

  

he heard words that now, to him, were unspeakable. 2 Cor. 12:4.  His experience was not unlike that of the Hills.   They also could not repeat or explain what they had heard or experienced on the spaceship until a doctor, using regressive hypnosis, got them to explain what had happened to them on their unexpected space flight. 
For this story see: 
http://www.ufocasebook.com/Hill.html

We can only wish that a doctor, understanding hypnosis, had been with the apostle Paul; he might have been able to elicit the facts from Paul.  How different our understanding of the Scriptures would be if Saint Paul had explained to all of us what he saw, heard and experienced on the spaceship.  The Bible is loaded with confirmations of the idea of UFOs; it is just that we have been taught not to see them when we read the Bible.

By reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations, my experience in the UFO; was so far beyond normal that I might have started bragging about it, but to keep that from happening there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, something that torments me.  three times I begged the Lord that it might depart from me, but He said no.  2 Cor. 12:7-8.   It has been reported many times by those who have been abducted by aliens that after they return they have some kind of physical ailment or deformity.  Paul also experienced a physical problem; he called it a thorn in the flesh.

I can't help but wonder, would there have been a benefit to the world at large if Paul would have written exactly what went on in the UFO.    Probably, the church fathers would have considered his letter as “so much rubbish”, that our book of Second Corinthians would have suffered the same fate as the Book of Enoch did.

Some Bible teachers believe that there were actually four letters by Paul to the Church at Corinth, but we have only the first and the third in our Bible.  Is it possible that Paul's second and the fourth letters to Corinth had some of Paul’s UFO experiences in them?  Is it also possible that that is why those two letters were excluded from our Bible like the Book of Enoch has been?

From the third century onward, (when the canon of our Bible was being formed), the church fathers were of the opinion that if they did not like a teaching, a truth or a fact, they would simply hide it from the public by not including it in the Bible.  

Unfortunately, the same can be said about present-day religious leaders and Bible teachers.  We know the Bible teaches things we don't believe but we will not teach them because, if we do, we will lose our jobs.