Comment on “Chelyabinsk, Zond IV , and a possible first‐century fireball of historical importance”

Abstract

As an aid to the study of singular historic events (≲ once/century), such as very large fireballs (in the energy range between Chelyabinsk and Tunguska), Hartmann (2015) described distinctions among perception (the initial stimulus observed), conception (the brain's culturally influenced interpretation of what was perceived), and reporting (accounts available to later researchers). That article suggested a bright fireball as the source of three existing first-century reports of a “light from heaven, brighter than the Sun,” reportedly witnessed by a party on the road to Damascus, headed by Saul of Tarsus (later known as St. Paul). The event was reportedly the direct cause of Saul's change from persecutor to supporter of early Christians. That event, “about noon,” was described in first- and third-person quotes from Paul in three different chapters of the biblical “Acts of the Apostles” (attributed to the physician Luke, who often traveled with Paul). These texts are known only through copies, most often in Greek, from the following few centuries. According to those accounts, some or most of the party fell to the ground and all heard some kind of sound, which Paul (and only Paul) interpreted as the voice of Jesus of Nazareth speaking to him. Paul was temporarily blinded. Contrary to many medieval and Renaissance-era paintings (and hence modern popular conceptions), the travelers reported seeing no one during the incident. Hartmann (2015) emphasized that while the others heard something, they reportedly did not conceive the sound as a speaking voice, as Paul did. The text interpretations are influenced by linguistic nuances of the wording in surviving Greek manuscripts from early centuries C.E.; hence, several reviewers of Hartmann (2015) urged collaboration with scholars of ancient Greek, which we undertake here. We comment on newly received ophthalmological evidence and newly recognized linguistic aspects. Ophthalmologist John D. Bullock (1994) published a valuable study of the incident—a paper not known to Hartmann (2015). Two of the three Acts accounts report that Paul was temporarily blinded “because of the brightness of the light” (Acts 22:11), having apparently stared at the light as a divine manifestation. Paul reportedly remained blind until the “third day” (~45 to ~54 hours after the midday event), when “something like scales fell” from his eyes. Both Bullock and Hartmann suggested that this described a known medical condition, “photokeratitis,” in which exposure to intense light, especially with an ultraviolet component, can “sunburn” the epithelial layer of cells over the cornea, after which they peel away, restoring sight. Bullock, as an ophthalmologist, provided a more professional basis for this conclusion, including photographs of the keratitis phenomenon in a patient who had been knocked to the ground and temporarily blinded by a gas stove explosion. Three days after the accident, the scale-like coverings of the cornea were removed with a cotton-tipped applicator, and sight was restored. Bullock attributed the event to a lightning strike (possibly a strike on Paul himself), and thunder. A similar conclusion was proposed by a classicist, Frederick E. Brenk (1998, pp. 354–363), based on linguistic and literary antecedents. We note, however, that lightning and thunder would have been recognizable to the bystanders in the group, whereas a large fireball would have been an unknown celestial (hence divine?) phenomenon to all witnesses. Moreover, within the field of classics, doubt has been cast on Brenk's interpretation of the episode as referring to ordinary lightning and thunder, since it appears generally compatible with ancient accounts of divine revelation and epiphany (Bremmer 2008; on which more below). In any case, the independent analysis of Paul's blindness by an ophthalmologist, along with Hartmann's citing of eye discomfort, sunburn phenomena, and UV radiation associated with the Chelyabinsk fireball, support the idea that St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus plausibly involved celestial and medical phenomena recognizable in our era. As for linguistics, we offer a new investigation of certain phrases in the early Greek copies of Acts, crucial to understanding the perception, conception, and reporting of the sound during this event. Hartmann (2015) noted that many translations of Acts, including the widely used 1953 Revised Standard Version, translates the operative noun consistently as “voice,” so we find in Acts 9:7 “… they (Paul's associates) hearing the voice but seeing no one …” and in Acts 22:9 “… those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me.” Hartmann noted that the Greek term might imply either “voice” or “noise,” with the seeming inconsistency depending on subtle linguistic-interpretive issues. To pursue this issue, we checked the latest critical edition of the Greek New Testament, Nestle et al. (2014), which takes into account roughly 900 manuscripts and 127 papyri in constituting a text with a relatively robust apparatus criticus (the bottom of each page records variations among textual “witnesses”). This edition includes the most important evidence for the textual history of Acts. It includes manuscripts dating back to the second century C.E., yet the manuscripts containing the relevant portions of Acts date only to the fifth century, and there are no corroborating papyri. For the sake of confirmation, we have also checked the fifth-century Codex Bezae, which includes only Acts 22:9. In all cases, we found no variant readings in the relevant Greek phrases. The Greek text, then, is well established. … and he (Paul), having fallen to the ground, heard a voice saying to him … … καὶ πεσὼν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν ἤκουσεν φωνὴν (accusative) λέγουσαν αὐτῷ … … they (Paul's associates) hearing the voice but seeing no one. …ἀκούοντες μὲν τῆς φωνῆς (genitive) μηδένα δὲ θεωροῦντες. “The men being with me saw the light, but did not hear the voice of the one speaking to me.” Οἱ δὲ σὺν ἐμοὶ ὄντες τὸ μὲν φῶς ἐθεάσαντο τὴν δὲ φωνὴν (accusative) οὐκ ἤκουσαν τοῦ λαλοῦντός μοι. “And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice speaking to me in the Hebrew language.” Πάντων τε καταπεσόντων ἡμῶν εἰς τὴν γῆν ἤκουσα φωνὴν (accusative) λέγουσαν πρός με τῇ Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ. Here we pause to consider the nature of the sound. The accounts agree that the witnesses heard the sound only “having fallen” or “when we had all fallen.” This suggests (but does not explicitly state) that the sound arrived as or just after they fell, suggesting arrival of shock-related acoustic waves, possibly knocking the witnesses down. However, we take note of the phenomena of electrophonic sounds occasionally reported by some, but not all, observers of fireballs as a “hissing” or “swishing” noise. These sounds are associated with low-frequency electromagnetic waves that arrive at the speed of light, then are converted by nearby, natural transducers (metal and even hair) into sounds before arrival of shock/acoustic waves from the fireball (Keay 1992; Kornei 2017). Because of the association of the sound with witnesses falling, we lean toward more common shock-related acoustic waves as the source of the sound. To return to the linguistic issue, what has exercised the imagination of New Testament scholars is the contrast between the report of Acts 9:7, reported in the third person and stating that the others heard a (strange?) “voice” (genitive case) and the report of Acts 22:9, quoting Paul speaking in the first person, stating that the others did not hear the voice (accusative) that spoke to him. To condense our longer investigation (Forte et al., personal communication), we agree with earlier investigations that a definitive distinction in narrator intent is not entirely clear based on grammatical construction alone. However, we suggest here a second factor, namely that the language relates to earlier and contemporaneous Greek accounts of epiphanies. Bremmer (2008) outlined thematic and phraseological similarities between the temporary blinding and conversion of Paul and extraordinary epiphanies in Greco-Roman texts. He included the epiphany to Heliodorus in 2 Maccabees (around 124 B.C.E.); Euripides’s tragic play Bacchae (performed in 405 B.C.E.), which dramatizes the brutal results of rejecting a god; and the famous ending of Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus at Colonus (written around 406 B.C.E.), in which a blind Oedipus is summoned by a divine voice, along with certain writings of Diogenes Laertius (see below). Among these examples, he found a great degree of thematic, verbal, and narrational similarity to the events on the road to Damascus, but he did not specifically examine the problem of the meaning of the genitive-case construction. We have found three more instances, in addition to Acts, in which a collocation of ἀκούω “to hear” and φωνή “voice,” with the latter in the unusual genitive case, appears specifically in contexts of divine epiphany. First, in Herodotus’s (400s B.C.E.) account of the Greco-Persian wars, the invading army of Xerxes is confronted by a mysterious cloud of dust shouting the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries (Histories 8.65.1). The Persians hear this terrifying shout (φωνή) in the genitive case. Second, in a work of Plutarch, a Greek author of the first-century C.E., it is reported that Socrates thought fraudulent anyone claiming to see the divine, but that he paid close attention to those who said they heard a voice (φωνή), also in the genitive case (Plutarch, Moralia 558D). Third, certain biographical traditions associated with the fifth-century B.C.E. philosopher-mystic Empedocles are found in a text of Diogenes Laertius, writing at least a century after Luke (and also mentioned in the thematic context by Bremmer 2008). In one story, Empedocles disappears during the night in what is said to be an apotheosis (i.e., elevation to divine status). The sole witness claimed that he heard a mysterious voice (φωνή), again in the genitive case, calling Empedocles’s name, and then saw lights sparkling in the night sky (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 8.68.7). The genitive use of the voice in Acts 9:7 would thus be just one more case of an author indicating that what was heard was an extraordinary φωνή (genitive case), implying an epiphanic event. He who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles. (“Revised Standard Version” of New Testament, 1952 edition) Thus, various aspects of the “road to Damascus linguistic puzzle” come together. Paul was convinced that he had divinely granted access to the meaning of the epiphanic event, which his companions lacked. Thus, the narrator of Acts 9:7, in a third-person description, intentionally uses the genitive construction to report that Paul's companions heard the extraordinary sounds (genitive), but Acts 22:9, describing a later first-person statement by Paul, notes more matter-of-factly that his companions failed to interpret the sound (accusative) as the voice of Jesus. Our interpretation also explains why Paul was the only one reported to have been blinded during the incident. Since he was the only one who conceived the sound as a divine voice speaking to him, he was the only one who watched the fearsome light continuously and intently enough to produce a recognizable case of photokeratitis. Although intense light is acknowledged as potentially painful in ancient medical texts (Hippocrates, Physician 2; Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body X.3) and there is a robust tradition of theorization and dissection of the eye in the ancient world (Sedley 1992), we could find no earlier reported case of scales falling from eyes, in response to light exposure, that could have served as a textual basis for the account in Acts. Presumably, Luke (being reportedly a physician) included this strange symptom as putative evidence for the divine nature of the event. To summarize the reports, an intense “light from heaven,” brighter than the sun, was observed by the whole party, with an unusual sound. Paul and others fell to the ground, and Paul conceived the sound as an epiphanic “voice saying” something to him in Hebrew. The others heard the strange sound but they saw no one and did not interpret the sound as a voice. (We might speculate that by this time Paul had faced questions about whether the others in his party heard the speaking voice, and thus, in accord with his exceptionalist self-image, he unapologetically goes on to say that only he recognized the sound as a speaking voice.) The data reported here are consistent with (but do not prove) the hypothesis that the three, first-century C.E. reports plausibly involve a very bright, noisy fireball. In this view, Saul saw the fireball not because he had been chosen, but it was because he saw the fireball that he believed he had been chosen. We thank Derek Sears, Hermann Hunger, and Christian Koeberl for helpful comments during MAPS reviews; Gayle Hartmann and linguist Terry Langendoen for helpful editorial and comments on various early drafts; Agnieszka Baier for help with MAPS editorial issues; and especially Elaine Owens (asteroid 6944) at the Planetary Science Institute for editorial help with formatting and submission of our manuscript. Dr. Christian Koeberl

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