Better Call Saul

In Acts 9:1-31 Luke presents us with the story of Saul’s conversion. Paul also discusses his calling and his travels on a few occasions in his letters, giving us the rare opportunity to compare Luke’s account with Paul’s own.

Luke’s Version of Saul’s Conversion

Luke actually presents three versions of Saul’s conversion, one in third-person narration in Acts 9 and the twice more (22:1-16; 26:9-18) in the form of Paul’s speeches. There are some minor differences in all three accounts, but the basic core is the same: Saul was traveling to Damascus with letters of authority from the Sanhedrin to round up Christians there and return them to Jerusalem. As he approached the city, he was struck by a blinding light and heard the voice of Jesus say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Saul was left blind by the incident for three days until he was healed and baptized by a Damascene disciple named Ananias. Saul began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues and debated the Jews there. “After some time had passed” (v. 23), Saul became aware of a plot by the Jews to kill him and escaped the city by being lowered from the city wall in a basket.

Arriving in Jerusalem, Saul sought out the Christian community there, but no one wanted to have anything to do with him. Barnabas intervened and brought him to the apostles. Saul began preaching the name of Jesus and arguing with the Jewish Hellenists until they, too, sought to kill him. Learning of the plot, the disciples hustled Saul off to Caesarea where he could take a ship back to his hometown of Tarsus. He would remain there until Barnabas found him and brought him to Anitoch (11:25-26).

Was Paul a pedestrian or an equestrian? If you are Catholic, you probably think he got knocked off his horse, but if you are Protestant, you probably think he was just knocked off his feet. Prior to the Renaissance, images featured Paul on foot. The Catholic imagination was fueled by visual images such as this one, but Protestants were influenced by the text of Scripture. (The Conversion of St. Paul [1767] by Nicolas Bernard Lépicié)

The Road to Damascus

Before we contrast Luke’s account with Paul’s, there’s some inconsistency with what we have read so far in Acts. According to Acts, the early Christian community lived largely at peace in Jerusalem until Saul led a program of persecution that caused all but the apostles to flee to Samaria and the Judean countryside. After being sidelined with the mission of Philip the evangelist, we return to the main narrative to find Saul still on the warpath and seeking to persecute Christian disciples in Damascus.

Damascus is 140 miles from Jerusalem and it would have taken Saul about a week to walk there. If Saul wanted to expand his area of operation, there were Christians much closer at hand in Judea, Samaria and Galilee. Traveling all the way to Damascus doesn’t make much sense unless he was attempting to extradite Christians who had escaped from Jerusalem. But, as explained elsewhere, the Jewish Sanhedrin had no authority outside the city of Jerusalem. At most, the letters Saul obtained from the Sanhedrin could only have served as proof he was not acting on his own initiative.

When Saul finally arrived in Damascus, he found a Christian community who took him in and, he immediately began proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God in the synagogues. Presumably he would have been catechized by the local Christians in some form before he began preaching. Although Saul’s reputation as a persecutor of the Jerusalem Christians preceded him, it doesn’t sound like the Damascene Christians had fled his persecution. One gets the impression from all this the Christian community in Damascus was well-settled long before Saul’s arrival.

Bottom line: Luke’s version of events seems somewhat contrived.

Paul’s Account

How does Luke’s version square with what Paul describes in his letters? Although Paul speaks several times of his vision of the risen Christ which called him from life as a persecutor of the church to become an apostle to the Gentiles, he never provides any details of the experience.

However, Paul gives an account of his early career in Gal 1:11-24. He is eager to assert that the gospel he received was unmediated by any human authority (vv. 16-17). After his call, he did not confer with any local disciples or the apostles in Jerusalem. Instead, he “went away at once” to Arabia and only afterwards returned to Damascus. From this we can infer that his conversion experience occurred in Damascus, matching what we are told in Acts.

Paul’s account doesn’t leave any room for the role Ananias played in healing and baptizing him. Given the importance of baptism as an initiation into the Christian community, it seems certain that Paul would have been baptized at some point, so we have to take his insistence that he “did not confer with any human being” with a grain of salt. Having already learned enough of the basics of the faith through his arguments with Hellenist Christians, perhaps Paul did not feel the need to be formally catechized but he must have had some contact with the local Christian community in Damascus before starting his ministry.

Into Arabia

More interesting is Luke’s failure to mention Paul’s sojourn in Arabia. “Arabia” is generally understood as the Nabatean Kingdom, across the Jordan from Israel. Paul never explains what he was doing there or how long he was there before returning to Damascus, so it is easy to see why Luke would have left that out, even if he had known about it.

Why go to Nabatea at all? For prayer and reflection prior to beginning his ministry? Perhaps. Did he seek to start a ministry there? Then why not begin in Damascus? If, as I suspect, the historical Paul had been engaged in persecuting Christians in and around Damascus rather than Jerusalem, he may have thought he would get a more open-minded hearing in a region where he didn’t carry as much baggage.

Most likely, things didn’t go well in Nabatea and Paul returned to Damascus where he must have known he would receive a chilly reception from both the Christian and Jewish communities. But Paul apparently considered it preferable to remaining in Nabatea. And, as we’ll see next week, once Nabatea gained some control over Damascus, Paul was threatened with arrest and had to flee once more. His first effort as an evangelist in Nabatea must really have turned out badly.

If all this supposition is close to the truth, it is little wonder Paul doesn’t say anything more about his journey into Arabia.

[To be continued next week.]