A BLINDING LIGHT; a voice from heaven. A Caravaggio masterpiece. The persecutor becomes the preacher. The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is celebrated on January 25 every year in many Western churches, including my own. The event has become a cultural metaphor. Traditions, on the one hand, and proverbial usage, on the other, conspire together to make what happened to Saul of Tarsus both famous and obscure. The incident, narrated three times (with interesting variations) in the book of Acts, is clearly vital: from Paul’s own brief autobiographical remarks in his letters it is obvious that something fairly cataclysmic happened to him that day. But what exactly happened? And what did it mean?
A century after Freud, we are all amateur psychologists. The “road to Damascus,” a byword for millions who have only the sketchiest idea where Damascus actually is, has been a honey trap for psychological speculation—and for psychological reductionism. What was going on in Saul’s mind and heart that day? What transformed the zealous persecutor into the zealous apostle?
Theories have come and gone. Saul’s vision was “really” the moment when his “twice-born” personality kicked in. No, it was when his residual guilt at Stephen’s stoning came back to haunt him. No, it was what might be expected when the tension between the inner lusts of a young man and the outer demands of strict holiness finally exploded. Actually, it was an epileptic fit. Or maybe he was just dehydrated in the midday sun, and so on, and so on. Anything rather than face the question from the other end. Supposing . . . supposing it was more than this?
Theories of this kind are, in fact, a bit like what happens when people who have never seen a neon sign are suddenly confronted with one—but in the script of a foreign language. They spend their time wondering how on earth it lights up like that, without even realizing that the sign is saying something. The whimsical English poet John Betjeman puts it like this:
St. Paul is often criticised
By modern people who’re annoyed
At his conversion, saying Freud
Explains it all. But they omit
The really vital part of it,
Which isn’t how it was achieved
But what it was that Paul believed.1
Betjeman, as it happens, doesn’t do a very good job of explaining “what it was that Paul believed,” but he is right about the main point. To ask “how it was achieved” might or might not require that we study Paul’s psychology, but it is ultimately the wrong question. In any case, historical psychology may be an amusing armchair sport, but it is next to useless in real historical investigation.
A moment’s thought will make this clear—and it’s an important point at the start of a biographical investigation. Any trained pastor or counselor, let alone any actual psychiatrist, knows perfectly well that human beings are deep wells of mystery. We can still be surprised, perhaps shocked, when a friend of many years or even a spouse allows us a small glimpse of unsuspected inner depths, what some cultures call the “heart” and others the “soul.” Even when the counselor is trusted completely, sharing the same cultural assumptions and spiritual values, it will almost always be much harder than one might have supposed to get to the root of the personality, the deep springs of motivation, the dark agonies that produce sleepless nights or dysfunctional days. How much more impossible is it with someone who lived two thousand years ago in a culture very different from our own.
In addition to being impossible, that sort of study is fortunately unnecessary for biography, as indeed for history in general. This doesn’t mean that we cannot study human motivation. We are not restricted to talking only about “what happened” at the level picked up by a camera or tape recorder. The historian and biographer can study, and should study so far as possible, the levels of motivation that are available, not least the implicit narratives that run through a culture or through the mind of a political leader or an isolated individual.
Something like that was attempted before the buildup to the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces and their allies in 2003. Two enterprising American writers produced a survey of the popular cultural figures (in movies, TV shows, and comic strips) listed as favorites by presidents over the previous century.2 Again and again the presidents favored Captain America, the Lone Ranger, and similar characters’ scripts, in which heroes act outside the law to restore peace to beleaguered communities. The narrative seemed worryingly familiar. That wasn’t psychoanalysis, but it was a study of motivation. We can in principle inspect the implicit narratives that drive people to particular actions.
This has been done, to take another example, by historians of World War I. As historians, we cannot psychoanalyze the leaders of Germany, Russia, Poland, Serbia, France, and the other countries involved, or even the stiff-upper-lipped British foreign secretary at the time, Sir Edward Grey. Nor should we try. But historians can in principle probe the way in which the statements and actions of such people reveal a sense of purpose, an understanding of national identity and duty, a narrative of past wrongs needing to be put right, and a sense, in some cases, of the arrival of a historic moment that ought to be seized. We can, in other words, study why so many people in so many countries all came to the conclusion, around the same time, that what Europe needed was a good brisk war. This isn’t psychology. It is the historical study of how and why humans make the choices they do.3 History is not just about events, but about motivations. Motivations, no doubt, float like icebergs, with much more out of sight than above the waterline. But there is often a good deal visible above the water, often including a strong implicit narrative. We can study that.
When, therefore, something shakes someone to the very core, so that that person emerges from the cataclysm in some ways the same but in other ways radically different, there are, no doubt, many explanations that could be given. Such explanations ought not to cancel one another out. What we can try to do, and will now try to do in the case of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road and thereafter, is to take what we know of our subject before the event and what we know of him after the event and place these apparently contrasting portraits within the rich cultural and spiritual Jewish world of his day, replete as it was with various forms of the controlling Jewish narrative. We must look carefully to see what emerges, not only about the event itself, whatever it was, but about the way in which the “zeal” of the eager young Torah student emerged in a different form as “zeal” for what he called the “good news,” the euangelion, the gospel, the message about Jesus—the fulfillment, shocking though it seemed, of the ancestral hope.
Some saw it at the time, and many have seen it since, as one narrative replacing another. The word “conversion” itself has often, perhaps usually, been taken that way. But Saul—Paul the Apostle—saw it as the same narrative, now demanding to be understood in a radical, but justifiable, new way. The narrative in question was the hope of Israel.
If I say that Saul of Tarsus was brought up in a world of hope, many readers may misunderstand me. “Hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. The optimist looks at the world and feels good about the way it’s going. Things are looking up! Everything is going to be all right! But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God. This God had made the world. This God had called Israel to be his people. The scriptures, not least the Psalms, had made it clear that this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end, to be true to his promises, to vindicate his people at last, even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering.
“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.
In Saul’s world, those unshakable promises were focused on one great story, with one particular element that would make all the difference. The great story was the ancient freedom story, the Passover narrative, but with a new twist. The One God had liberated his people from slavery in Egypt, and he would do the same thing again. But they weren’t in Egypt now. Their slavery, in Saul’s day, was more complicated. For a start, nobody in the ancient stories had ever suggested that Israel’s time in Egypt was a punishment for wrongdoing. But Israel in Babylon was a different story. Read the prophets—it’s hard to miss. Young Saul, as we saw, would easily have made the connection between Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden and Israel being exiled from the promised land. Adam and Eve listened to the voice of the snake and no longer did their job in the Garden, so off they went, into a world of thorns and thistles. The Israelites worshipped the idols of Canaan and no longer did justice, loved mercy, or walked humbly with the One God, so off they went to Babylon.
In neither case (Adam and Eve, on the one hand, and Israel, on the other) could this be the end of the story. If it was, the One God would stand convicted of gross incompetence. The story of Israel, starting with Abraham himself, had always been, and in Saul’s day was seen to be, the start of a rescue operation, the beginning of a long purpose to put humans right and so in the end to put the whole world right again. The human project, the humans-in-the-garden project, had to get back on track. But if the rescue operation (Abraham’s family) was itself in need of rescue, what then? If the lifeboat gets stuck on the rocks, who will come to help, and how?
By Saul’s day it was clear that the Abraham project, the Israel vocation, had indeed gotten to the point where it needed rescuing. As we saw earlier, some Jews had come back from Babylon, while others were scattered all over the known world. But the cry went up from generation to generation, between the time of the Babylonians and the time, four centuries later, when Roman soldiers marched through the sacred land: We are still in exile. “Exile” wasn’t just geographical. It was a state of mind and heart, of politics and practicalities, of spirit and flesh. As long as pagans were ruling over the Jews, they were again in exile. As long as they were paying taxes to Caesar, they were in exile. As long as Roman soldiers could make obscene gestures at them while they were saying their prayers in the Holy Place, they were still in exile. And, since the exile was the result of Israel’s idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.
That was the glad news the prophets had spoken of, the word of comfort at every level from the spiritual to the physical. That is why the famous opening of the central poem in the book of Isaiah stresses comfort: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.”4 When the king pardons a jailed criminal, the criminal is set free. When the One God finally puts away the idolatry and wickedness that caused his people to be exiled in the first place, then his people will be free at last, Passover people with a difference.
That was the ancient hope, cherished not only by Saul of Tarsus but by thousands of his fellow Jews. By no means were all of them as “zealous” as Saul was. Few, perhaps, had his intellectual gifts. But they were mostly aware, through scripture and liturgy, of the ancient divine promises and of the tension between those promises and the present realities. One way or another, it was a culture suffused with hope. Hope long deferred, but hope nonetheless.
That is the great story in which Saul and his contemporaries were living. That is the narrative they had in their heads and their hearts. That story gave shape and energy, in a thousand different ways, to their aspirations and motivations. It explains both hope and action. This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.
* * *
The particular element that brought all this into sharp focus, and indeed into blinding focus on the road to Damascus, concerned Israel’s God himself. It wasn’t just Israel that had gone into exile. According to the prophets, Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem, had departed from the Temple, leaving it open to invasion and destruction. But the prophets didn’t leave it at that. They promised a great restoration. Two of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, focused these long-range promises on the assurance that the One God, having apparently abandoned his people to their fate, would return. “Flatten the hills and fill in the valleys,” shouts Isaiah. “Roll out the red carpet for God to come back!”5 The watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls will shout for joy as, in plain sight, they see him returning to Jerusalem.6 A new Temple would appear, declared Ezekiel, and the divine glory would come to dwell there as it had in the wilderness Tabernacle at the climax of the freedom story, the book of Exodus.7
All this meant that the symbolism at the heart of all ancient temples would come true at last. Temples were built to hold together the divine realm (“heaven”) and the human realm (“earth”). Jerusalem’s Temple, like the wilderness Tabernacle before it, was designed as a small working model of the entire cosmos. This was where the One God of creation would live, dwelling in the midst of his people. When the Temple was destroyed, this vision was shattered, but the prophets declared that God would one day return. Malachi, one of the last of the ancient prophets, several generations after the return of some Jews from Babylon, insists to the skeptics that “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.”8 Rumors of an endless absence were wrong. He would return. But the people had better be prepared . . .
So how could one prepare? What should a devout Jew be doing in the meantime? Well, one should keep the Torah for a start. As we saw earlier, for many Jews even in this period (i.e., before the final destruction of the Temple in AD 70) the Torah had become like a portable Temple: wherever they were, in Rome or Babylon, in Greece or Egypt, if they prayerfully studied the Torah, then it might be as if they were in the Temple itself. The divine presence would be there, not with flashing glory, not with a pillar of cloud and fire, but there nonetheless.
There were patterns and disciplines of prayer, too, through which that glorious moment might be anticipated by a devout Jew (and young Saul was nothing if not a devout Jew). There were ways of prayer—we hear of them mostly through much later traditions, but there are indications that they were already known in Saul’s day—through which that fusion of earth and heaven might be realized even by individuals. Prayer, fasting, and strict observance of the Torah could create conditions either for the worshipper to be caught up into heaven or for a fresh revelation of heaven to appear to someone on earth, or indeed both. Who is to say what precisely all this would mean in practice, set as it is at the borders of language and experience both then and now? A vision, a revelation, the unveiling of secrets, of mysteries . . . like the Temple itself, only even more mysterious . . .
There was a centuries-old tradition of Jewish sages longing for this kind of thing and in some cases being granted it. Such stories go all the way back to the narratives of Israel’s patriarchs. Abraham has a strange, disquieting vision of the divine presence as a burning cooking pot, passing between the halves of sacrificial animals and establishing the covenant.9 Jacob, running away for his life, dreams of a ladder reaching down from heaven to earth.10 Joseph interprets dreams for Pharaoh’s servants and then for Pharaoh himself, before suddenly finding that his own boyhood dreams are fulfilled as well in ways he could never have imagined.11 Closer to the first century, there was Daniel. Daniel, like Joseph, interpreted dreams for a pagan king; then, like Jacob, he had his own visions of heaven and earth in dangerous but glorious interchange.12
These memories informed the minds of those first-century Jews who found themselves in the long, puzzling interval between the time when the One God had abandoned the Temple and the time when he would return in glory. Heaven and earth would come together at last. But how? And when? Interim answers were given in various writings. Seers, mystics, and poets wrote of dreams and visions whose subject matter was the rescue of Israel and the final saving revelation of the One God. Often these took the literary form of “dream plus interpretation,” fused together to provide the “revelation” (in Greek apokalypsis) of things normally hidden. This was the world in which Saul of Tarsus, heir to these traditions, practiced his fierce and loyal devotion to Israel’s God. This was how to keep hope alive, perhaps even to glimpse its fulfillment in advance.
Once again, locating him within this world is a matter not of psychology, but of history. We are trying to think our way into the mind of a zealous young Jew determined to do God’s will whatever it cost, eager to purge Israel from idolatry and sin, keen to hasten the time when God would come back and rule his world with justice and righteousness. What could be more appropriate than for such a young man to seek through prayer and meditation to inhabit for himself those strange old traditions of heaven-and-earth commerce, to become, in his own mind and heart and perhaps even body, part of that heaven-and-earth reality, a visionary whose inner eye, and perhaps also whose outer eye, might glimpse the ultimate mystery?
You will see where this is going (though Saul, of course, did not). But there is one more element to add to the mix before we get there. In later Jewish tradition—again we must assume that such traditions have deep historical roots, though they are now lost to our view—one central text for meditation of this sort, for heaven-and-earth mysticism if we want to call it that, was the opening of the book of Ezekiel. In one of the strangest scenes in all scripture, the prophet sees the heavenly throne-chariot upon which the One God goes about his business. He describes it with immense caution, starting down below with the whirling and flashing wheels and the strange four-faced creatures (angels? who can say?) that inhabit them. (Even reading the text can make you giddy. Some of the later rabbis tried to keep people from reading it until they were at least forty years old.)
Slowly, gradually, the prophet works his way up from the living creatures and the whirling wheels to the throne itself; then, from the throne to the figure sitting on the throne. Here he hardly dares say what he seems to see: “something that seemed like a human form.”13 The prophet falls on his face as though dead. He is, however, commanded at once to stand up to receive his prophetic vocation, though this in its way is just as frightening as the vision itself. Perhaps such a vocation can only be undertaken by someone who has seen such a sight.
This passage in Ezekiel became a focal point of meditation for devout Jews of Saul’s time and later. Contemplating such an awe-inspiring scene might, they hoped, bring into personal focus, ahead of the long-awaited visible return of God to Jerusalem, that fusion of heaven and earth that was the very raison d’être of the Temple itself. This wouldn’t just be about one person having what we moderns might call “a glorious spiritual experience.” A throne vision, a Temple vision, would be about heaven and earth coming together; in other words, it would have to do with the long-awaited renewal of creation itself—the ultimate prophetic vision.
The more I have pondered what happened to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, holding together (as a historian must) the somewhat formalized accounts in the book of Acts and the brief, cryptic references in Paul’s own letters, the more I have wondered whether Saul had been practicing this kind of meditation. It was the kind of thing one might well do during the long, hot hours on the journey from Jerusalem to Damascus. In Caravaggio’s famous painting, Saul is riding a horse; historically, a donkey seems a good deal more likely. This would also produce an oblique echo of the story that began with Balaam on his donkey and ended up with Phinehas’s moment of zeal.
As we reflect on what Paul the Apostle came to say about the incident much later, it would make perfect sense to suppose that he had been meditating upon Ezekiel’s vision and seeking, if he could, to glimpse for himself what the prophet had seen. (I assume he was well under the prescribed age of forty. But I also assume that the attempted prohibition was a later restriction, designed precisely to protect young hotheads from danger.) Perhaps Saul was praying the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one,” praying it as a mantra, repeating it to the rhythm of his breathing, to the steady movement of the beast beneath him. Pray and watch. Watch and pray. Stay loyal to Israel’s God. Stand up for his kingdom. Pray and watch. Start with the living creatures and the whirling wheels, and perhaps ascend from there . . .
In his mind’s eye, then, he has the four-faced creatures and the wheels. He focuses on them. He sees them. He ponders them. Will he dare to go further? Upward, with prayer and quickening pulse, to the chariot itself. Was it his imagination? Was he actually seeing it? Were his eyes open, or was it just his heart’s eyes opened to realities normally invisible? Nobody who has had that kind of experience is likely to give a scientific answer to such questions, but such questions are in any case left behind when heaven and earth are coming together. Upward again, then, to the lower parts of what seems to be a figure on the throne, some kind of human form. Saul of Tarsus, head full of scripture, heart full of zeal, raises his eyes slowly upward once more. He is seeing now, eyes wide open, conscious of being wide awake but conscious also that there seems to be a rift in reality, a fissure in the fabric of the cosmos, and that his waking eyes are seeing things so dangerous that if he were not so prepared, so purified, so carefully devout, he would never have dared to come this far. Upward again, from the chest to the face. He raises his eyes to see the one he has worshipped and served all his life . . . And he comes face-to-face with Jesus of Nazareth.
To explain what this meant in the language of psychology would be like trying to copy a Titian with a child’s crayons. To understand the explosion that resulted, we need history, we need theology, we need a strong sense of the inner tensions of the first-century Jewish world and the zealous propagators of Jewish culture. This moment shattered Saul’s wildest dreams and, at the same split second, fulfilled them. This was—he saw it in that instant—the fulfillment of Israel’s ancient scriptures, but also the utter denial of the way he had been reading them up to that point. God the Creator had raised Jesus from the dead, declaring not only that he really was Israel’s Messiah, but that he had done what the One God had promised to do himself, in person. Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled. He had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel’s vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah itself. His lifelong loyalty was utterly right, but utterly misdirected. He had a zeal for God, but had not understood what the One God was up to. Everything was now focused on the figure from whom there streamed a blinding light, the figure who now addressed Saul as a master addresses a slave, the figure he recognized as the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Heaven and earth came together in this figure, and he was commanding Saul to acknowledge this fact and to reorient his entire life accordingly.
So when Christian tradition speaks of the “conversion” of Saul, we need to pause. In our world, as we saw earlier, we normally apply that term to someone who “converts” from one “religion” to another. That was not the point. Not for one second did Saul cease to believe in the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was just that . . . well, what had happened was . . . how could he put it? Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.”14 That was one way of putting it. There would be other ways too. This wasn’t about “religion,” whether in the ancient or the (very different) modern sense. It was about Jesus. About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.
It is easy, in our culture, to get this seriously wrong. People still speak of Paul and the groups of Jesus-followers who sprang up through his work as offering a new kind of “religion” comparable to or in competition with something called “Judaism.” This is misleading on several counts. There was nothing called “Christianity” in the first century, only groups of people who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord. There was nothing corresponding to what we now call “Judaism” in the first century (the word then, as we saw, had an active force meaning “the zealous propagation of the Jewish way of life”), only the many communities of Jews around the world, praying to Israel’s God, studying the scriptures, focusing on Temple and Torah.
What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel’s God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel’s scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus. Paul remained to his dying day fiercely loyal to Israel’s God, seen in fresh and blinding focus in Jesus. Neither Paul nor his communities were engaged in “comparative religion.” They were not saying, “We’ve tried one way of being religious, and now we think we have a better one.” Nobody thought like that in the first century, certainly no Jew. They were focused on what we might call messianic eschatology: the belief that the One God had acted climactically and decisively in, and even as, Israel’s Messiah. A shocking, blinding reality. The reality that would change the world.
They led Saul by the hand and brought him into the city.
* * *
If you look up “Straight Street” in Damascus (on Google Earth, say), you will be directed to Bab Sharqi. It is part of an ancient Roman road running east to west across the heart of the old city. Bab Sharqi is now the eastern half of a longer street, with the Jewish quarter lying on its southern side. Somewhere in that district Saul of Tarsus was taken, stone blind, to a lodging where he stayed, shocked and stunned, for three days. He didn’t eat; he didn’t drink; he couldn’t see; but he prayed. Of course he prayed. “Hear, O Israel . . .”
But what would that great prayer mean now? What form would loyalty to the One God now take? Paul would, of course, continue to invoke the One God as the God of Israel. But what if Israel’s purposes had been fulfilled in one man, the anointed king? And what if Israel’s God had done in person, in the person of this man, what he said he would do, defeating death itself and launching his new creation? What would the word “God” itself now mean? What would the word “Israel” now mean? (This question was faced by many Jewish groups of the period, from the Covenant Sect at Qumran to the eager groups supporting various potential “messiahs” over the next century or so, each claiming an exclusive inside track on the divine purposes.) Saul, knowing the Psalms and prophets and, behind them all, the great story of creation and the Exodus, prayed and prayed.
On the third day there was a knock at the door. The little group of Jesus-followers in Damascus, some of them perhaps refugees from the persecution in Jerusalem, had known that Saul of Tarsus was coming to get them, to drag them off to prison or even death. One of that group, Ananias, had a vision. (People today sneer at such things, but that is often mere prejudice. Many people in various cultures still speak of strange senses of direction or even command, unexpected promptings that, when followed, produce unexpected results.) He was to go and lay his hands on Saul so that he could see again. Ananias naturally recoiled. Was the Lord asking him to walk into a trap, into a lion’s den? No. As so often—it becomes a recurring theme in early Christian storytelling—when something has to be done, it will be done through an obedient, but quite likely nervous and worried disciple. So off he goes.
Jesus had told him three things about Saul. First, he was praying. People have sometimes suggested that “praying” was itself a sign that Saul had had a new “religious experience,” like a secular atheist in today’s world meeting God and praying for the first time; but that of course is nonsense. Saul had prayed all his life and was now praying with a new focus and a new perplexity. Second, Saul was to be a “chosen vessel” through whom the message would go out to the world. Third, Saul would have to suffer for Jesus’s sake. But Ananias didn’t say that to Saul. That was for Jesus himself to make clear. Ananias had other words and other actions. Together they introduce several themes that will shape Saul’s life and work.
“Brother Saul,” he began. Brother? Yes. From the very start—from the teaching of Jesus himself—the members of this strange new group regarded one another as “family” in a world where “family” meant a lot more than it does in most Western cultures today. Even before Saul has been baptized, Ananias recognizes him as part of what anthropologists call a “fictive kinship group.” Of course, at this point all the Jesus-followers were Jews, so there was already a sense of extended kinship within which this new reality had come to birth. But quickly, not least through the work of Saul himself, this kinship would be extended to a much wider company, creating serious problems on the way but always making the same strong affirmation. “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no ‘male and female’; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.”15 Paul wrote those words at least fifteen years later. But the truth they express was already contained within Ananias’s opening greeting.
Ananias explained to Saul that Jesus had sent him so that Saul would be able to see again and so that he would receive the holy spirit. Who knows what those words did to Saul after his three days of turmoil and blindness? Whatever was going on inside him, the outward evidence was clear: something like scales fell from his eyes (another proverbial phrase; had the blinding light caused some sort of a scab?), and he could see. We in the modern world do not put much stock in “miracles.” But when we are faced with events that seem to fall in no other category, we speak of miracles as though they are caused by a “supernatural” power from outside the world that “invades” the chain of “natural causes.” It may sometimes feel like that. But a more biblical account would recognize the strange, steady work of God within so-called natural causes as well, so that the sudden and shocking new event is held within a larger continuum of ultimate divine causation.
In any case, the early followers of Jesus knew very well that, just as Jesus himself had gone about healing people, so they too were entrusted with this gift—not all the time and never simply at their own whim, but with a lasting and powerful effect that carried its own evidential weight. Writing his letters some years after this, Paul would refer to the same kind of healing power working through him and through others—just as he would also refer to illnesses, his own and those of others, that were not healed, or not in the way one had hoped. The mystery remained, but the power remained too.
So then Ananias baptized the puzzled Saul. As in some of the other occasions in Acts, this happened at once, as soon as the person came to believe in the crucified Jesus as the risen Lord. There was no period of waiting, teaching, or preparation. That would come in due time. Baptism, looking back to Jesus’s own baptism and past that to the crossing of the Red Sea in the Passover story, marked out the new family, the new Passover people.
Jesus himself had used the image of baptism to speak of his approaching death. Paul would later make it clear that this dramatic plunging into water and coming up again spoke in powerful and effective symbolic language about the dying and rising of Jesus and about the new world that had come to birth through those events. To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one. Insofar as it marked out members of the family, it functioned somewhat like circumcision for a Jew, except of course that women were included as well. Equally, it was a bit like a slave being branded (so that the slave was now under a new master), though of course slaves and free alike were baptized. The important thing was that, having been baptized, one now belonged to the Messiah. Saul was now a “Messiah man,” shaped in the pattern of the Jesus who had summed up the divine purposes for Israel.
Something else happened at the same time: Saul received Jesus’s own spirit. The fourth and last point of immense significance in Ananias’s visit to Straight Street is that Saul was promised the gift of the spirit, and everything in his subsequent life and writings indicates that he believed this had happened then and there. The story in Acts doesn’t say that Saul spoke in tongues or prophesied. The idea that things like that had to happen for the spirit’s gift to be genuine is a much later fiction. What Acts offers instead is the remarkable statement that Saul went at once to the synagogue in Damascus and announced that Jesus was the son of God (a theme to which we shall return in due course). There was a new power coupled with a new sense of direction.
Paul’s powerful, spirit-driven proclamation of Jesus as “son of God” can hardly be called “preaching,” if by “preaching” we mean the sort of thing that goes on in churches week by week in our world. This was a public announcement, like a medieval herald or town crier walking through the streets with a bell, calling people to attention and declaring that a new king had been placed on the throne. This was, indeed, how the word “gospel” would be heard right across the Roman world of the day: as the announcement of a new emperor. Paul’s proclamation was not, then, a fresh twist on the regular teaching work of the local Jewish community. He wasn’t offering advice on how to lead a more holy life. He certainly wasn’t telling people how to go to heaven when they died. He was making the all-time one-off announcement: Israel’s hope has been fulfilled! The King has been enthroned! He was declaring that the crucified Jesus was Israel’s long-awaited Messiah.
But what happens when half the people in the town don’t want this new king? Saul discovered the answer to that all too soon, not that he would have been particularly surprised. The local Jewish community in Damascus was shocked at the sudden turnaround of this hotheaded young man, transformed from persecutor to proclaimer. Not just shocked; they were deeply offended (as of course Saul himself had been) at the suggestion that Israel’s history would reach its climax in a crucified messiah. Not all Jews in this period, so far as we can tell, believed in a coming messiah in the first place. Those who did hope for such a figure envisaged the messiah as a warrior hero. He would be a new David; he would overthrow the wicked pagans, restore the Temple to make it fit for Israel’s God to come back to at last, and establish a worldwide rule of justice and peace. Jesus of Nazareth, as everybody knew, had done none of those things. Saul of Tarsus could produce all the scriptural “proofs” he liked from his long years of study. But the synagogue in Damascus was not going to be convinced.
* * *
Up to this point, we have been following the story of Paul on the road to Damascus and then in the city itself more or less as we find it in the book of Acts. But Paul, in a later writing, injects another episode into the mix at this point. This extra episode, when properly understood, strongly reinforces our developing picture of the hotheaded young zealot suddenly stopped in his tracks. He went away, he says, to Arabia.16 What was that all about? Why did he go? What did it mean? How does it help us to see not only what motivated Saul from the beginning, but also what was involved in his sudden transition from persecutor to apostle? What does it contribute to our effort to understand the man whose subsequent writings would shape a worldwide movement and, in a measure, the world itself?