C. Conversion of Saul of Tarsus (9:1–31)
1. Saul’s Expedition to Damascus (9:1–2)
1As for Saul, he continued to breathe out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest
2and asked him for letters to the synagogues of Damascus, so that, if he found any followers of The Way there, men or women, he might bring them in chains to Jerusalem.
1 The narrative now returns to Saul of Tarsus and his campaign of repression against the believers in Jerusalem, which received passing mention in 8:3. He was not content with driving them from Jerusalem; they must be pursued and rooted out wherever they fled, not only within the frontiers of the land of Israel1 but beyond them as well. “In the excess of my fury against them,” as he was later to tell the younger Agrippa, “I pursued them even to foreign cities” (26:11). The great paragons of religious zeal in Israel’s history—Phinehas,2 Elijah,3 and Mattathias4 (father of the Maccabees)—were prepared to go to extremes of violence against the enemies of God, and they were the exemplars on whom Saul modeled himself in his zeal against the church.
2 When the Jewish state won its independence under the Hasmonaean dynasty of ruling priests (142 B.C.), the Romans, who patronized the new state for reasons of their own, required neighboring states to grant it the privileges of a sovereign state, including the right of extradition. A letter delivered at that time by a Roman ambassador to Ptolemy VIII of Egypt concludes with the demand: “If any pestilent men have fled to you from their own country [Judaea], hand them over to Simon the high priest, so that he may punish them according to their law” (1 Macc. 15:21). In 47 B.C. Julius Caesar confirmed those rights and privileges anew to the Jewish nation (although Judaea was no longer a sovereign state), and more particularly to the high-priesthood.5 Luke’s narrative implies that the right of extradition continued to be enjoyed by the high priest under the provincial administration set up in A.D. 6. The followers of The Way whom Saul was authorized to bring back from Damascus were refugees from Jerusalem, not native Damascene disciples. The charge against them may have been complicity in Stephen’s offense against the temple.
“The Way” is a designation for the new movement used several times in Acts (19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22; cf. also 16:17; 18:25–26). It was evidently a term used by the early followers of Jesus to denote their movement as the way of life or the way of salvation. Similar words are used in a religious sense elsewhere; a specially close parallel is the use of the Hebrew word for “way” in the Zadokite Work and other documents of the Qumran community to denote the membership and life-style of that community.6
The history of Damascus goes back to remote antiquity. It was a city in the days of Abraham, and at the time of the Israelite monarchy it was the capital of the most important Aramaean kingdom. Later it was the seat of administration of an Assyrian province. In Hellenistic times it was completely replanned, on the Hippodamian grid-system. From 64 B.C. on it belonged to the Roman province of Syria, but had a measure of municipal autonomy in the loose federation of cities called the Decapolis. There was a very large Jewish population in the city,7 so it is not surprising that there were several synagogues, each exercising disciplinary supervision over its members.
2. The Light and Voice from Heaven (9:3–7)
3As he went on his way he was approaching Damascus when suddenly a light from heaven flashed round about him.
4He fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”8
5“Who are you, my lord?” he asked. The other said,9 “I am Jesus,10 the one you are persecuting.11
6But get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”
7The men who were traveling with him stood speechless; they heard the voice but did not see anyone.12
3–6 Armed with the high priest’s commission, Saul set out for Damascus, and had almost reached it when the momentous event took place. About midday13 a light which outshone the sun flashed round him, and as he lay on the ground to which he had fallen, a voice sounded in his ears, addressing him in Aramaic:14 “Saul! Saul! why are you persecuting me?”15
The voice which he heard, as far as literary parallels are concerned, may be recognized as the phenomenon known to the rabbis as baṯ qôl “the daughter of the voice [of God],” the heavenly echo. In the latter days, they believed, when there were no more prophets to hear the direct voice of God, the echo of his voice might still occasionally be heard by some. The solemn repetition of the name of the person addressed is common in divine allocutions.16 Saul probably discerned a divine quality about the voice as it spoke to him; hence “Who are you, my lord?” may be a better rendering of his response than “Who are you, sir?” But he was not prepared for the reply to his question: the one who spoke to him was Jesus, once crucified but now the heavenly Lord—the one whom he was zealously persecuting in the person of his followers.
Any attempt to explain Saul’s Damascus-road experience in medical terms must reckon with its revolutionary and long-term effects. The extraordinary enhancement of illumination experienced by epileptics, as described (for example) by Dostoyevsky,17 is a very different matter from a total conversion such as Saul underwent—a conversion of will, intellect, and emotion, which dictated the abiding purpose and direction of his subsequent life and activity. That the illumination was inward as well as external appears from his own language about the transition from unbelief to faith—“seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God … For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4, 6).
That Saul actually saw the risen Christ in addition to hearing his voice is not expressly stated in the conversion narrative itself, but is confirmed below in the words of Ananias (v. 17) and Barnabas (v. 27).18 His own references to his conversion imply incidentally that he heard the voice of Christ but emphasize above all that he saw him as the risen and glorified one.19 There are affinities between his conversion experience and Ezekiel’s inaugural vision, in which the prophet saw the “likeness” of the heavenly throne and above it “a likeness as it were of a human form” (Ezek. 1:26);20 but for Saul the one who bore a human form identified himself as a historical person: “I am Jesus.” Few of Saul’s distinctive insights into the significance of the gospel cannot be traced back to the Damascus-road event, or to the outworking of that event in his life and thought.21
As truly as Jesus the crucified one had appeared “alive after his passion” to Peter, James, and others on the first Christian Easter morning and the days that followed, so truly now, “as to one untimely born,” did he appear to Saul (I Cor. 15:5–8). His fellow-travelers (according to 22:9) saw the light that flashed so suddenly around them, but for them it was not accompanied by that blinding illumination within which wrought the revolution in the persecuting zealot, and diverted his zeal to the propagation of the faith which up to that moment he had endeavored to destroy.
Saul’s own account of his experience is not only adequate to the sequel: it is in character with it too. The more one studies it, the more one is driven to agree with the eighteenth-century statesman George Lyttelton, that “the conversion and apostleship of St. Paul alone, duly considered, was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation.”22
A striking modern parallel to the narrative is Sundar Singh’s story of his own conversion after a period of bitter hostility to the gospel. Praying in his room in the early morning of December 18, 1904, he saw a great light. “Then as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had such an appearance of glory and love. If it had been some Hindu incarnation I would have prostrated myself before it. But it was the Lord Jesus Christ whom I had been insulting a few days before. I felt that a vision like this could not come out of my own imagination. I heard a voice saying in Hindustani, ‘How long will you persecute me? I have come to save you; you were praying to know the right way. Why do you not take it?’ The thought then came to me, ‘Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.’ So I fell at His feet and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get anywhere else. This is the joy I was wishing to get. When I got up, the vision had all disappeared, but although the vision disappeared the Peace and Joy have remained with me ever since.”23 Several circumstances make it difficult to set down this experience as a dream or as the effect of self-hypnotism; it is also interesting to be told that, to the best of his remembrance, “at that time he did not know the story of St. Paul’s conversion; though, of course, on a point of that kind the human memory cannot be implicitly relied on”24 (and even if he did not know the story at the time of his conversion, he knew it by the time he related his conversion in the words just quoted, and it may have influenced the wording of his narrative). Here too we cannot properly evaluate the Sadhu’s account of his experience without taking into consideration the remarkable life which was its sequel and the exceptional signs that attended his ministry.25
7 The statement that Saul’s fellow-travelers “stood speechless; they heard the voice, but did not see anyone,” has sometimes been thought to conflict with his own statement, “we had all fallen to the ground” (26:14), and still more with his statement that the men who were with him “did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me” (22:9). The first discrepancy is immaterial: presumably the others were able to get up while Saul remained lying on the ground. As for the other discrepancy, Chrysostom’s explanation that the voice heard by the fellow-travelers was Saul’s voice talking to the risen Lord26 runs up against the difficulty that “the voice” in verse 7 is most naturally taken as referring back to the “voice” of verse 4. The more usual explanation is that, while the others heard a sound (like the crowd in John 12:29 which “said that it had thundered” when Jesus’ prayer was answered by a heavenly voice), they did not distinguish an articulate voice.27
It is not made clear whether Saul’s companions happened to be traveling in the same caravan, or had actually set out with him to attend him on his mission.28 Since he was commissioned to bring the refugees in chains to Jerusalem, he would naturally have required the help of others (perhaps members of the temple police) to round them up and take them back.
3. Saul Enters Damascus (9:8–9)
8Saul got up from the ground, but when his eyes were opened he saw nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.
9He remained without sight for three days, and neither ate nor drank.
8–9 At last Saul was able to rise from the ground, and when he did so, he was unable to see, “blinded by excess of light.” His companions therefore took him by the hand and led him through the gate of Damascus to the place where, presumably, arrangements had been made for him to stay. There he stayed for three days, taking neither food nor drink. (There is no need to regard his abstinence as an early instance of fasting before baptism;29 it was probably the result of shock.)
4. Ananias Sent to Saul (9:10–16)
10In Damascus there was a disciple named Ananias. To him the Lord said in a vision, “Ananias!” “Here I am, Lord,” he replied.
11The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and ask at the house of Judas for a man of Tarsus, named Saul. For, I tell you, he is praying
12and has seen [in a vision]30 a man called Ananias coming in and placing his hands on him, so that he may recover his sight.”
13But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard about this man from many people—about all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.
14And here he has authority from the chief priests to throw into chains all who call on your name.”
15“Be on your way,” said the Lord to him; “this man is a chosen instrument for me, to bear my name before Gentiles and kings and Israelites.
16I am going to show him all that he must suffer for the sake of my name.”
10–12 Toward the end of these three days, Saul, as he was praying, received a further vision, in which a man named Ananias came to him and laid his hands on him, with the result that his sight was restored. This Ananias turned out to be a real person, a man of Damascus who was a disciple of Jesus, although he was evidently not one of the fugitives from the persecution in Jerusalem.31 It appears that the gospel had already made its way independently to Damascus—possibly from its northern base in Galilee. Ananias knew, however, about the persecution in Jerusalem which had dispersed so many of the believers in that city, and he knew of the leading part that Saul had played in it. He knew, too, that Saul had come to Damascus with authority to arrest believers from Jerusalem who had fled there for refuge.32
We may judge of Ananias’s astonishment, then, when he in his turn received directions from the risen Christ33 in a vision to go to the place where Saul was staying and lay his hands on him for the restoration of his sight. The “street called Straight,” where Saul’s host lived, is still one of the chief thoroughfares of Damascus, the Darb al-Mustaqim. The traditional location of the house of Judas is near its western end.
13–14 “Lord,” said Ananias, as he received these instructions, “I have heard about this man from many people.” He had not had any personal experience of Saul’s harrying of the disciples, but those who could speak from firsthand knowledge had told him of Saul’s activity, and the news of his coming to Damascus to prosecute his grim work there had reached the city before Saul himself arrived. When Ananias, in his reply to the Lord, spoke of “all who call on your name,” he referred to the followers of Jesus, those who confessed him as Lord.34 The background of the expression is to be found in Joel 2:32, “everyone who invokes the Lord’s name will be saved,” quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:21).
15 But Ananias’s protest was overruled: the risen Lord had his eye on the man of Tarsus and had a great work for him to perform. In spite of his recent record as a persecutor, Saul was a chosen instrument35 in the Lord’s hand, a messenger who would spread the good news in Jesus’ name more widely than anyone else. The Gentiles and their rulers, not only the people of Israel, would hear the proclamation of salvation from his lips. While Paul says that the revelation of God’s Son which he received on the Damascus road was given in order that he might “proclaim him among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:16), Luke consistently includes Jews among the beneficiaries of his ministry, in recognition of the fact that he did preach to Jews, as he was shortly to do in the synagogues of Damascus (v. 20), and numbered Jewish believers among his converts.
16 Moreover, Ananias was assured that, if Saul himself had inflicted suffering on those who believed in Jesus, he in his turn would have much suffering to endure for the sake of Jesus’ name.36
5. Ananias Visits Saul (9:17–19a)
17Ananias went off, entered the house, and placed his hands on him. “Brother Saul,” he said, “the Lord—that is, Jesus, who appeared to you on the road by which you came—has sent me so that you may recover your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
18Immediately a scaly substance fell away from his eyes; he recovered his sight,37 got up, and was baptized.
19aThen he took food and his strength was restored.
17 Ananias obediently made his way to the street called Straight, and entered the house of Judas. There, without delay, he fulfilled his commission, laying his hands on the blind man and addressing him in terms of brotherly friendship. The form of the name “Saul” in the original text at this point—the same form as was used by the heavenly voice which Saul heard on the way38—suggests that Ananias spoke in Aramaic.
In his later speech to the Jerusalem populace from the top of the steps connecting the temple precincts with the Antonia fortress (22:14–16) Paul gives a fuller account of what Ananias said to him; in his speech before Agrippa (26:16–18) he includes Ananias’s communication in what was said to him during the heavenly vision. In the present narrative, too, it is plain that the Damascus-road vision and the message of Ananias were mutually confirmatory; by this twofold communication Saul received his commission from the Lord.
In writing to the Galatians Paul is at pains to deny, in the most unqualified terms, that he received his apostolic commission from any mortal man, or through any mortal man: he received it, he asserts, immediately from the Christ who was revealed to him as God’s Son (Gal. 1:1, 11–20). How does this square with the part ascribed to Ananias in Acts?
In the first place, Paul in Galatians is answering the charge that he was dependent, for such missionary authority as he might possess, on the apostles in Jerusalem. The part played by Ananias could not have affected the argument one way or the other. A private disciple like Ananias could not in any case have had the power to commission him. In the second place, Ananias for this special purpose occupied such an exalted status that his words to Saul were the words of the risen Christ. Having been sent by the risen Christ to lay his hands on Saul, he was on this particular occasion his agent and indeed his mouthpiece—Luke would not have called him an apostle but the designation would not be inappropriate.39 Whether he is called an apostle or not, he was certainly a duly authorized prophet. It was as the spokesman of Christ that he went to Saul; he had nothing to say beyond the words that the Lord put in his mouth. Ananias uttered the words, but as he did so, it was Christ himself who commissioned Saul to be his ambassador. Ananias laid his hands on Saul, but it was the power of Christ that in the same moment enlightened his eyes and filled him with the Holy Spirit. That Saul should have received the filling of the Spirit through the imposition of the hands of such an obscure disciple as Ananias shows clearly that Luke did not reckon the imposition of apostolic hands to be necessary for this (in his understanding of the term “apostolic”).40 Such filling was the indispensable qualification for the prophetic ministry mapped out for Saul in the Lord’s words of verse 15—a ministry comparable to that to which Jeremiah was called in his day (Jer. 1:5). Henceforth Saul discharged this ministry as one endowed with heavenly power (cf. v. 22).
The commissioning of Saul, and the part played in it by Ananias, must ever remain a stumbling block in the path of those whose conception of the apostolic ministry is too tightly bound to one particular line of transmission or form of ordination. If the risen Lord commissioned such an illustrious servant in so “irregular” a way, may he not have done so again, and may he not yet do so again, when the occasion requires it?
So Ananias enters and leaves the narrative, and we know nothing more of him. But as Saul’s first friend after his conversion, the first follower of Jesus to greet him as a brother, as well as the one who faithfully bore the Lord’s commission to him, Ananias has an honored place in sacred history, and a special claim on the gratitude of all who in one way or another have entered into the blessing that stems from the life and work of the apostle to the Gentiles.
18–19a When Ananias had executed his commission and laid his hands on Saul, a flaky substance fell away from Saul’s eyes.41 He was able to see again; he rose up and was baptized forthwith in the name of Jesus (receiving his baptism at the hands of Ananias, we should naturally suppose);42 he ate food for the first time in three days and a return of bodily strength accompanied the influx of new spiritual power.
6. Saul Preaches in Damascus (9:19b–22)
19bHe stayed for some days43 with the disciples in Damascus,
20and without delay he began to preach Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is44 the Son of God.”
21All who heard him were amazed. “Is not this the man,” they asked, “who has devastated in Jerusalem those who call on this name? Has he not come here for the very purpose of taking them in chains to the chief priests?”
22But Saul’s power went on increasing45 and he confounded the Jews who were resident in Damascus as he proved that this Jesus was the Messiah.46
19b–20 According to the autobiographical outline supplied by Paul in Gal. 1:15–17, he did not confer with any human being after receiving his “revelation of Jesus Christ” but went away to Arabia (the Nabataean kingdom, which lay on the eastern frontier of Syria and stretched south to the Red Sea). This need not exclude a short period of such witness in Damascus as is described here—either before he set out for Arabia (which seems more probable) or after his return to Damascus (“without delay” in v. 20 need not be pressed overmuch, especially since Luke has nothing at all to say of the visit to Arabia).
It is more significant than might be supposed at first glance that the only occurrence of the title “Son of God” in Acts should be in this report of Saul’s early preaching.47 It was as the Son of God that Christ was revealed to him on the Damascus road (Gal. 1:16; cf. 2 Cor. 1:19; Rom. 1:4).
This title, or its equivalent, is used in the Old Testament (1) of the people of Israel (Ex. 4:22; Hos. 11:1), (2) of the anointed king of Israel (2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 89:26–27), and therefore (3) of the ideal king of the future, the Messiah of David’s line (see especially Ps. 2:7 as quoted below in 13:33; cf. also above, 2:25–26). For the messianic use of the title in the pseudepigrapha cf. 1 Enoch 105:2; 4 Ezra 7:28–29; 13:32, 37, 52; 14:9. That our Lord’s contemporaries believed the Messiah to be in some special sense the son of God is rendered probable by the wording of the high priest’s question to him at his trial: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” (Mark 14:61 par. Matt. 26:63; Luke 22:67, 70). As applied to our Lord, then, the title “Son of God” marks him out as the true representative of the Israel of God and as God’s anointed king; but it is no merely official title. As he himself understood the heavenly voice which said to him at his baptism, “You are my Son” (Mark 1:11 par. Luke 3:22), it expressed his unique relationship and fellowship with the Father.48 A. E. Harvey finds three aspects of sonship implicit in the ascription of the title to Jesus: his perfect obedience to God, his being the ultimate revealer of God, and his being the authorized agent of God.49 The proclamation of Jesus as the Son of God represents an advance on the way in which his messiahship has been proclaimed thus far in Acts.
21–22 It was to the synagogues of Damascus that Saul had been sent with the commission from the high priest, and to the synagogues of Damascus he went. But instead of presenting his letters of credence and demanding the extradition of the disciples of Jesus, he appeared as the bearer of a very different commission, issued by a higher authority than the high priest’s, and as a disciple and messenger of Jesus he announced his Master’s claims. No wonder that his hearers were amazed by the change that had come over him. The news of his mission had not been kept secret: here was the man whose arrival they had expected, but far from arresting the disciples of Jesus he was confounding the Jews of Damascus by his argument that the disciples’ witness was true: Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God.50 The filling of the Spirit which he had received gave his words a demonstrative power which could not be confuted: as with Stephen at an earlier date, so now with Saul, his hearers “could not resist the wisdom and spirit with which he spoke” (6:10).
7. Saul Escapes from Damascus (9:23–25)
23When many days had elapsed, the Jews plotted to kill him;
24but Saul learned of their plot. They actually guarded the gates by day and by night in order to kill him,
25but his disciples took him and let him down through the wall by night, lowering him in a basket.
23–25 With the adventure thus recorded by Luke must be compared Paul’s account in 2 Cor. 11:32–33: “In Damascus the ethnarch of King Aretas was guarding the city of the Damascenes in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped his hands.” Aretas IV (9 B.C.–A.D. 40) was ruler of the Nabataean kingdom in which Saul spent some time after his conversion (Gal. 1:17). It is commonly supposed that Paul’s sojourn in Arabia had the nature of a religious retreat: that he sought the solitude of the desert—perhaps even going to Mount Horeb as Moses and Elijah had done—in order to commune with God and think out all the implications of his new life, without disturbance. But the context in which he tells of his going to Arabia, immediately after receiving his commission to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles, suggests that he went there to preach the gospel.51 The hostile interest which the Nabataean authorities took in him implies that he had done something to annoy them—something more than withdrawal to the desert for solitary contemplation. The ethnarch looked after the interests of the many Nabataean subjects who lived in Damascus, and in general acted as King Aretas’s representative in the city.52 Whatever part the local Jews had in the plot, Paul avoids saying anything to the detriment of his own people, but one possibility is that, knowing of the official Nabataean animosity toward him, they advised the ethnarch of his whereabouts, so that he might arrest him as he left the city and take him back to be dealt with by the Nabataean authorities.53 However, while Saul’s enemies were watching the city gates to catch him, some of his new friends and sympathizers got him safely away.54 One of them had a house built on to the city wall, and he was lowered in a large basket or net55 through a window of the house, which was actually cut in the city wall.
Luke says that this incident took place “when many days had elapsed”; Paul, more definitely, says in Gal. 1:18 that it was three years after his conversion (by inclusive reckoning, no doubt) that he went up to Jerusalem—and from the narrative of Acts he seems to have gone to Jerusalem immediately after his escape from Damascus.
8. Saul in Jerusalem; He is Sent to Tarsus (9:26–30)
26When he arrived in Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples. But they were all afraid of him; they could not believe that he was a disciple.
27But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and told them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and what he had said to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus.
28So he stayed with them in Jerusalem, coming in and going out,
29and preached boldly in the Lord’s name. He also spoke to the Hellenists56 and debated with them, but they tried to kill him.
30When the brothers learned of this, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.
26 When Saul returned to Jerusalem, he was in a difficult position. His old associates knew all about his defection, and he could expect no friendly welcome from them. On the other hand, the disciples of Jesus, with whom he now wished to associate himself, had not forgotten his campaign of persecution. One can scarcely feel surprise at their suspicion when he made overtures to them. The role of the agent provocateur was as familiar in antiquity as in more recent times; what assurance had they that this was not a scheme of Saul’s to gain their confidence for their more effective undoing?
27 It was Barnabas who, true to his name, acted as Saul’s sponsor and encouraged them to receive him. It is possible that Barnabas was already acquainted with Saul, knew his integrity of character, and was convinced of the genuineness of his conversion.57 When Saul desperately needed a true friend in Damascus, Ananias played that part to him; now, when he stood in equal need of one in Jerusalem, he found a friend in Barnabas. And Barnabas’s prestige with the apostles and other believers in Jerusalem was such that when he gave them his guarantee that Saul was now a true disciple of Jesus, they were reassured.
When Luke says that Barnabas brought Saul “to the apostles,” the narrative of Gal. 1:18–20 compels us to interpret this as a generalizing plural. According to Paul’s own solemn affirmation, the only leaders of the Jerusalem church whom he met on that occasion were Peter (Cephas) and James the Lord’s brother (whom Paul calls an apostle, although he would not have satisfied Luke’s conditions for that designation).
28–30 With Luke’s account here the whole passage in Gal. 1:18–24 must be compared: “Next, after three years I went up to Jerusalem to get to know58 Cephas, and stayed with him for fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles, except James, the Lord’s brother. I assure you, in what I am writing to you, as God is my witness, I am telling no lie. Then I came into the territories of Syria and Cilicia. I remained unknown by face to the churches of Judaea which are in Christ; they only kept on hearing, ‘Our former persecutor is now preaching the faith which he once tried to devastate,’ and they glorified God on my account.” The emphasis with which Paul affirms the truth of this account suggests that he knew of another account, which may have come to the ears of his Galatian converts, and which he is anxious to refute. It has indeed been argued that this rival account is the one on which Luke draws here,59 but this is quite improbable.
Paul’s chief concern in this section of Galatians is to show that he received his gospel, and his commission to preach it, without human mediation—in particular, that he was in no way indebted to the Jerusalem authorities. He had started fulfilling his commission (in Arabia) before he had any contact with Jerusalem, and when in due course he went up to Jerusalem, it was for a short private visit. Luke may generalize and say that he saw the apostles, but for Paul it was important to particularize and say which apostles he actually met. But Luke’s generalizing report does not suggest at all that “the apostles” to whom Barnabas introduced Saul conferred any authority on him.
It is not so easy to reconcile Luke’s description of Saul’s public activity at Jerusalem in association with the apostles with the statement in Gal. 1:22 that, until the time of his departure for Syria and Cilicia (and after that), he “remained unknown by face to the churches of Judaea,” which knew of him only by hearsay. One commentator removes the phrase “in Jerusalem” from verse 28 (taking it to be a gloss) and regards verses 28 and 29 as a continuation of Barnabas’s description of Saul’s activity at Damascus. Verse 30 would then go on: “And the brothers recognized him60 (that is, as a disciple) and brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.” Thus, we are assured, “the whole difficulty vanishes.”61 It does not, and even if it did vanish, one must have reservations about an emendation, however ingenious it may be, which is proposed not because it has any textual attestation but because its adoption will help to remove a discrepancy. It is true that there is a marked resemblance between the account of Paul’s activity at Damascus (his bold preaching and the consequent plot against his life) and that of his activity in Jerusalem. Luke’s sources probably supplied him with little detail about the Jerusalem visit; hence the generalizing terms in which he reports it.
He describes Saul, during his Jerusalem visit, as taking up the work which Stephen had laid down at his death, by engaging in debates with the Hellenists.62 Their reaction was swift and violent. Saul was worse than Stephen: he was in their eyes a traitor to the true cause, and by his volte-face he had let down those who formerly followed him loyally as their leader in the suppression of the new movement. With the information given here we have somehow to combine Saul’s account (reproduced at a later point, in 22:17–21) of Jesus’ appearing to him in the temple and telling him to leave Jerusalem because his witness would not be listened to. He protested that he was a specially valuable witness because the people of Jerusalem knew his earlier record as a persecutor and his approval of Stephen’s death. But the Lord repeated his command to him to depart from Jerusalem, adding that he would send him to the Gentiles.63
Jerusalem was too hot to hold Saul. His friends saved his life by getting him safely away to Caesarea, where they put him on board a ship bound for his native Tarsus. Thus, as he says himself, he “came into the territories of Syria and Cilicia” (Gal. 1:21). Syria and Cilicia at this time formed a united imperial province.64 Tarsus, the chief city of Cilicia, was now about a thousand years old. It had been subject, from time to time, to the Assyrians, Persians, and Graeco-Macedonians. It passed under Roman control in 64 B.C., but retained its autonomy as a free city. Under Augustus the administration of the city was entrusted to his former teacher, Athenodorus the Stoic, himself a native of Tarsus, who appears to have established a property qualification for its citizens.65 Tarsus was a leading center of culture, with schools devoted to philosophy, rhetoric, and law, although they did not have the international standing of the schools of Athens and Alexandria.66 It is unwise, however, to exaggerate the influence which the educational system of Tarsus exercised on its most illustrious son.67
There, then, we leave Saul for some time, engaged in unchronicled evangelization; we meet him again in 11:25.
9. The Church Enjoys Peace and Prosperity (9:31)
31So the church68 throughout all Judaea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and continued to be built up and to increase, as it conducted itself in the fear of the Lord and the encouragement of the Holy Spirit.
31 Luke uses the singular “church” here where Paul prefers to use the plural and to speak of “the churches of Judaea” (Gal. 1:22; cf. 1 Thess. 2:14). It was, in fact, the original Jerusalem church, now dispersed and decentralized. “The Ecclesia,” said F. J. A. Hort, “was still confined to Jewish or semi-Jewish populations and to ancient Jewish soil; but it was no longer the Ecclesia of a single city, and yet it was one: probably as corresponding, by these three modern representative districts of Judaea, Galilee and Samaria, to the ancient Ecclesia which had its home in the whole land of Israel.”69
With this summary of progress Luke’s narrative of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus comes to an end. The persecution that broke out after Stephen’s death died out with the conversion and departure of the leading persecutor. But such is the importance attached by Luke to this event that, in spite of limitations on the space at his disposal, he records it in some detail on two later occasions, on both of which the story is told by Paul in the first person—once to the hostile crowd from which he had just been rescued in the temple precincts (22:1–21), and once in his apologia before the younger Agrippa (26:2–29).70
With Luke’s estimate of the importance of Saul’s conversion neither the historian nor the theologian can quarrel. The spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire cannot be imagined apart from his work. He was indeed a chosen instrument in the hand of the risen Lord, fitted for his life-work before his conversion—set apart for it indeed, as he acknowledges, before his birth (Gal. 1:15). Born a “Hebrew” son of “Hebrew” parents,71 and given the best education in his ancestral traditions that contemporary Judaism could provide,72 he also inherited the rare privilege of Roman citizenship, while his debt to Hellenistic culture is plain to every reader of his letters. When in due course God “revealed his Son” in Saul of Tarsus, he devoted all this wealthy inheritance, together with his rare natural qualities, to the task of Gentile evangelization; and, latecomer though he was among the apostles, he “worked harder than any of them, though [he added] it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).