The Conversion of Saul
Unmercifully, the blistering sun beat down on the riders, dehydrating their already worn-out bodies as they journeyed through the desolate, arid desert in the direction of Damascus. Already they could feel the fatigue and exhaustion of three days travel, now multiplied by the scorching heat, which was already causing some to see mirages on the rocky crags of the desert which lay ahead.
At their lead was Saul of Tarsus, one of the fiercest and most hated Pharisees of his time. Ruthless and unrelenting, Saul heartlessly persecuted the Nazarenes, murdering them cold-bloodedly by the dozens. Already, he had ridden Jerusalem of those fanatics and was now in search of newer lands, in this case, Damascus. With a passion which never seemed to end, he was an exemplary Pharisee, and had earned the praise of several of the Sanhedrin, including their leader, Gamaliel, under whom he had studied.
With his permission and a letter to the synagogues of Samaria, Saul was now on his way to Damascus to finish off the remaining believers which had fled from Jerusalem and refugeed in safer Samaritan lands. “Safer”, he thought, “until I arrive.” A smile crept up his face as he imagined the horrified and fearful looks he instilled on his victims. Despite his cruel hate for the followers of the Way, however, he admired their emotional strength and fortitude in the face of danger. When younger, he had witnessed the stoning of Stephen and he would never forget the devotion and tranquility etched on the dying man’s face as he faltered with each blow of the pelting stones. “It is a pity they believe in that lunatic Nazarene who claimed to be the king of Israel. They would have made excellent Pharisees,” he thought.
Examining his surroundings, Saul noticed that all he could hear was the occasional flapping of vulture wings and the careful gait of their horses as they slowly picked their way through the pebble-strewn path. The swaying of the horses he didn’t mind, actually he was used to it by now, but the vultures brought back unpleasant memories of the long strenuous journeys he had made in Cappadocia and Cilicia when younger.
His thoughts were turning back to his unfinished discourse on the Mosaic Law he had left behind Jerusalem when suddenly his horse bucked, hurling him completely off his saddle and down a nearby embankment. Confused and dazed, he attempted to see through the settling dust when a dazzling light shining down from heaven blinded him. Now thoroughly terrified, he covered his eyes then heard from above a voice saying “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
Stunned and very much afraid, Saul stuttered questioningly, “Who are you, Lord?”
“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” He replied, “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”
Saul picked himself up from the ground, shaking off all the red dust which had settled on his white coat. Amazed and shaken up, Saul stared again one more time at the spot the light had come from. “How could I be persecuting God??” he asked himself. “I’m doing this for Him not against Him!” Indignant, he thought over the words spoken to him in his vision and still confused, he looked up one more time. Everything was now pitch dark and he couldn’t even see the ground. “But it’s still in the afternoon!” he thought. Crying out to his fellow travelers, he groped around until he found a rock to rest on. Excited voices approached him, asking him if he had seen what had happened. Saul explained what he had seen and they were amazed that he had heard a voice. To them, only a brilliant light had appeared.
His glassy gaze soon betrayed his blindness to them and after helping Saul mount his horse, they rode on hastily towards Damascus, which was only 15 miles away, in hopes of reaching it before nightfall.
Who was Saul? Where was he from and how did he end up thousands of miles from home on a lonely road heading north from Jerusalem to Syrian Damascus? To begin, we must travel back in time and space 70 years and 600 kilometers northwest to a small hill outside Tarsus, a large, prosperous city situated in the wide and fertile plain of south-central Cilicia.
The year is 42 B.C. Gradually, the leading column of a Roman legion tops the hill and begins its final descent to Tarsus after a grueling day’s march from Antioch. With them is the much expected news of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, a war which had thrown the Roman Empire into turmoil for the last two years and was finally ending with the death and defeat of Pompey. Tarsus had wisely sided with the Emperor Caesar, and as recompense, received the status of free city of the Roman Empire and capital of the new province of Cilicia.2
Forty years later in the same city, in the year 3 B.C.,a boy is born to a Jewish family of the tribe of Benjamin. According to the custom of the Jews of the Dispersion in Roman territories, he was given both a Hebrew and a Latin name – Saul, meaning asked for and Paul, meaning little. By right of birth, Saul was a Roman citizen, Jewish in background and Greek in education. His father was a wealthy Pharisee, and Saul had a sister and a nephew.1 Many Jewish families had emigrated from their homeland willingly or as a result of foreign incursions in the centuries following Greek and Roman conquests of the Holy Land.
Tarsus was a lively city that combined both the Roman and Greek worlds in that its politics was Roman and its culture was Greek, a place of education and commerce.3 One of the chief crossroads of Asia Minor, Tarsus became the meeting place of East and West and of the Greek and Oriental cultures. Early Greek geographer Strabo (c. 62 BC-23 AD) described the citizens of Tarsus as being avid in the pursuit of culture. It had a famous university noted for its flourishing school of Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism. Hellenic influences at this time had permeated all levels of urban society in Asia Minor.
It was in this city that Saul was born and where he spent his childhood. Growing up in a Jewish family meant that Saul would have studied the Jewish Scriptures and tradition. At an early age he entered the synagogue day school where he learned to read and write by copying Scripture passages, committing the entire book of Deuteronomy to memory. His later writings indicate that he was at least trilingual in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, with probable knowledge of Latin and a local western Asian dialect.4
Every Jewish boy learned a trade – young Saul’s was tent-making or more properly cloth-weaving. He was a weaver of the coarse goats-hair cloth known as cilicium, a name derived from the province of Cilicia where Tarsus was located. This was the material Saul used in his profession of tent making, his means of supporting himself during his later travels. Perhaps he even attended the great university of Tarsus, second only to those in Athens and Alexandria, with its gymnasia, theater, school of art and stadium.5 It was there that he witnessed Greek influences and saw the convergence of the Jewish conservatism and the pagan Hellenistic world.
At the age of 19 in around A.D. 22, Saul’s parents shipped him off to Jerusalem to study under the eminent rabbi Gamaliel the Elder, one of the most honorable and reputable Jewish rabbis in the first century.6,7 He was the grandson of Hillel, the founder of the most influential rabbinical school of Judaism and the president of the Sanhedrin in succession of his father. Despite the liberal tolerance of his teacher, Saul became a fire-breathing conservative totally committed to the law and conservative Judaism: “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers”.8
It was in this environment that Saul received his education in the religion of Judaism and became well versed in its dogma and apologetics. In the year A.D. 35 Saul appears in Jerusalem as a self-righteous young Pharisee, almost fanatically anti-Christian. An observant Pharisee, Saul said of himself: “In the matter of the law, I was a Pharisee as for the uprightness embodied in the Law, I was faultless.”9 According to tradition, Saul was also married, but he was widowed early or his wife left him, so that he is alone during the rest of his life. 10
Sometime during his educational years it was instilled in him a fervent hatred for Christ and His followers and therefore became the perfect agent in the employment of the Sanhedrin against the Nazarene sect. Saul was preparing for a rabbinical career, since directly after finishing his education and training he appeared as a strong zealot of Pharisaic traditions and persecutor of the Christian faith. Perhaps by the appointment of the Sanhedrin he was a witness of the death of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, holding the coats of his stoners.11 No doubt in his approximately thirty years spent in Jerusalem, Saul made many trips throughout the Roman world under orders to exterminate and uproot Christians from all provinces. The new sect were to be stamped out, its adherents punished.
In his zeal and energy, he began persecuting the early believers of Jesus for their lack of fidelity to Jewish orthodoxy. He saw them as corrupters of the true religion and wanted them wiped out. Saul took the initiative to go to the High Priest and ask for authority to go to Damascus, Syria which is located 130 miles from Jerusalem, for the sole purpose of arresting the followers of Christ. He writes later: “I then thought it my duty to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth . . . many of the saints I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests to do so; and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them; and oftentimes in all the synagogues I punished them and tried to force them to blaspheme; and in my extreme rage against them I even pursued them to foreign cities”.12
And it is on the dusty road to Damascus that we reencounter Saul, blinded by the vision of Christ, astonished by what he had just seen and dazed by the sudden turn of events. Years of his life had been spent on persecuting the followers of Christ. A personal encounter with Jesus was the last thing he expected on this routine trip. The unexpected had happened. The brief exchange left Saul convinced that the risen Christ had spoken directly to him, and that in persecuting His followers he had been persecuting Jesus Himself.
Saul eventually recovered from his blindness, but spiritually he was never the same. On arriving in Damascus, there followed in dramatic sequence his sudden conversion, the cure of his blindness by the disciple Ananias, and his baptism. Immediately after his eyesight was restored, “he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God.”13
Paul accepted eagerly the commission to preach the Gospel of Christ, but like many others called by God for a specific mission, he was instructed personally by the Holy Spirit, spending three years in the deserts of Arabia, also called Nabatea, in meditation and prayer before beginning his ministry. He trained in the school of the Spirit in order that he might receive greater revelations concerning the new doctrines and the mysteries of the Church. During that time he no doubt spent some time in reflection and meditation, while visiting such cities as Philadelphia (now Amman, Jordan), Petra (the Nabatean capital) and Jerash. But, he probably began to preach the Gospel there because he had run afoul of King Aretas IV of Nabatea and was forced to flee back to Damascus eventually.
From the moment of his return, Paul—for he had now assumed this Roman name—never paused in his labors. It proved to be the most extraordinary career of preaching, writing, and church-founding of any Christian leader. He continued on with the same fiery passion, although this time it was directed towards divulging the Gospel of Christ which had changed his life and through him would change the lives of countless others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1)Giuseppe Frangi, From Persecutor to Chosen One
2) Acts 23:16
3) Acts 21:39; 9:11; 22:3
4) Acts 21:37
5) Lives of Saints, John J. Crawley & Co., Inc.
6) Acts 5,24; 22,3
7) Acts 5:34
8) Galatians 1:14
9) Philippians 3:5-6
10) Clement of Alexandria, A.D. 200
11) Acts 7:58
12) Acts 26:9-11
13) Acts 9:20
Additional Resources
1) Phillip J. Pendleton, A Synoptic Life of the Apostle Paul (1901)
2) John Abela, Paul of Tarsus: a Chronology
3) Charles A. Jennings, Tracing the Steps of the Apostle Paul
4) Miles Hodges, The Apostle Paul (Mid-First Century AD)
5) Biographies of St. Peter & St. Paul, St. Peter & St. Paul Catholic Community
6) The Work of Paul, Christian Classics Ethereal Library