This life-changing experience happened around the year 35, about five years after Jesus’ execution. The author of Acts tells the story three times with minor differences of detail—once as part of his narration and twice in speeches attributed to Paul.3
According to the first and fullest account in Acts 9, Paul was on his way to Damascus in Syria, authorized by Jewish authorities to seek out followers of Jesus (those who belonged to a fledgling movement called “the Way”) and bring them bound to Jerusalem. Then he experienced a brilliant light and heard a voice:
Now as Paul was approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”4
Paul had a vision—a vivid subjective sense of momentarily seeing and hearing another reality. The men traveling with Paul did not experience exactly what he did. In Acts 9, we are told that they heard the voice but saw no one; in Acts 22, we are told that they saw the light but heard nothing.5
The vision blinded Paul. The voice commanded him to go into Damascus, where he would be told what to do. In that city, Jesus appeared in another vision to a disciple named Ananias, directed him to find Paul, and disclosed to him that Paul had been chosen as an instrument to bring Jesus’ name “before Gentiles and kings and the people of Israel.”
Ananias did as he was told and found Paul, who had now been blind for three days. Laying his hands on Paul, he said, “The Lord Jesus has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” The result: “Something like scales fell from Paul’s eyes, and his sight was restored.”6 Whether Ananias’s restoration of sight to Paul is history remembered or metaphorical narrative, its metaphorical meaning is provocatively appropriate: filled with the Spirit, Paul saw anew as the scales fell from his eyes. Then he was baptized, and his life as an apostle of Jesus began.
Paul’s experience on the Damascus Road is one of the most famous in religious history. Even in the secular culture, people speak of dramatic, life-changing experiences as “Damascus Road experiences.” It included features reported in other visions in the history of religions: a “photism” and an “audition,” technical terms for an experience of brilliant light and a voice.
Commonly called Paul’s conversion experience, it is and is not, depending upon what we mean by “conversion.” In a religious context, the word has three meanings. The first is conversion from being nonreligious to being religious, the second is conversion from one religion to another, and the third is conversion within a religious tradition. Paul’s experience is neither of the first two. Clearly, he was deeply religious before Damascus. Moreover, he did not convert from one religion to another. Not only was Christianity not yet seen as a separate religion, but Paul continued to regard himself as a Jew after his conversion and for the rest of his life. But it was a conversion within a tradition: from one way of being Jewish to another way of being Jewish.
In an important sense, his conversion was his “call story” to the rest of his life-work. All three accounts in Acts report Paul’s commissioning to his vocation as an apostle to the Gentiles. In his own words from Galatians:
God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through divine grace, was pleased to reveal God’s Son to me so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.7
This dramatic experience changed not only Paul, but eventually the world.
I have begun with the story of Paul on the Damascus Road in part because that experience was the turning point in his life, but also because I am convinced that we best understand Paul when we take his religious experience seriously as our starting point for understanding his message. Moreover, because he also refers to dramatic religious experiences in his own letters, he is one of only two first-century followers of Jesus (and perhaps the only one) from whom we have firsthand reports of such experiences.8 Unless we ground Paul’s theology in his conversion experience, it easily becomes an abstract and unpersuasive intellectual construction.
Before we turn to Paul’s message, let us take a closer look at his life. Because of the importance of the Damascus Road experience—its life-changing impact—I will speak of the pre-Damascus Paul and the post-Damascus Paul as we review his life.
The Pre-Damascus Paul: His Life
Paul’s life before Damascus equipped him exceptionally well for his vocation as a Jewish apostle to the Gentile world.9 Born to Jewish parents, he grew up in a Hellenistic city in the Diaspora. Well-educated in both the Jewish tradition and Hellenistic rhetoric, he was fluent in Greek and at least bilingual (and probably more). Urban and cosmopolitan, he was also a Roman citizen by birth, a relatively uncommon status.
Though we do not know when Paul was born, it was probably in the first decade of the first century.10 He was born and grew up in Tarsus, a city on the south coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, was located on the major north-south trade route leading from the Middle East to Asia Minor and the Aegean Sea.11 Paul refers to it as “no mean city,” and writers from the time support his judgment. Tarsus flourished in the age of Augustus (emperor of Rome from 31 BCE to 14 CE) and was well known as a center of Hellenistic culture. One ancient author referred to its reputation for philosophy and learning, claiming that it surpassed both Athens and Alexandria, though another criticized its frivolous and luxury-loving atmosphere.12
Paul received his early education in Tarsus, and he seems to have been well taught. As his letters written many decades later attest, he was brilliant. According to a well-known twentieth-century scholar:
The intellectual range of his gospel . . . soared to incomparable heights, today still unconquered. Small wonder that many readers are left gasping at his letters, loaded to the line with a heavy cargo of thought; and that not a few who yield themselves to his gospel are left feeling like a traveler overcome by vertigo in an Alpine region surrounded by steep cloud-covered peaks, who often does not know how to follow on and how he is going to last the journey.13
A scholar of ancient Greek refers to his “writing as a classic of Hellenism.”14 Though both are referring to the post-Damascus Paul, the pre-Damascus Paul must also have been intellectually gifted. Conversion changes the way one sees, but it does not make one brighter.
According to Acts, as a young man Paul went to Jerusalem to study and spent a significant amount of time there. Acts reports that he studied under the famous Jewish teacher Gamaliel, that he was present at the martyrdom of Stephen before his Damascus experience, and that he had a sister living in Jerusalem. But Paul’s letters say nothing about any of this, so some uncertainty must remain.15
But his letters do make it clear that he was thoroughly educated in the Jewish tradition. He quotes and alludes to the Hebrew Bible (in Greek translation) over and over again, and his use of that text indicates that he was familiar with Jewish methods of interpretation. He was also passionately committed to Judaism. In his own words:
You have heard no doubt of my earlier life. . . . I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.16
In another passage about his life before Damascus, he describes himself with obvious pride as “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews.” He then refers to himself as a Pharisee: “as to the law a Pharisee.” The Pharisees were a Jewish sectarian movement committed to an intensified form of Torah observance, especially the extension of priestly standards of purity to everyday life. We do not know when Paul became a Pharisee, but if he did spend time in Jerusalem, it probably happened there. The fact that he chose Pharisaism points to the earnestness of his religious quest and the depth of his conviction. After once again mentioning the zeal with which he persecuted
the church, he concludes the passage with the words, “as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”17 Though Paul’s claim to be “blameless” under the law sounds strange to many Protestant Christians, there is no reason to doubt it, just as there is no reason to think that Paul found his pre-Damascus life as a Pharisee either oppressive or unsatisfying.
At some time in his life, Paul learned a trade. He became a tentmaker, which involved making tents and awnings out of leather and cloth. The trade gave him great mobility, requiring only a few lightweight tools (a knife, an awl, and curved needles) that could be carried anywhere. He was thus able to support himself everywhere, as he did in his life as a missionary.
The Post-Damascus Paul: His Life
Now we turn to Paul’s life and activity as a follower of Jesus and apostle to the Gentiles.
A Jewish Christ-Mystic
A mystic is a particular type of religious personality. Mystics do not simply believe in God; they know God. The defining core of mysticism is thus experiential: mystics have direct, vivid, and typically frequent experiences of the sacred. Sometimes the sacred is experienced in another level of reality beyond the visible world; other times it is experienced as a luminous reality shining through the visible world. Mysticism intrinsically involves a nonordinary state of consciousness—nonordinary in the sense that such experience is radically different from ordinary everyday consciousness. Mystical consciousness is ecstatic in the root sense of the word: in Greek, ek means “out of” and stasis means “state of being.” To be ecstatic in this sense does not mean to be thrilled or happy or jubilant (as in the term’s common usage today), but to be out of one’s ordinary state of being. Thus, to use an approximate synonym, a mystic is a religious ecstatic.
Paul was clearly a mystic—a Jewish mystic. His experience on the Damascus Road (as well as subsequent experiences) put him in this category. Mystical experience in the Jewish tradition is ancient, going back well beyond the first century. Reflected in several books in the Hebrew Bible, it continued into the postbiblical period and has endured through the centuries ever since. But in the history of Jewish mysticism, Paul occupies a special place: he is the first Jewish mystic from whom we have a firsthand account, and the only one prior to about 1000 CE.18
We do not know how frequently Paul had such experiences. The Damascus Road experience was certainly one. Another one is reported in Second Corinthians. Defending his credentials as an apostle, he says, “I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord,” and then uses third-person language to refer to himself:
I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.19
It is a classic description of a particular kind of mystical experience: a journey into another level of reality (“the third heaven”) named as Paradise (the place of God’s presence), a sense of being out of one’s body, and an inability (or prohibition?) to disclose what was experienced there.20
Does this passage suggest that Paul had many such experiences? As he introduces it, he uses the plural visions and revelations and concludes by using the plural again as he refers to “the exceptional character of the revelations.” 21 Perhaps not much weight should be given to this, but the language suggests that the experience was one of several.
Strikingly, Paul regarded his mystical experience of Jesus as a resurrection experience—an appearance of the risen Christ similar to those experienced by the original followers of Jesus. In I Corinthians 15, in the earliest passage in the New Testament referring to those to whom the risen Christ appeared, Paul includes himself. Similarity is also suggested by the use of the same verb throughout:
Jesus appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.22
When and how did the risen Christ first appear to Paul? The answer, of course, is in his mystical vision on the Damascus Road.
In addition to these reports of mystical experience, there are passages in Paul that reflect the consciousness of a mystic. In Galatians, he uses classical mystical language that points to a mystical identity—the death of an old self and the birth of a new self spoken of as Christ living in him: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”23 Of the many passages in Paul whose language makes best sense within a mystical framework, I cite one more. In a dense but luminous passage, Paul uses phrases characteristic of one who has had mystical experiences: “unveiled faces” and “beholding the glory of the Lord” (“glory” means “radiant presence”). He also speaks of the transforming effect of such experience:
And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.24
Thus Paul was not just a Jewish mystic, but a Jewish Christ-mystic. In my judgment, his mystical experience was the source of everything he became as a follower of Jesus. It was the ground of his conviction that Jesus was not a dangerously misleading and cursed figure of the past but a living reality of the present who had been raised by God; it was the basis of his identity and of his call to be an apostle; and, as we will see, it was the foundation of his message.
An Apostle and Missionary of Jesus
Paul’s life as a missionary of Jesus lasted about twenty-five years. Most of it was spent in Asia Minor and Greece. On the road much of the time, he established Christ communities in urban areas and then stayed in touch with them by writing letters.
Paul’s Travels Paul’s travels as an apostle may have totaled about ten thousand miles—miles that he covered mostly by foot and occasionally by boat.25
As an itinerant, he supported himself as a tentmaker, though he occasionally received some additional support from the communities he founded.
After his experience on the Damascus Road, he spent three years in “Arabia,” which in those days meant Nabatea (in present-day Jordan; its ancient capital was Petra). He spent the 40s of the first century as a missionary in Asia Minor, including the area of Galatia. Around the year 50, he left Asia Minor for Europe. In Greece, beginning in the north, he established Christ communities in Philippi, Thessaloniki, and Beroea. In the south, he apparently had no success in Athens, though he did in the cosmopolitan city of Corinth, where he spent a couple of years and to whose Christians much of his correspondence was directed.26 During the 50s, he crossed back and forth between Greece and Asia Minor, where he spent considerable time in the important city of Ephesus. During this decade, he wrote most or all of his letters.
Paul’s life as an apostle was often arduous, filled with controversy, and marked by suffering. He describes it in a well-known passage in which he defends himself against Christian opponents:
Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold, and naked. And besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches.27
Paul wrote the above before his final imprisonment, which was to last at least four years. Near the end of the 50s,
he returned to Jerusalem with a collection of money for “the poor,” gathered from his largely Gentile communities. There, according to Acts, he was arrested on the charge of bringing a Gentile into the part of the temple forbidden to Gentiles. Imprisoned in Caesarea on the coast for about two years, he was then transported as a prisoner to Rome around the year 60 (and shipwrecked again). In Rome he was under house arrest for another two years, though people were able to come to him to hear the gospel. There the book of Acts ends, and we learn nothing more about what happened to Paul next.28
The Christ Communities of Paul The common image of Paul as a street-corner preacher proclaiming the gospel to all and sundry is probably not an accurate reflection of the way he did things. According to Acts, Paul followed a consistent missionary strategy. When he arrived in a new city, he began by going to the Jewish synagogue. There he would address Jews, of course, but also Gentiles who were loosely associated with the synagogue. Commonly called “God-fearers,” these were Gentiles who were attracted to Judaism and worshiped in the synagogue but did not fully convert to Judaism.29
(We might call them “seekers.”) Paul sought them out, most likely engaging them in one-on-one or small-group conversation. Most of Paul’s Gentile converts seem to have come from this category.
Paul’s converts would begin a community life of their own, gathering regularly for worship and instruction and life together. Later in this chapter I will say more about the life of these communities. For now, I note that they were small, for two reasons. The first was the relatively small number of Christians. According to a recent estimate of early Christian growth, there were only about two thousand Christians in the whole of the Roman Empire by the year 60, by which time Paul’s missionary activity was basically over.30 Assuming that half of these were in the Jewish homeland, about a thousand were spread out over the rest of the empire. Thus in any given locality, with perhaps an exception or two, the number of Christians would have been well under a hundred (and perhaps more like ten to thirty).
Reading the Bible again for the First Time Page 22