THE APOSTLE PAUL

CHAPTER V

CONVERSION AND CALL

WHETHER Paul was present in Jerusalem in the days when Jesus fulfilled His destiny there, and had seen Him in the flesh, we cannot tell-from 2 Cor. v. 16 no definite conclusion can be drawn either for or against a personal acquaintance of the apostle with Jesus, while 1 Cor. ix. 1 can only refer to a vision of the risen Lord. The first historical appearance of Paul is connected with the martyrdom of the Hellenist Stephen, who seems to have been the first to draw from the belief in Jesus as the Messiah farreaching inferences as to the reform of the Jewish religion, to which the other disciples had not yet approached, for it was made a special charge against him that he had declared that Jesus would destroy the Temple and alter the Mosaic customs (Acts vi. 14). If, then, Paul the Pharisee, with his zeal for the Law, heard bold assertions of this kind maintained by those who confessed the faith in the crucified Messiah Jesus, and openly defended in the synagogues, it is intelligible that this aroused his bitter indignation against a sect whose belief in a crucified Messiah was in itself irrational, while in

view of the revolutionary consequences drawn by Stephen it became nothing short of impious; and made its extirpation appear to him as a conscientious duty. Accordingly at the death of Stephen he played the part of the principal witness, at whose feet the executioners laid down their clothes. And not content with making the one capital example, he displayed such zeal in the continued persecution of the Christian community that the Council at Jerusalem gave him authority to hold penal jurisdiction in the Jewish colony at Damascus over the Christians who had taken refuge there. But the persecutor was to enter Damascus as a convert.

The Book of Acts gives a threefold account of the conversion of Paul, in chaps. ix., xxii., and xxvi. The particulars of this threefold narrative can make no claim to historical accuracy, if only because they contradict each other in several points. The words which one account ascribes to Christ at His appearance are represented in the other as spoken by Ananias at Damascus; in one the companions of Paul fall to the ground along with him, in the other they remain standing; according to one they hear, indeed, a voice, but see nothing; according to another, they see, indeed, a light, but hear nothing. If we deduct these subordinate features, which are to be credited to the narrator, there remains as the essential kernel of the story only this—that Paul on the way to Damascus suddenly saw an appearance of light that shone down from heaven, and heard a voice in which he believed he recognised a personal communication from Jesus. With this, Paul's own utterances in his letters are in essential harmony, since they agree in indicating that

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the decisive experience by which he was called to be not only a believing disciple, but also the Apostle of Christ to the heathen, consisted in the manifestation of the Lord Jesus exalted to heaven and glorified with heavenly splendour (dóğa). When, for example, he asks in 1 Cor. ix. 1, "Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?" it is evident from the context that this 'seeing" can only refer to the experience on which Paul based his claim to apostolic rank, therefore to his call at his conversion. Again, when in 1 Cor. xv. 9, after the enumeration of the earlier appearances of Christ to the other disciples, he continues, "Last of all he appeared unto me also, as to one born out of due time, for I am the last of the apostles, and am not worthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church, but through the grace of God I am what I am," it is clear that here too he refers his call to the apostleship to an appearance of Christ which he places in line with the other appearances of the risen Christ as of essentially the same character. Now though this makes it certain that Paul was convinced of the objective character of the appearance of Christ which he witnessed, yet other passages show just as clearly that he did not regard this seeing as the perception by the senses of an earthly, material body, but as the vision of a supersensuous being by the inner eye of the spirit. He says in Gal. i. 16, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen"; and in 2 Cor. iv. 6, "God. . . . hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." It is quite in accordance with this that in 1 Cor. xv. 45 ff. he describes Christ as the Heavenly

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Man, whose likeness we shall one day bear at the resurrection, and whose body has nothing to do with flesh and blood, but is a "spiritual" or "heavenly" body such as pertains to heavenly beings.1 spiritual or heavenly body of this kind cannot, however, be an immediate object of sense-perception to the bodily eyes; what is seen by these is only an appearance of light to which the inner sense or the consciousness of the percipient gives the definite significance of an appearance of Christ. But that is as much as to say that this appearance belongs to the category of inner or visionary perception, and stands therefore in the closest relationship with the visions and revelations which are frequently mentioned elsewhere in the apostle's life.

Specially significant in this connection is 2 Cor. xii. 1 ff., where his subjective ecstatic state of consciousness in visions of the objectivity of which, in other respects, Paul entertained no doubt, is made quite clear by his adding that he does not know whether, when he was caught up into the third heaven, he was "in the body or out of the body." When, further, he speaks in the same connection of peculiar bodily suffering and exhaustion which was connected with these high visions, that points unmistakably to such conditions of nervous excitation as are usually connected with ecstatic states of consciousness and form in a measure the physical basis for them. We may therefore confidently draw the conclusion that the bodily and mental organisation of Paul had a general predisposition to experiences

1 σῶμα τῆς δόξης, Phil. iii. 21; σῶμα ἐπουράνιον, πνευματικόν, 1 Cor. xv. 40, 44, 48.

of that kind. There are some other instances which give us a glimpse into the psychological pre-conditions for the occurrence of "revelations." When, according to Acts xvi. 9 f., his resolve to extend his missionary activity into Europe was caused by a vision in the night, or when, according to Gal. ii. 1, his eventful journey to the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem was the result of a revelation, it is clearly evident that in such cases the "vision" or or "revelation" was the form of consciousness which a mental struggle, issuing from doubt to clearness, from indecision and uncertainty to a definite resolution, was wont to assume in the case of Paul. These visionary experiences, therefore, did not occur spontaneously; they had their immediate causes in pre-existing conditions of mind, from which they may therefore to a certain extent be psychologically explained. The same is the case with the visionary experiences which led to Paul's conversion: historical criticism claims the right and the duty of investigating its psychological pre-conditions and the motives which gave rise to it. Moreover, this question cannot be avoided even by those who believe themselves bound to maintain the strictly miraculous character of the occurrence, for were there no psychological preparation or motive for this "miracle," it would be a purely magical act, in which the soul of Paul was subjected to a force acting from without a thoroughly unevangelical conception which would stand in complete contradiction with the Pauline definition of faith as an act of personal obedience to the truth which has been inwardly experienced.

The Book of Acts gives us a hint which helps