Apprehended by Christ Jesus

With astonishing suddenness the persecutor of the church became the apostle of Jesus Christ. He was in mid-course as a zealot for the law, bent on checking a plague which threatened the life of Israel, when, in his own words, he was "apprehended by Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:12) and constrained to turn right round and become a champion of the cause which, up to that moment, he had been endeavouring to exterminate.

What caused this revolution? His own repeated explanation is that he saw the once-crucified Jesus now exalted as the risen Lord. "Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" he asks indignantly when his apostolic credentials are questioned (1 Corinthians 9:1), referring to the same occasion as that mentioned later in the same letter (1 Corinthians 15:8) where, after listing earlier appearances of Christ in resurrection, he adds, "Last of all...he appeared also to me" (perhaps in the sense, "he let himself be seen by me").

The resurrection appearance granted to him was as real as the appearances witnessed by Peter, James, and many others on the first Easter and the days immediately following. When, in 2 Corinthians 4:6, he says that "God...has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ," his language perhaps implies a reminiscence of the same event-more particularly of that great "light from heaven, brighter than the sun" which flashed about him as he and his companions approached Damascus, according to the evidence of Acts (9:3; 22:6; 26:13).

The evidence of Acts corroborates Paul's claim to have seen the risen Christ but also insists time and again that he heard him speak. "The God of our fathers," he is told by Ananias of Damascus, "appointed you to see the just One and to hear a voice from his mouth" (Acts 22: 14; cf. 9: 17). Whatever variations there are in Luke's three accounts of Paul's conversion, all three agree that about midday, as he was approaching Damascus, he "heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' And he said, `Who are you, Lord?' And he said, `I am Jesus [of Nazareth], Whom you are persecuting'" (9:4f.; 22:7f.; 26:14f.).

Some verbal communication, beyond the heavenly vision in itself, is implied in Paul's statement that "he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles" (Galatians 1:15f.). No single event, apart from the Christ-event itself, has proved so determinant for the course of Christian history as the conversion and commissioning of Paul. For anyone who accepts Paul's own explanation of his Damascus-road experience, it would be difficult to disagree with the observation of an 18th-century writer 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."

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