by N. T. Wright
Slowly, gradually, the prophet works his way up from the living creatures and the whirling wheels to the throne itself; then, from the throne to the figure sitting on the throne. Here he hardly dares say what he seems to see: “something that seemed like a human form.”13 The prophet falls on his face as though dead. He is, however, commanded at once to stand up to receive his prophetic vocation, though this in its way is just as frightening as the vision itself. Perhaps such a vocation can only be undertaken by someone who has seen such a sight.
This passage in Ezekiel became a focal point of meditation for devout Jews of Saul’s time and later. Contemplating such an awe-inspiring scene might, they hoped, bring into personal focus, ahead of the long-awaited visible return of God to Jerusalem, that fusion of heaven and earth that was the very raison d’être of the Temple itself. This wouldn’t just be about one person having what we moderns might call “a glorious spiritual experience.” A throne vision, a Temple vision, would be about heaven and earth coming together; in other words, it would have to do with the long-awaited renewal of creation itself—the ultimate prophetic vision.
The more I have pondered what happened to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, holding together (as a historian must) the somewhat formalized accounts in the book of Acts and the brief, cryptic references in Paul’s own letters, the more I have wondered whether Saul had been practicing this kind of meditation. It was the kind of thing one might well do during the long, hot hours on the journey from Jerusalem to Damascus. In Caravaggio’s famous painting, Saul is riding a horse; historically, a donkey seems a good deal more likely. This would also produce an oblique echo of the story that began with Balaam on his donkey and ended up with Phinehas’s moment of zeal.
As we reflect on what Paul the Apostle came to say about the incident much later, it would make perfect sense to suppose that he had been meditating upon Ezekiel’s vision and seeking, if he could, to glimpse for himself what the prophet had seen. (I assume he was well under the prescribed age of forty. But I also assume that the attempted prohibition was a later restriction, designed precisely to protect young hotheads from danger.) Perhaps Saul was praying the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one,” praying it as a mantra, repeating it to the rhythm of his breathing, to the steady movement of the beast beneath him. Pray and watch. Watch and pray. Stay loyal to Israel’s God. Stand up for his kingdom. Pray and watch. Start with the living creatures and the whirling wheels, and perhaps ascend from there . . .
In his mind’s eye, then, he has the four-faced creatures and the wheels. He focuses on them. He sees them. He ponders them. Will he dare to go further? Upward, with prayer and quickening pulse, to the chariot itself. Was it his imagination? Was he actually seeing it? Were his eyes open, or was it just his heart’s eyes opened to realities normally invisible? Nobody who has had that kind of experience is likely to give a scientific answer to such questions, but such questions are in any case left behind when heaven and earth are coming together. Upward again, then, to the lower parts of what seems to be a figure on the throne, some kind of human form. Saul of Tarsus, head full of scripture, heart full of zeal, raises his eyes slowly upward once more. He is seeing now, eyes wide open, conscious of being wide awake but conscious also that there seems to be a rift in reality, a fissure in the fabric of the cosmos, and that his waking eyes are seeing things so dangerous that if he were not so prepared, so purified, so carefully devout, he would never have dared to come this far. Upward again, from the chest to the face. He raises his eyes to see the one he has worshipped and served all his life . . . And he comes face-to-face with Jesus of Nazareth.
To explain what this meant in the language of psychology would be like trying to copy a Titian with a child’s crayons. To understand the explosion that resulted, we need history, we need theology, we need a strong sense of the inner tensions of the first-century Jewish world and the zealous propagators of Jewish culture. This moment shattered Saul’s wildest dreams and, at the same split second, fulfilled them. This was—he saw it in that instant—the fulfillment of Israel’s ancient scriptures, but also the utter denial of the way he had been reading them up to that point. God the Creator had raised Jesus from the dead, declaring not only that he really was Israel’s Messiah, but that he had done what the One God had promised to do himself, in person. Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled. He had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel’s vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah itself. His lifelong loyalty was utterly right, but utterly misdirected. He had a zeal for God, but had not understood what the One God was up to. Everything was now focused on the figure from whom there streamed a blinding light, the figure who now addressed Saul as a master addresses a slave, the figure he recognized as the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Heaven and earth came together in this figure, and he was commanding Saul to acknowledge this fact and to reorient his entire life accordingly.
So when Christian tradition speaks of the “conversion” of Saul, we need to pause. In our world, as we saw earlier, we normally apply that term to someone who “converts” from one “religion” to another. That was not the point. Not for one second did Saul cease to believe in the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was just that . . . well, what had happened was . . . how could he put it? Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.”14 That was one way of putting it. There would be other ways too. This wasn’t about “religion,” whether in the ancient or the (very different) modern sense. It was about Jesus. About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.
It is easy, in our culture, to get this seriously wrong. People still speak of Paul and the groups of Jesus-followers who sprang up through his work as offering a new kind of “religion” comparable to or in competition with something called “Judaism.” This is misleading on several counts. There was nothing called “Christianity” in the first century, only groups of people who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord. There was nothing corresponding to what we now call “Judaism” in the first century (the word then, as we saw, had an active force meaning “the zealous propagation of the Jewish way of life”), only the many communities of Jews around the world, praying to Israel’s God, studying the scriptures, focusing on Temple and Torah.
What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel’s God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel’s scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus. Paul remained to his dying day fiercely loyal to Israel’s God, seen in fresh and blinding focus in Jesus. Neither Paul nor his communities were engaged in “comparative religion.” They were not saying, “We’ve tried one way of being religious, and now we think we have a better one.” Nobody thought like that in the first century, certainly no Jew. They were focused on what we might call messianic eschatology: the belief that the One God had acted climactically and decisively in, and even as, Israel’s Messiah. A shocking, blinding reality. The reality that would change the world.
They led Saul by the hand and brought him into the city.
* * *
If you look up “Straight Street” in Damascus (on Google Earth, say), you will be directed to Bab Sharqi. It is part of an ancient Roman road running east to west across the heart of the old city. Bab Sharqi is now the eastern half of a longer street, with the Jewish quarter lying on its southern sid
e. Somewhere in that district Saul of Tarsus was taken, stone blind, to a lodging where he stayed, shocked and stunned, for three days. He didn’t eat; he didn’t drink; he couldn’t see; but he prayed. Of course he prayed. “Hear, O Israel . . .”
But what would that great prayer mean now? What form would loyalty to the One God now take? Paul would, of course, continue to invoke the One God as the God of Israel. But what if Israel’s purposes had been fulfilled in one man, the anointed king? And what if Israel’s God had done in person, in the person of this man, what he said he would do, defeating death itself and launching his new creation? What would the word “God” itself now mean? What would the word “Israel” now mean? (This question was faced by many Jewish groups of the period, from the Covenant Sect at Qumran to the eager groups supporting various potential “messiahs” over the next century or so, each claiming an exclusive inside track on the divine purposes.) Saul, knowing the Psalms and prophets and, behind them all, the great story of creation and the Exodus, prayed and prayed.
On the third day there was a knock at the door. The little group of Jesus-followers in Damascus, some of them perhaps refugees from the persecution in Jerusalem, had known that Saul of Tarsus was coming to get them, to drag them off to prison or even death. One of that group, Ananias, had a vision. (People today sneer at such things, but that is often mere prejudice. Many people in various cultures still speak of strange senses of direction or even command, unexpected promptings that, when followed, produce unexpected results.) He was to go and lay his hands on Saul so that he could see again. Ananias naturally recoiled. Was the Lord asking him to walk into a trap, into a lion’s den? No. As so often—it becomes a recurring theme in early Christian storytelling—when something has to be done, it will be done through an obedient, but quite likely nervous and worried disciple. So off he goes.
Jesus had told him three things about Saul. First, he was praying. People have sometimes suggested that “praying” was itself a sign that Saul had had a new “religious experience,” like a secular atheist in today’s world meeting God and praying for the first time; but that of course is nonsense. Saul had prayed all his life and was now praying with a new focus and a new perplexity. Second, Saul was to be a “chosen vessel” through whom the message would go out to the world. Third, Saul would have to suffer for Jesus’s sake. But Ananias didn’t say that to Saul. That was for Jesus himself to make clear. Ananias had other words and other actions. Together they introduce several themes that will shape Saul’s life and work.
“Brother Saul,” he began. Brother? Yes. From the very start—from the teaching of Jesus himself—the members of this strange new group regarded one another as “family” in a world where “family” meant a lot more than it does in most Western cultures today. Even before Saul has been baptized, Ananias recognizes him as part of what anthropologists call a “fictive kinship group.” Of course, at this point all the Jesus-followers were Jews, so there was already a sense of extended kinship within which this new reality had come to birth. But quickly, not least through the work of Saul himself, this kinship would be extended to a much wider company, creating serious problems on the way but always making the same strong affirmation. “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no ‘male and female’; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.”15 Paul wrote those words at least fifteen years later. But the truth they express was already contained within Ananias’s opening greeting.
Ananias explained to Saul that Jesus had sent him so that Saul would be able to see again and so that he would receive the holy spirit. Who knows what those words did to Saul after his three days of turmoil and blindness? Whatever was going on inside him, the outward evidence was clear: something like scales fell from his eyes (another proverbial phrase; had the blinding light caused some sort of a scab?), and he could see. We in the modern world do not put much stock in “miracles.” But when we are faced with events that seem to fall in no other category, we speak of miracles as though they are caused by a “supernatural” power from outside the world that “invades” the chain of “natural causes.” It may sometimes feel like that. But a more biblical account would recognize the strange, steady work of God within so-called natural causes as well, so that the sudden and shocking new event is held within a larger continuum of ultimate divine causation.
In any case, the early followers of Jesus knew very well that, just as Jesus himself had gone about healing people, so they too were entrusted with this gift—not all the time and never simply at their own whim, but with a lasting and powerful effect that carried its own evidential weight. Writing his letters some years after this, Paul would refer to the same kind of healing power working through him and through others—just as he would also refer to illnesses, his own and those of others, that were not healed, or not in the way one had hoped. The mystery remained, but the power remained too.
So then Ananias baptized the puzzled Saul. As in some of the other occasions in Acts, this happened at once, as soon as the person came to believe in the crucified Jesus as the risen Lord. There was no period of waiting, teaching, or preparation. That would come in due time. Baptism, looking back to Jesus’s own baptism and past that to the crossing of the Red Sea in the Passover story, marked out the new family, the new Passover people.
Jesus himself had used the image of baptism to speak of his approaching death. Paul would later make it clear that this dramatic plunging into water and coming up again spoke in powerful and effective symbolic language about the dying and rising of Jesus and about the new world that had come to birth through those events. To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one. Insofar as it marked out members of the family, it functioned somewhat like circumcision for a Jew, except of course that women were included as well. Equally, it was a bit like a slave being branded (so that the slave was now under a new master), though of course slaves and free alike were baptized. The important thing was that, having been baptized, one now belonged to the Messiah. Saul was now a “Messiah man,” shaped in the pattern of the Jesus who had summed up the divine purposes for Israel.
Something else happened at the same time: Saul received Jesus’s own spirit. The fourth and last point of immense significance in Ananias’s visit to Straight Street is that Saul was promised the gift of the spirit, and everything in his subsequent life and writings indicates that he believed this had happened then and there. The story in Acts doesn’t say that Saul spoke in tongues or prophesied. The idea that things like that had to happen for the spirit’s gift to be genuine is a much later fiction. What Acts offers instead is the remarkable statement that Saul went at once to the synagogue in Damascus and announced that Jesus was the son of God (a theme to which we shall return in due course). There was a new power coupled with a new sense of direction.
Paul’s powerful, spirit-driven proclamation of Jesus as “son of God” can hardly be called “preaching,” if by “preaching” we mean the sort of thing that goes on in churches week by week in our world. This was a public announcement, like a medieval herald or town crier walking through the streets with a bell, calling people to attention and declaring that a new king had been placed on the throne. This was, indeed, how the word “gospel” would be heard right across the Roman world of the day: as the announcement of a new emperor. Paul’s proclamation was not, then, a fresh twist on the regular teaching work of the local Jewish community. He wasn’t offering advice on how to lead a more holy life. He certainly wasn’t telling people how to go to heaven when they died. He was making the all-time one-off announcement: Israel’s hope has been fulfilled! The King has been enthroned! He was declaring that the crucified Jesus was Israel’s long-awaited Messiah.
But what happens when half the people in the town don’t want this new king? Saul discovered the answer to that all too soon, not that he would have been particularly surprised. The local Jewish community in Damascus was shocked at the su
dden turnaround of this hotheaded young man, transformed from persecutor to proclaimer. Not just shocked; they were deeply offended (as of course Saul himself had been) at the suggestion that Israel’s history would reach its climax in a crucified messiah. Not all Jews in this period, so far as we can tell, believed in a coming messiah in the first place. Those who did hope for such a figure envisaged the messiah as a warrior hero. He would be a new David; he would overthrow the wicked pagans, restore the Temple to make it fit for Israel’s God to come back to at last, and establish a worldwide rule of justice and peace. Jesus of Nazareth, as everybody knew, had done none of those things. Saul of Tarsus could produce all the scriptural “proofs” he liked from his long years of study. But the synagogue in Damascus was not going to be convinced.
* * *
Up to this point, we have been following the story of Paul on the road to Damascus and then in the city itself more or less as we find it in the book of Acts. But Paul, in a later writing, injects another episode into the mix at this point. This extra episode, when properly understood, strongly reinforces our developing picture of the hotheaded young zealot suddenly stopped in his tracks. He went away, he says, to Arabia.16 What was that all about? Why did he go? What did it mean? How does it help us to see not only what motivated Saul from the beginning, but also what was involved in his sudden transition from persecutor to apostle? What does it contribute to our effort to understand the man whose subsequent writings would shape a worldwide movement and, in a measure, the world itself?
