by Jay Parini
They assured me that I had simply absorbed too much sun, that my sight would return, and my balance as well.
“I see nothing!” I told them. “I am blind!”
“You have lost your wits,” said Jarib, putting a wet cloth to my forehead. “The sun can do this. It’s not uncommon for this to happen on desert journeys.”
His words meant nothing to me. I knew what had happened. God had punished me for what I did to Stephen. But for reasons beyond understanding, Jesus now called to me. I had been singled out, chosen. My life was forever changed.
They helped me onto my donkey, and I clung to the stubble of its neck.
I shuddered and wept as we proceeded, utterly lost. I could see nothing but a glaze of indistinct light, a smear of yellow, and shadows, and thought I must soon die. My associates simply didn’t understand what had happened and how I felt. But how could they? It was all too peculiar, upsetting, upending. I would never be the same, that much I knew in my gut. I was no longer the same man who had left Jerusalem.
Chapter Four
LUKE
Paul talked a good deal, even in his sleep, and told the story of his first encounter with the Christ many times. I grew quite tired of the road to Damascus after a while.
I heard the anecdote in various forms, as the details, and the emphasis and tone of the story, shifted. The audience mattered, and he possessed a keen sense of his listeners and could alter his presentation in mid-flight, adjusting to the responses in the room: a laugh, a sigh of boredom, even a snort of contempt. For all this, I had no doubt that his experience on that legendary road changed everything for him.
“I’m not the man who set off from Jerusalem to Damascus,” he said to me. “Not the man who stoned dear Stephen.”
“All true,” I would say. “You changed course, reversed direction.”
“No,” he would say, argumentative as ever. “That doesn’t go far enough.”
Paul wanted everything framed in terms that measured his ideas of reality, and yet he clung to strange notions about himself. Often he would push back at me, resisting the shape of whatever I proposed, as if my version of Paul the apostle could never quite capture his reality.
“It was a transformation near Damascus,” he explained, “but not what you imagine. On that road I discovered what I already possessed, which is eternal life. It had been there all along, in my hand but concealed. I simply opened my hand, and there it lay.”
All very brisk and fetching, that comment, but I’m not sure his explanation was logical. Logic was never his gift. “It only leads to untruth,” he would say. “I never liked the syllogism as a form of thought. Aristotle be damned!”
What remained true was that he had wished to persecute followers of the Way. A friend had enlisted him as an adjunct of the Temple Guards: an unlikely prospect for a small, stumbling, stooped man with a squint who had no martial training, no gift for violence. They accepted him only because they imagined he would advance in elite Jewish circles and sit among the Court of Elders one day. His pervasive learning, skills of persuasion, determination, and blunt expressiveness boded well.
It must have disappointed them to see Paul reverse course, becoming an apostle of Jesus, especially among the Greeks. What puzzled many in the Way, however, was Paul’s lack of interest in the actual life of Jesus.
“Jesus never talked about his childhood,” he told me. “He stepped into the world at the moment of his baptism in the River Jordan. Anything before that was irrelevant. I suspect that his mother annoyed him.”
Mary had become a leading figure in the Way, and her role as the mother of our Lord gave her a special status in Jerusalem. With my plan to write a life of Jesus, I had a strong wish to interview her. What a thing it would be to have her voice in my head. But Paul discouraged me.
“Write as the spirit inspires you,” he said. “Let God push your fingers. A good story obliterates the material it serves. It creates truth.”
I did my best to convince him that a narrative of the events in the life of Jesus could be useful, providing a portrait of man perfected by God, a man chosen by the Almighty to express his voice. Followers of our Lord would (and did) have many questions: Where did he come from? What were the conditions of his birth? How was he different from other teachers who claimed a special connection to God?
Paul insisted that nothing mattered but the crucifixion, followed by the resurrection. Only this was relevant. Even the relationship between Jesus and the Law bored him. “He was himself the Law,” he said, a comment that didn’t go down well in Jerusalem with Peter and James, the Pillars. Of course he hoped to retain their approval, even thought that he required it. They gave him their approval, yet remained uneasy about his approach to gentiles like myself. He argued that the Kingdom of God would embrace the world at large, Greek and Jew alike. “There is no boundary,” he would say.
Paul’s mind often played over his youth in Jerusalem at the school of Gamaliel. I think one always recalls the days of yore with fondness, and perhaps trepidation as well, as this is a time of misplaced affections, unexpected turns, fancies and fantasies, inklings and excitements. (I often pushed away thoughts of my own distant childhood in Antioch, which had never been especially happy. Is there such a thing as a happy childhood?) I understood that Paul’s training with Gamaliel had formed the basis of his broad learning, and I could feel his gratitude to this old teacher, who had taken him in hand—and recently joined the Jesus circle himself, much to everyone’s astonishment.
If anyone understood the matter of reversals, of changing course in mid-flight, it was Paul.
Recollections of the Damascus Road became the opening gambit in most of his sermons, especially when he met an audience for the first time. And the tale adapted readily to local conditions, accumulating fresh dimensions in the moment of its telling. Paul usually failed to say that he had spent a good deal of time in Damascus before this visit because his family had business interests there, believing this somehow lessened the drama of his tale. He was in fact widely known to the Jews in that city. This fateful journey was a return of sorts, and he expected a bright welcome in the synagogue near the market, where he would be called on to read the scriptures aloud and comment as well. Paul knew the Torah well, and it was a rare thing for a scholar trained in the school of Gamaliel to appear in their midst, so they would have taken full advantage.
“I was halfway to Damascus when the ground beneath my horse began to tremble,” he might say, although I knew from other conversations that the “horse” was in fact a donkey, as he confessed one day. But a donkey doesn’t play well in public. “I clung to the quivering mane of my tall white horse,” he would say, “sure I would be thrown and mangled underfoot.” Sometimes he would begin: “Not far from the pink city walls of Damascus, the sky began to brighten. It was almost night, so this seemed odd, even ominous.” Another time he opened with: “One morning, as I mounted my small gray horse to begin the fourth day of my journey to Damascus, the clouds above me parted, and the face of our Lord shone like the sun itself, only brighter. I could see his eyes!”
The animals disappeared from the anecdote on many occasions. “I went by foot from Jerusalem to Damascus,” he could say. (I always missed the donkey.) He was with or without companions on this journey. Once he moved through the desert in a train of camels, which seemed highly unlikely, but he enjoyed talking about camels, which he considered “the most amusing of all God’s creatures, a divine joke.”
Did he actually meet the Christ, our Lord?
That cannot be doubted, although the exact nature of the manifestation and the meeting varied in the telling.
“A great light wavered in the desert, and a voice spoke to me,” he would often declare. “Why do you persecute my people? I am Jesus. You know me, I’m quite sure. You have always known me. I will make you my apostle.”
I took notes, as w
as my habit, accumulating a range of Damascus Road stories. The narrative might vary in detail, but the message was firm. The Lord had made contact with Paul, shaken and blinded him. He had been transformed.
The face of Jesus may or may not have glistened in the sky, but there can be no question about the intensity of the light or its effect on Paul. “As if lightning flashed and failed to fade,” he said. “It was steady, a bright surrounding glow, overwhelming.” Once he said, “My own flesh seemed to melt,” but that image displeased him and I never heard it again.
Somewhere near Damascus, Jesus appeared to Paul—the persecutor of the Way—in a blast of light, and Paul fell from his horse. Or fell to the ground as he walked. Or tumbled from his donkey. And the men who accompanied him fell beside him or didn’t. It was significant that the earth itself shook violently, as this detail drew gasps from the crowd, whatever their disposition. And the voice of Jesus, with his appointment of Paul as apostle, mattered to everyone but especially to Paul.
One night, as he lay next to me on a straw pallet near the Galatian town of Derbe, he recalled the Damascus experience with less bombast: “We slept beside the road each night, our donkeys tethered to a tree. When I woke one morning, before sunrise, there was the body of Jesus—a glorified body—crouched beside me on the blanket. I sat up, and we talked face-to-face, and he asked me to direct my attention to the mind of God. He said I could become like him, part of the Eternal Mind. He told me that time only existed for those who were lost. To be ‘found’ was to find myself outside of time.” He paused. “And he asked me to follow him.”
That was a singular monologue, possibly accurate, though I much preferred the image of Paul riding on a white horse, perhaps a warhorse, charging toward Damascus with anger in his heart, eager to slaughter those who belonged to the Way. The ground shuddered beneath him, tilting in air. A mighty wind arose, lifting the sand in a cloud. The sky turned blood-orange and gauzy. At once a brilliant and blinding light enveloped Paul, and in the midst of this effulgence came a voice telling him to stop persecuting people of the Way. Instead, he must join them. And spread the Good News about Jesus and God’s kingdom.
I quite preferred that version, although I perhaps have combined the details of many versions in my own way. A good story is a running river that never empties itself.
* * *
“Listen to what I say to you, my son,” Jesus said to Paul in one often-repeated version. “Go into the city now, pray, and ask for forgiveness. You will be told what to do by someone within the walls. Do not be afraid.”
In the course of years, the death of Jesus became the focus of Paul’s thought, the still point at the swirling center of his imagination. “Everything follows from the cross,” he would say. But it was the life and ideas that interested people in the Way, not so much the humiliating death. This was also true for the Jerusalem leaders, who regarded Jesus as the anointed one, the Christ, a man who asked his followers to turn their eyes to the heavens and to their community, where the need for service arose. “Love God and love one another. These are my commandments,” Jesus said.
I liked the simplicity of this formulation: Love God, and love others—much as I have loved you. That message could be taken into the world, and it would change the world as well.
The death of Jesus and his resurrection didn’t concern many of our circle in Jerusalem, especially those who admired James. But Paul, raised in Tarsus, understood the range of meanings one could discover in the imagery of blood and torn flesh: It was Mithras, after all, who held Tarsus in thrall. Paul knew the usefulness of suffering, how it served as an invitation to the spirit, a path to resurrection in life. Over time, he uncovered a language for thinking about Jesus that stuck in our heads and helped us to understand the meaning of the cross.
The slaying of a sacred bull obviously intrigued him: an aspect of Mithras and his cult that acquired a ritual significance in the time of Paul’s boyhood and mine. We had both seen hot blood poured over the heads of the devout. With a gift for symbolism, Paul acknowledged the power of blood as a sign of rebirth. And he used this symbol in ways that linked it to the execution of Jesus, focusing on the crucifixion as an act of self-sacrifice, with the symbol of blood granting new life to those who held Jesus dear, who valued his teachings, who believed that the soul undertakes a passage through a dark tunnel before resurfacing into what Paul called “the glorified body,” which is radiant and changeless.
I settled back with pleasure to hear Paul turn rhapsodic, as he often did before a gathering, especially on the topic of the resurrection, which was not the Great Resuscitation, as he would say: “It was so much more than simply that and more confusing, too. Even Mary Magdalene and Peter did not, when Jesus returned to them, recognize their teacher and spiritual master.”
This intrigued me, especially when I heard about the disciples who, only a couple of days after the crucifixion of their Lord, headed out of Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus. Two of them talked of the death of Jesus, shaking their heads sadly, when a third appeared beside them, someone they didn’t recognize. This stranger asked them about their stories, and they said, “Haven’t you heard about Jesus, and his execution?” He feigned ignorance, listening all day to their lamentations, absorbing their grief. At the end of the day they asked this sympathetic stranger to dine with them, gathering around a fire pit. Jesus said, “Would you mind if I offered a word of prayer?” As they listened, it dawned on them that this was actually their Lord. “Rabbi!” one of them cried. At which point Jesus disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Paul adored this story, and he implored me to include this exemplary tale in my life of Jesus. “It will teach your readers the truth, that we can’t know Jesus fully in this life, and that his resurrection is mysterious. The new life we find in him is nothing like the old life. It’s a transformation, and it’s complete.”
Paul’s way of talking entranced his listeners, even if he wasn’t necessarily the most polished of speakers and often seemed baffled by his own message, almost babbling in tongues. He could lose his thread, backing around a narrative rather than moving through it, fumbling and fussing for the right word, occasionally settling on the wrong anecdote or parable. But there was a thrill in this, too: watching the mind of a prophet at work as he stumbled toward the truth.
“They don’t understand,” he would say to me, frustrated when listeners didn’t catch what he meant. “I was clear, wasn’t I?”
I would reassure him. Nobody doubted the force of his message, even when the exact meaning eluded his listeners. The proof of his power was in the number who turned to the Way of Jesus because of his rhetoric. And it surprised me how rapidly we grew, with pagans and Godfearers coming to our gatherings, not infrequently demanding baptism in the nearest river or lake. We would sing hymns and hold hands, standing up to our waists in water.
“The Word is alive in my mouth, and in yours as well,” Paul told me one evening before bed, kissing me on the forehead as if to confer apostolic powers.
He knew the power of ceremonial gestures, though I resisted the idea that I had any special access to God. I was, always, an ordinary man, another follower of Jesus. No more and no less.
I watched with fascination as Paul developed ceremonies that seemed to draw our communities together, giving us a vision. He broke bread and shared cups of wine with gatherings in ways that generated reverence as well as loyalty. “We become one body in the breaking of this bread,” he would say, lifting a tiny loaf above his brow, breaking it. The phrase proved durable and moved from outpost to outpost along Roman byways as our movement spread. “We who are many have become one body,” they would say.
Were those Paul’s words or the words of Jesus? When I asked, he glared at me.
Blunt questions proved an inconvenience. Did I somehow not realize that Paul could speak for Jesus? “Are you with me, my dear Luke?” he would say, raising his voice. “H
ave I lost your confidence?”
I didn’t doubt him, as I had seen the strength of his utterances, even felt God growing inside me, overwhelming me, in his presence. Paul stood among the prophets, a true descendant of Moses and Ezra, Isaiah and Daniel and Jeremiah. Of course no prophet was perfect except in the quicksilver moment of prophecy.
I loved Paul and his perfervid ways, but he could be awkward and demanding, a human thorn. A look of his could whither a fig tree, I once told him, and he laughed to think I compared him in this to Jesus, who had supposedly cursed a fig tree in Bethany, for reasons I never understood.
“You want everything explained,” Paul said. “This annoys me.”
He knew that I, as a physician, sought explanations. In the pursuit of healing, I must take into account causes and effects. I didn’t often speak in metaphors or parables, preferring the plain sense of things. Nor did I traffic in abstruse thoughts: a trait better left to garrulous Athenians, who made fools of themselves in the public square with arguments and counterarguments, with gaseous musings.
I lay beside him night after night on the road and listened to his stories, hearing them unfold in the dark. It occurred to me that, in living so close to Paul, in listening with such attention to his conversation, I absorbed his way of thought, even his language. Sometimes I could hardly separate myself from him.
The tale of what happened after he got to Damascus rarely varied, and it had about it the exactness of truth. I myself witnessed these events, so I could judge this part of the story. I had come from Antioch to visit Ananias, my uncle, a leader of the Way of Jesus in Syria for some years, and to pursue some business connected with the salves that I had begun to sell throughout the empire, although in small quantities. I had been in the city for only a few weeks when Paul thundered into view, a figure who raised considerable terror, since word had traveled to our ears about the death of our friend Stephen in Jerusalem and the role Paul had played in that grisly execution. He was, my uncle said, “something of a holy madman” with a “vengeful nature.”
