The light that turned the chief persecutor into the chief apostle
The road from Jerusalem to Damascus is about 150 miles northeast. In the year 34 or 35 AD, a Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus was walking it. He carried letters from the high priest authorizing him to arrest any followers of *the Way* — the early Christian community — found in the Damascus synagogues. He was traveling to extend the persecution that had already killed Stephen and scattered the Jerusalem church (Acts 8:1–3; 9:1–2). The Damascus road episode in Acts 9 is the single moment in the New Testament that most changes the direction of the Christian mission.
Around noon (Acts 26:13), close to the city, a light brighter than the sun flashes around Saul and the men traveling with him. Saul falls to the ground. A voice says, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" He answers: "Who are you, Lord?" The voice answers: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." (Acts 9:4–5) The identification is the Christological substance of the whole episode. The risen Christ identifies himself completely with his persecuted church. To persecute Christians is to persecute Christ. The verse is the textual foundation of the *body of Christ* ecclesiology Paul will spend the rest of his life writing.
Saul gets up blind. The men with him lead him by the hand into Damascus. He spends three days without sight, without food, without drink. The traditional Christian reading is that the three days mirror Christ's three days in the tomb — Saul has died to the man he was, and the resurrection of his new identity has not yet happened. The Christian editorial honesty is that Acts doesn't explicitly draw the parallel; the patristic tradition did.
Meanwhile a Christian disciple in Damascus named Ananias is visited in a vision. The LORD tells him to go to the house of Judas on Straight Street, find the man named Saul of Tarsus, and lay hands on him to restore his sight. Ananias' protest is theologically priceless: *Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name.* (Acts 9:13–14) The LORD's answer to Ananias is the line on which the Pauline mission is built: *Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.* (Acts 9:15–16)
Ananias goes. He lays hands on the man whose name was a terror in his community three days earlier. He calls him *Brother Saul*. The scales fall from Saul's eyes. He is baptized. He takes food. The new identity has begun.
The Damascus road episode is recorded three times in Acts — chapter 9 in the third person, chapters 22 and 26 in Paul's own first-person testimony before different audiences. The variations are minor and the kind of variation eyewitness accounts produce when the same person tells the same story to different audiences over years. The fact that Luke records it three times signals how central he understood it to be.
Paul's own letters refer back to the encounter as the foundation of his apostolic authority. *Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.* (1 Corinthians 15:8) *I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.* (Galatians 1:11–12) The Damascus road is the basis on which Paul claims equal apostolic standing with the Twelve — not because he had been with Christ during the public ministry, but because the risen Christ commissioned him directly.
The theological substance of the conversion has been pressed into service for almost every later moment of conversion in Christian history. Augustine's reading of his own conversion in the *Confessions* leans on Paul's. The Protestant reformers read it as the paradigm case of grace overriding self-righteousness — the chief persecutor saved without warning, without merit, against his own intention. The Eastern monastic tradition reads it as the inauguration of the *kenosis* that will mark Paul's whole ministry. Every Christian conversion is read, in some sense, against the Damascus road.
The geography of the road has been venerated since the early centuries. The traditional site of the vision, just outside Damascus, has been a pilgrimage destination through every period of Christian access to Syria. The house of Judas on the Street called Straight is identified locally — Straight Street still runs through old Damascus today. The Bab Kisan area of the old city traditionally marks the place where the church lowered Paul out of the city in a basket (Acts 9:25; 2 Corinthians 11:33) when his preaching turned the Jewish authorities against him.
The Damascus road also opens the geographic logic of the rest of Acts. From Damascus, Paul will go to Arabia (Galatians 1:17), to Tarsus (his hometown), to Antioch, to Cyprus, to the cities of Asia Minor, to Macedonia, to Greece, to Jerusalem, to Rome. The light on the Damascus road sends the Christian mission west across the Roman Empire and ultimately to the imperial capital itself. The conversion of one Pharisee is what carries the gospel out of Jewish-Christian Jerusalem into the Gentile world Christ had told the apostles would be their field (Matthew 28:19; Acts 1:8).
Related entries: Paul (Saul of Tarsus), Stephen (Protomartyr), Rome