Acts 9 in Relation to OT Prophetic Call Narratives
T. David Gordon
I. Examples of Call Narratives in OT
Exodus 3:1-6
Moses
Judges 6:1-24
Gideon
1Sam 3:1-14
Samuel
Isa. 6:1-8
Isaiah
Jer. 1:4-10
Jeremiah
II. Ordinary Features of Call Narratives
A. Theophany/Epiphany (burning bush, audible voice, etc.)
B. Call extended
C. Expression of reluctance
D. Acquiescence in call
III. The Claim of Call Narratives
The existence of this literary form functions to identify its recipient not only as a
messenger from God, but a special kind of messenger, one who is intricately involved in God’s
governance of His people. As Norm Habel put it:
There can be little doubt that the classical prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and II Isaiah
appropriate and develop the call traditions reflected in the structure of the calls of Moses and
Gideon. By using the same call Gattung the prophets in question establish a specific link with the
past history of Israel. Their own calls, it would seem, are viewed from the historical perspective
of the commission of the ancient mediators of Israel. This proposition agrees with an assertion
noted in the call narratives themselves, that the prophets are both messengers and “more than
messengers”, both spokesmen and mediators of Yahweh’s historical involvement. In this sense
the prophets are successors to the saviors of old. Thus, for Jeremiah it was not only a question of
claiming to be a prophet like Moses, but also of extending the historical line of continuity from
the ancient mediators via the divine commission and its form.
In the light of the previous discussion, the prophetic call accounts also seem to be the
product of later reflection as the prophets concerned announce their credentials to Israel at large,
either orally or in writing, in accordance with the tradition of their predecessors. By employing
this form the prophets publicly identify themselves as God’s ambassadors. The call narratives,
therefore, are not primarily pieces of autobiographical information but open proclamations of the
prophet’s claim to be Yahweh’s agent at work in Israel.1
IV. Acts 9:1-19 (and Acts 22:4-16, Acts 26:9-19, Gal. 1:13-17)
It is evident that the narratives of Paul’s call share all the features of the prophetic call
narrative. It is also apparent that Luke, in Acts, takes several deliberate steps to present Paul as a
prophet. Not only is he listed in Acts 13:1 in a list of five prophets, Luke also calls attention to
the fact that Paul is a recipient of visions, a qualification that God had indicated would be true of
prophets in Numbers 12:6: “If there is a prophet among you, I the LORD make myself known to
him in a vision (ἐν ὁράματι); I speak with him in a dream.” Luke records that before Paul met
Ananias, he had “seen in a vision (ἐν ὁράματι) a man named Ananias” (Acts 9:12). Luke thus
“The form and significance of the Call Narratives,” ZAW 77, no. 1 (January, 1965): 297-323, all
emphases mine.
1
1
establishes that Paul qualifies as a “prophet of the Lord” according to God’s own criteria earlier
disclosed to Moses.2 Further, at Gal. 1:15-16, we even see an unmistakable allusion to the calls
of Jeremiah and Isaiah in the narrative of Paul’s call:
Jer. 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb
I knew you, and before you were born I
consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet
to the nations.
πρὸ τοῦ με πλάσαι σε ἐν κοιλίᾳ ἐπίσταμαί σε
καὶ πρὸ τοῦ σε ἐξελθεῖν ἐκ μήτρας ἡγίακά σε
προφήτην εἰς ἔθνη τέθεικά σε.
Gal. 1:15 But when he who had set me apart
before I was born (literally, “from my
mother’s womb”), and who called me by his
grace, 16 was pleased to reveal his Son to
me, in order that I might preach him among
the Gentiles…
Ὅτε δὲ εὐδόκησεν [ὁ θεὸς] ὁ ἀφορίσας με
ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου καὶ καλέσας διὰ τῆς
χάριτος αὐτοῦ ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ
ἐν ἐμοί, ἵνα εὐαγγελίζωμαι αὐτὸν ἐν τοῖς
ἔθνεσιν
[The ESV translation not only obscures the
parallel to Jer. 1 and Isa. 49; it violates the
ESV’s stated principle of “literal where
possible.” There is a perfectly good way to
say “was born” in Greek, and Paul uses the
expression at Rom. 9:11 (“though they were
not yet born,” μήπω γὰρ γεννηθέντων), Gal.
4:23 (“the son of the slave was born,” μὲν ἐκ
τῆς παιδίσκης κατὰ σάρκα γεγέννηται), and
Gal. 4:29 (“at that time he who was born,”
τότε ὁ κατὰ σάρκα γεννηθεὶς). But Paul
employed the language of the Greek Old
Testament here (“from the womb”), as a
deliberate allusion to the calls of Jeremiah
and Isaiah, an allusion utterly obfuscated by
the ESV translation. Other ETs mistranslate
here also; but they do not profess to be
“literal where possible” translations, so they
are just bad translations; they are not
inconsistent with their stated principles.]
Note especially the striking similarity between
Paul:
ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου καὶ καλέσας
and Isaiah:
ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου ἐκάλεσεν.
2
Isa. 49:1, 5, 6--“ Listen, O isles, unto me;
and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD
hath called me from the womb; from the
bowels of my mother hath he made mention
of my name. … And now, saith the LORD
that formed me from the womb to be his
servant… I will also give thee for a light to
the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my
salvation unto the end of the earth.” (κύριος
ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομά
μου… οὕτως λέγει κύριος ὁ πλάσας με ἐκ
κοιλίας… τέθεικά σε εἰς διαθήκην γένους εἰς
φῶς ἐθνῶν τοῦ εἶναί σε εἰς σωτηρίαν ἕως
ἐσχάτου τῆς γῆς.
For these insights regarding Acts, I am very much indebted to the insightful work by Jeffrey T.
Riddle, “Paul as Prophet in the Acts of the Apostles,” a paper delivered at the annual meeting of
the Evangelical Theological Society in November, 2004. Near his conclusion, Riddle says: “We
have seen that Paul in Acts is presented in terms familiar from the Old Testament prophetic
profile. Luke’s Paul receives a prophetic call; serves as God’s messenger by encouraging,
strengthening, and instructing the believers; performs miracles as did the prophets of old;
accurately predicts future events; and appears as an iconoclast who is rejected by many” (p. 26).
2
Despite the evident effort by Luke and Paul to present the Damascus theophany as a call
narrative, the narrative is still commonly (and, in my judgment, erroneously) referred to as Paul’s
“conversion.” Krister Stendahl is right in saying: “If, then, we use the term ‘conversion’ for
Paul’s experience we would also have to use it of such prophets as Jeremiah and Isaiah.”3
Seyoon Kim has pointed out that the verb εὐδόκησεν in Gal. 1:16 “seems to come from Isa.
42:1,” because in portions of the textual tradition, προσεδέξατο is replaced with εὐδόκησεν.
Kim, Paul and the New Perspective, op. cit., 2002, p. 102. So also Karl Olav Sandnes, Paul—
One of the Prophets? (WUNT 2/43. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1998): “Paul presents his
commission in a manner reminiscent of the literary form that is used in the OT to depict the call
of the prophets…Paul here actually describes his Christophany in the form of a prophetic call.
Attention has to be paid to this form critical observation, for it defines the framework for the
interpretation of the overloaded subordinate clause” (pp.58, 59). So also Seyoon Kim: “Since
Gal 1:24 seems to allude to Isa 49:3 and Gal 2:2 to Isa 49:4, the call of the Ebed of Isa 49 appears
to be in the forefront of Paul’s mind while he recalls his own call to apostleship on the road to
Damascus.” Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 101.
V. Why we tend not to see Acts 9 as a call narrative (despite its obvious similarity to other call
narratives in the Bible). I can think of six reasons (though I regard none of them as being
especially reasonable) why the tendency to mis-read the Damascus narrative is so persistent.
A. Experientialist hermeneutic
The Scriptures are framed in a redemptive-historical framework. They record
those events that have great consequences for the accomplishment of redemption. The
Pietist/Evangelical traditions tend to read the scriptures within a personal-historical
framework (we talk about “personal testimony,” and “personal relationship with Christ,”
and even encourage people to ask what a passage of scripture “means to you,” etc.). We
are very interested, that is, in the individual’s experience of redemption; whereas the
Scriptures are a bit more interested in the divine accomplishment of redemption, and the
spokesmen God appointed to proclaim that redemption publicly.
B. Exemplarist hermeneutic
We also tend to read some narrative books (perhaps especially Acts) as containing
examples of commendable behavior. We expect Scripture to record such; when in fact,
Scripture often narrates events that are unique, once-for-all or one-of-a-kind. How many
bushes talk for instance? Just the one in Exodus 3 (and the “singing bush” from the
movie The Three Amigos, but I think that one may be fictive). So Exodus 3 says nothing
about what we should do, what bushes should do, etc.; it merely records the significant
calling of Moses to be a spokesman for God. Numbers 22:28-30 records the conversation
between Balaam and his donkey when the donkey saw the angel of the Lord and Balaam
struck the donkey. This tells us nothing of donkeys, or of whether or what conversation
we should have with them, or whether we should strike them; the event was probably
unique. We cannot “apply” such narratives to ourselves any more than we can “apply”
3
“Call Rather than Conversion,” in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, p. 10.
3
the narrative of Sherman’s burning of Atlanta (and one may hope that we do not regard
Sherman’s scorched earth policy as exemplary).
C. Revivalist hermeneutic
Revivalism expects revival, and tends to regard sudden religious change as
normative. It therefore looks for the record of such in Scripture, despite the fact that
Scripture contains few, if any, such records of sudden conversion, and expressly teaches,
in the OT, in the teaching of Jesus, and the teaching of his apostles, that ordinarily the
ministry of the word is gradual, non-episodic, analogous to agricultural growth (Psa.
1126:6, Mat. 13:3-9, 1 Cor. 3:6-9).4
D. Personal hermeneutic
There is a hermeneutic, common in evangelical circles (at least at the popular
level) that I regard as virtually guaranteed to lead to error: We are often told to ask of a
biblical passage, “What does this passage mean to you personally?” If we convened a
synod of devils to design a question virtually guaranteed to prevent people from
understanding the Bible correctly, that august assembly would undoubtedly devise this
question. One can easily imagine Screwtape instructing Wormwood to plant such a
thought in people’s minds, to ask “what the Bible means to you.” The biblical documents
are not personal letters; they are public documents, designed for the visible covenant
people of God on earth as the visible people of God on earth. I might as well ask what a
biblical passage means to my cat as ask what it means to me; it wasn’t designed for the
cat and it wasn’t designed for me (individually considered). When I read Grant’s
Memoirs five or six years ago (with due apologies to my fellow native Richmonders), I
did not ask “What do Grant’s Memoirs mean to me?” He did not write them to me or for
me; he wrote them for the public that he had served in wartime and afterward, because his
life had public consequences for a public people. Biblical narrative is analogous to
Grant’s Memoirs; biblical narratives recount events of public consequence, so that we
may have a public/shared/common faith in the God who revealed Himself in the biblical
narrative. To read them, attempting to find some peculiar or particular personal meaning
misses their entire point, which is to inform a common public with a common record of
events of common importance. When Paul was converted (and possibly even whether—
was Balaam’s donkey converted? No; but God spoke through him) is of entirely no
consequence to the Christian church; that his ministry fulfilled the third of God’s three
pledges to father Abraham was and is entirely consequential.
E. Paul appears to have embraced a different religion
4
When Paul spoke in the synagogues, for instance, he was speaking to people who had expended
a significant part of their lives studying the Holy Scriptures; he was not speaking to people who
were thinking about religion for the first time. The synagogue was not even an Old Testament
institution; it was a voluntary institution, not required of anyone. Those who attended
synagogue, therefore, had a profound interest in the Old Testament scriptures. Similarly, when
Paul spoke at the Areopagus, he was speaking at a forum where the profoundest discussion of
religion and philosophy took place. Even the Ethiopian, whom Philip encountered, was reading a
scroll of Isaiah, which would have been both extremely rare and extremely expensive in that day;
so the Ethiopian obviously had made great effort to understand the message of that holy text.
4
After the Synogogue-ban of A. D. 94, Christians were no longer permitted to be
members of the Jewish synagogue. Prior to that, however, what we call “Christianity”
had not emerged as a separate world religion from what we call “Judaism.” Paul
probably did not think of himself as a Christian. He thought of himself as a Jew, as a
“Hebrew of Hebrews,” who lived during the time when the final, third pledge to Abraham
was fulfilled. When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, and there was
no movement to rebuild it, obviously a new religion was born; a religion that did not need
to make sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, what we now call “Judaism” is as
different from Second Temple Judaism as is Christianity, as Rabbi Neusner has indicated.
Christianity has every bit as good a claim to be the heir of Second Temple Judaism as
does Judaism:
“Both Judaism and Christianity claim to be the heirs and products of the Hebrew
Scriptures...Yet both great religious traditions derive not solely or directly from the
authority and teachings of those Scriptures, but rather from the ways in which that
authority has been mediated, and those teachings interpreted, through other holy books.
The New Testament is the prism through which the light of the Old comes to
Christianity. The canon of rabbinical writings is the star that guides Jews to the
revelation of Sinai, the Torah....The claim of these two great Western traditions, in all
their rich variety, is for the veracity not merely of the Scriptures, but also of Scriptures as
interpreted by the New Testament or the Babylonian Talmud....while most people are
familiar with the story of the development of Christianity, few are fully aware that
Judaism constitutes a separate and distinctive religious tradition.…Both the apostles and
the rabbis thus reshaped the antecedent religion of Israel, and both claimed to be Israel.
That pre-Christian, prerabbinic religion of Israel, for all its variety, exhibited common
traits: belief in one God, reverence for and obedience to the revelation contained in the
Hebrew Scriptures, veneration of the Temple in Jerusalem (while it stood), and
expectation of the coming of a Messiah to restore all the Jews to Palestine and bring to a
close the anguish of history. The Christian Jews concentrated on the last point,
proclaiming that the Messiah had come in Jesus; the rabbinic Jews focused on the
second, teaching that only through the full realization of the imperatives of the Hebrew
Scriptures, Torah, as interpreted and applied by the rabbis, would the people merit the
coming Messiah…For the Christian, therefore, the issue of Messiah predominated; for
the rabbinic Jew, the issue of Torah; and for both, the question of salvation was crucial.” 5
During Paul’s generation, prior to A.D. 94 and prior to A.D. 70, these two movements
had not yet diverged as two distinct religions. After the first century of the common era,
what we call “Christianity” and what we call “Judaism” became two different religions;
but in Paul’s day this diverging had not yet taken place.
F. Paul was killing people, which we take to be incompatible with regeneration. This is
the best argument for the “conversion” theory of Damascus. It, too, however, is entirely
explicable in terms of the Mosaic teaching that blasphemy is a capital crime. Note that
the Mosaic law made no provision for people disagreeing with the Sanhedrin. If a person
is judged by the elders of Israel to be a blasphemer, he is to be put to death, period.
5
Judaism in the Beginning of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 11-13.
5
1. Lev. 24:16 ‘Moreover, the one who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall
surely be put to death; all the congregation shall certainly stone him. The alien as
well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.
2. Deut. 13:6 “If your brother, your mother’s son, or your son or daughter, or the
wife you cherish, or your friend who is as your own soul, entice you secretly,
saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods’ (whom neither you nor your fathers have
known,7 of the gods of the peoples who are around you, near you or far from you,
from one end of the earth to the other end), 8 you shall not yield to him or listen to
him; and your eye shall not pity him, nor shall you spare or conceal him. 9 But
you shall surely kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death,
and afterwards the hand of all the people. 10 “So you shall stone him to death
because he has sought to seduce you from the Lord your God who brought you out
from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
3. Gal. 1:13 For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I
used to persecute the church of God beyond measure, and tried to destroy it; 14
and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my
countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.
What would a sincere believer, reared as Paul was by studying the OT Scriptures, have
done in his circumstances? He would have participated in the stoning of Stephen, which
is exactly what he did. That is, in his moment in the history of redemption, there was
nothing inherently incompatible with being a true believer and stoning a blasphemer.
V. How I believe Acts 9 should be understood
A. Acts 9 follows the well-established OT literary pattern of a prophetic call narrative.
Therefore, I believe it is Luke’s purpose to describe Damascus in that manner, to call
attention to the fact that Paul is not merely equal to the other apostles, but more
significant than the others in one particular way: through his ministry of proclaiming
good news to Gentiles, the third aspect of the promise to Abraham (that his seed would be
a blessing “to all nations”) has come to historical fulfillment. The calling of Paul is as
significant, in the history of redemption, as the call of Moses. If Moses was to lead the
now-numerous descendants of Abraham into the land promised to them, Paul was to
declare that through the “seed of Abraham,” Christ (Gal. 3:16, Gen. 12:3; 22:18) God was
now blessing all the nations of the earth. That is, Luke’s narrative in Acts 9 is designed
to call attention to the fact that Paul was a prophetic ambassador in a special way,
mediating a special, distinctive redemptive benefit. It was Luke’s way of saying: “Pay
attention to these apostles and what they did; but pay especial attention to Paul.”
Perhaps we may not regard the apostolate as significant; but the original generation did.
For the original generation, it was very important to know upon whom Jesus predicted
that he would build his church:
“And he called (προσκαλεσάμενος) to him his twelve disciples and gave them
authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and
every affliction. The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon, who is
called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his
6
brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James
the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot,
who betrayed him.” (Mat. 10:1-4)
The other disciples were called during Jesus’s humiliated state; whereas Paul was called
during his exalted state, but they were all hand-selected by Christ to be the ones,
especially instructed by the Holy Spirit (John 16:12-13), upon whose foundation the
church would be built (Eph. 2:20).
Luke’s point in the Damacus narrative is to leave testimony to the fact that the exalted
Christ called Paul to be his apostle to the Gentiles. Luke’s narrative, we might even say,
is intended as a counter-point to Paul’s contrite and humble statement: “For I am the
least of the apostles (ὁ ἐλάχιστος τῶν ἀποστόλων), unworthy to be called an apostle,
because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9). Luke disagrees. His record
establishes Paul as, in some sense, superior to the other apostles. The other eleven did
not receive an epiphany as Paul did (unless we regard the Incarnation itself as an
epiphany, but if we did so, then everyone who saw the incarnate Christ witnessed an
epiphany, including many unbelievers). Luke’s likening of Paul’s call to the significant
prophetic call narratives in the OT is Luke’s way of saying that Paul’s call inaugurated a
significantly new moment in the redemptive event-complex of Christ’s humiliated and
exalted work. Elsewhere, Paul indicates that he concurs with this, because in Galatians 1,
it is so evident that Paul likens his calling to that of Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Luke, in other words, does not understand Paul’s gentile mission merely in strategic
terms, not merely as another step in the progress of the Christian mission. Rather, he
regards Paul’s gentile mission as itself a fulfillment of the third part of what was pledged
to Abraham, and therefore part of the good news itself. God pledged to make Abraham’s
descendants numerous, which was fulfilled during the four centuries in Egypt. God
pledged to give those descendants a great arable land, which was fulfilled under Joshua
and the judges. But he also pledged to bless all the nations/tribes of the earth through one
single descendant of Abraham one day (Gen. 22:18), and this, by Paul’s own testimony,
was fulfilled in his ministry:
And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,
preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations
be blessed.” So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the
man of faith.: Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It
does not say, “And to offsprings,” (καὶ τοῖς σπέρμασιν) referring to many, but
referring to one, “And to your offspring,” (καὶ τῷ σπέρματί σου) who is Christ.
(Gal. 3:8-9, 16).
Note that the pledge of Genesis 22:18 (reiterated at Gen. 26:4) to bless all the nations
through Abraham’s single descendant, is referred to by Paul as “the gospel.” The gentile
mission, spear-headed by Paul after Damascas, is not merely a mission; it is nothing less
than the gospel itself, an overturning of the global curse of Genesis 3, when the God who
once cursed Adam’s race now, in the Last Adam, blesses all nations.
In one of the more curious ironies in the history of interpretation, we have not only
misunderstood, but almost totally inverted the apostolic understanding of the Damascas
event. Luke (and Paul) went out of his way to present Paul’s call as unique, completely
7
and entirely unprecedented in the NT era; we have tended to understand it as typical of all
Christian conversion. Luke not only never even addressed the question of Paul’s
conversion (here or anywhere else), he went out of his way to describe the Damascus
event as the only event in the NT era analogous to the prophetic call narratives of the OT.
Even Paul’s contrite and humble reference to the event in 1 Cor 15:7-8, makes two claims
about the event’s uniqueness: “Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last
of all (ἔσχατον δὲ πάντων), as to one untimely born (ὡσπερεὶ τῷ ἐκτρώματι), he appeared
also to me.” While the second of these expressions appears merely to be curious, it is
more than that. The term translated “untimely born” (ἔκτρωμα) is extremely rare; it
appears nowhere else in the NT, and only once in the LXX, where God brought judgment
on Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, and they both interceded for her:
And Aaron turned toward Miriam, and behold, she was leprous. And Aaron said
to Moses, “Oh, my lord, do not punish us because we have done foolishly and
have sinned. Let her not be as one dead, whose flesh is half eaten away when he
comes out of his mother’s womb (ἔκτρωμα ἐκπορευόμενον ἐκ μήτρας μητρὸς καὶ
κατεσθίει τὸ ἥμισυ τῶν σαρκῶν αὐτῆς).” 13 And Moses cried to the LORD, “O
God, please heal her—please.” (Num. 12:10-13).
Even by employing such a curious expression, Paul associates himself with that other
great prophet/mediator, Moses.
Luke and Paul did everything in their power to describe the Damascus event as
unprecedented; nothing before it and nothing after it (“Last of all…”) was precisely
analogous to it. Each did everything possible to describe the event as atypical, not like
anything else in the Christian era; and we have tended to describe the event as typical of
all Christian conversion (which was always somewhat bizarre anyway; how many of us
have been literally blinded when converted? How many of us had something like scales
fall from our eyes later? How many of those travelling with us at the time “heard a
voice/sound, but saw no one”?). That is, even if Luke had recorded a conversion in Acts
9, it would have been the strangest, most bizarre conversion in the history of the apostolic
church.
B. Was Paul converted at Damascus? I don’t know (nor care), nor does Luke express an
opinion on the matter. Nothing in the narrative describes the event as an ordinary
example of conversion, but as an extraordinary example of prophetic calling. Luke has
no interest, in his narrative, in the question of Paul’s religious state at this moment, nor do
I have an opinion on the matter. Was Moses converted at the burning bush? Was Isaiah
converted in the narrative of Isaiah 6? Was Samuel converted when he heard the voice of
the Lord in the night? It simply is not the point of prophetic call narratives to address the
religious state of those who received the call. I do know that Paul’s stoning of Stephen is
not inconsistent with true faith under the Sinai covenant. Someone reared in Judaism
before the conclusion of the public ministry of Christ would have been obliged by the
Mosaic law to stone someone who was adjudged by the Sanhedrin to be a blasphemer.
So, Paul could have been, before Damascus, like righteous Simeon (who awaited the
consolation of Israel), a true believer in the revelation God had given to his Sinai
covenant people. Even his later statement that he was “chief of sinners” is not
inconsistent with similar statements in other prophetic call narratives, such as Isaiah
8
saying that he was “a man of unclean lips.” Those OT prophets who encountered
Yahweh in an epiphany/theophany, made profound statements of their own sin, due to
their encounter with a profoundly holy God.
C. What should we do with Acts 9? I don’t think we should treat it as a conversion
narrative, even though I think it is possible that Paul was converted there (When was
Gideon converted, or Moses, or Isaiah or Jeremiah? Of course, it is entirely possible that
each was converted at the time of his call; we will probably never know). It is presented
to us in the scriptures as a call narrative; and just as we do not call Exodus 3 “the
conversion of Moses,” or Isaiah 6 “the conversion of Isaiah,” I don’t think we should
refer to Acts 9 as the “conversion of Paul.” He may well have been converted there; or he
may have already been regenerate beforehand; but Luke says nothing about it in the text,
because he has no interest in such matters. Luke is interested in Paul the apostle, not Paul
the regenerate.
Rather, we should understand Acts 9 as we understand the calls of Moses, Gideon,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Samuel, and Isaiah. Habel again:
“By employing this form the prophets publicly identify themselves as God’s
ambassadors. The call narratives, therefore, are not primarily pieces of
autobiographical information but open proclamations of the prophet’s claim to be
Yahweh’s agent at work in Israel.”
If Habel is right, what Paul is doing in Galatians 1 (and what Luke is doing in Acts 9, 22,
and 26) is declaring himself as God’s ambassador, to be God’s agent in His great work of
bringing light to the Gentiles, in fulfillment of the pledge made to Abraham to bless all
the nations of the world through his “Seed” (Gal. 3:16). This establishes his authority,
not merely equal to that of the other apostles, but even greater than that of the others
(though he modestly calls himself “the least” of them, 1 Cor. 15:9). Paul has authority,
for instance, to correct the large variety of errors at Corinth, the error at Galatia, and even
Peter’s cowardly (φοβούμενος τοὺς ἐκ περιτομῆς) and hypocritical (καὶ συνυπεκρίθησαν
αὐτῷ [καὶ] οἱ λοιποὶ Ἰουδαῖοι, ὥστε καὶ Βαρναβᾶς συναπήχθη αὐτῶν τῇ ὑποκρίσει) error
at Antioch (Gal. 2). The call narrative is designed to establish such authority, and to miss
this point by pursuing the arcane point of Paul’s spiritual condition at the time is to miss
the point of the narrative entirely.
D. In his survey, “Interpreting Paul’s Conversion—Then and Now,” Bruce Corley
indicates that recent scholarship has reached some consensus about the Damascus event
influencing Paul in four ways: Soteriological, Christological, Missiological, and
Doxological. Cf. Richard C. Longenecker, ed., The Road from Damascus : The Impact of
Paul’s Conversion on His Life, Thought, and Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997),
pp. 1-17. The Damascus event has received significant scholarly attention; and I
regretfully say that the difference between the scholarly understanding and the
understanding of the typical Christian layperson is almost total.
Pertinent Bibliography
A. Prophetic Call Narrative in the OT
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N. Habel, “The form and significance of the Call Narratives,” ZAW 77, no. 1 (January, 1965):
297-323. Also available online <http://fontes.lstc.edu/%7Erklein/Documents/habel.htm>
Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, pp. 54ff.
Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapters 1—
24, trans. Roland E. Clements (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 100.
B. Prophetic Call Narrative in the NT
David E. Aune, Prophecy in early Christianity and the ancient Mediterranean world, pp. 97ff.
--------. The Westminster dictionary of New Testament and early Christian literature, pp. 85-86.
William Baird, “Visions, Revelation, and Ministry: Reflections on 2 Cor. 12:1-5 and Gal. 1:1117,” JBL 104, no. 4 (December, 1985): 651-662
Matthew Black, “The Throne-Theophany Prophetic Commission and the Son of Man,” in Jews,
Greeks, and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly
(Leiden: Brill, 1976), 57, cited in Blake T. Ostler, “The Throne-Theophany Prophetic
Commission in 1 Nephi: A Form-Critical Analysis,” BYU Studies 26/4 (1986): 69.
Dennis Bratcher, http://www.cresourcei.org/prophetcall.html
Scott J. Hafemann, Paul, Moses, and the History of Israel: The Letter/Spirit Contrast and the
Argument from Scripture in 2 Corinthians 3 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), pp. 39-185.
Richard C. Longenecker, ed., The Road from Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on
His Life, Thought, and Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).
Frederick David Mazzaferri, The Genre of the Book of Revelation from a Source Critical
Perspective, pp. 87ff.
Jeffrey Riddle, “Paul as Prophet in the Acts of the Apostles,” http://www.jpbc.org/pdf/Paul as
Prophet in Acts.pdf
Karl Olav Sandnes, Paul—One of the Prophets? (WUNT 2/43. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck,
1998).
Krister Stendahl, “Call Rather than Conversion,” in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles.
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), pp.7-23.
Robert C. Tannehill, Narrative Unity Luke Acts, pp. 325-26.
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