Did Paul Convert?

As we approach the feast day of St Peter and St Paul (June 29), let’s settle once and for all a Big Question regarding the latter: Was Paul converted on the road to Damascus?

With full scholarly authority, I pronounce the answer to be Yes.

And no.

And, also, yes.

Yes: obviously he was converted! Look at all the art down through the ages! Paul is literally knocked off his high horse and shown how blind he has been by literal blindness.

The scales eventually fall from his eyes through the ministrations of a Christian. Then Paul begins a long period of training for what is, indeed, a new career proclaiming a new message. (He wouldn’t have had to do that, highly educated as he already was, if he hadn’t experienced a radical change of religion.)

And, for good measure, he seems to have changed his very name—from the Hebraic “Saul” to the Hellenistic “Paul.”

So, yes, Paul was converted on the road to Damascus.

Except, however, no: he wasn’t. Two generations of New Testament scholars have laboured to show us that Paul didn’t switch allegiances. He served Yhwh as a Pharisee, and he served Yhwh as a Christian.

The new covenant is not a radical break from the old, but its fulfilment. The Law of God remains beautiful, vital, and instructive. Israel has not been cast aside, but remains the cultivated vine of God into which the Gentiles (that is, the rest of humanity) have been graciously grafted by the Vinedresser.

These are crucial points to make, especially given the perennial Christian temptations to disregard the Old Testament and to disrespect the Jews.

Paul had his view of Christ and Christians changed, to be sure. But he went on to serve the same God with the same zeal: just corrected, not converted.

Paul even remains “Saul”! The former is his Gentile-facing name, while Saul remains his Hebrew-facing name. Acts records him as “Saul” after his conversion: 9:19, 22–28; 11:25–30; 12:25; 13:1–9.

So, no, Paul was not converted on the road to Damascus.

Except, however, yes, he was.

What is conversion? If it is the abandonment of one deity for another, then Paul wasn’t converted. But if it is the exchange of one way of looking at the world and an attendant way of being in the world, then Saul was certainly converted.

Saul himself testifies to a radical change in the most binary terms. When he tells his story to the Galatians, he relates that he did indeed undergo years of training to fully understand this new news so he could teach it properly.

He concludes his autobiography in the stark terms of death and resurrection: “For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (2:19–20).

To the Philippian believers he sounds the same notes. He has utterly shed his past life and strains forward in his new one. It’s worth looking again at these familiar verses in this light (3:4–14):

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

But let’s not take just Paul’s word for it. When he tells his story to his fellow Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 21–22), do they see him as a fellow Jew who has just changed secondary beliefs about Jesus of Nazareth but is otherwise as he was before?

“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Go; I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”

The crowd listened to Paul until he said this. Then they raised their voices and shouted, “Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live!”

…They were shouting and throwing off their cloaks and flinging dust into the air…. (22:21–23).

That sounds like a strong reaction: like an unequivocal affirmation that Paul had left one group for another, abandoned one religion for another.

Indeed, that’s exactly how it would be regarded today. Despite Messianic Judaism, despite all the good work done since the apostles themselves to show the continuity between the testaments, despite all of the evidence that Jesus is indeed the Messiah and thus the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes and dreams—Jews today see someone claiming Jesus as Saviour and Lord to be converting. And so do we Christians.

I conclude, therefore, that Paul was indeed converted on that road, so long as we then take the appropriate care to delineate from what and to what he was converted.

Conversion (I’m drawing on the work of sociologists Irwin Barker and Raymond Currie) is defined as a radical break with one's former identity such that the past and the present are antithetical in some important respects.  Alternation, by contrast, is "a transition in which a new identity develops naturally out of the old one.  Unlike a conversion, the old identity is not radically disrupted; minor, rather than fundamental changes are experienced."

Sociologists of conversion, therefore, would see what happened to Saul as conversion. Our New Testament scholars’ concern not to over-emphasize conversion can make his case sound like mere alternation.

A third term, commitment, is measured by the intellectual, experiential, and practical ways in which one's adhesion (a fourth term!) to the new identity manifests itself.

I respectfully suggest that Paul’s testimony and career demonstrate an intensity and extent of commitment and adhesion such as to put beyond doubt that he was truly converted. Let us say so—while also affirming with Paul all the good things he continued to believe about Israel, the Law, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

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The quotation is from Irwin R. Barker and Raymond F. Currie, "Do Converts Always Make the Most Committed Christians?" Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 24 (1985): 305-13. For more such bibliography, if also dated, see John G. Stackhouse, Jr., "Billy Graham and the Nature of Conversion: A Paradigm Case," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 21 (1992): 337–50; reprinted in John G. Stackhouse, Jr. Evangelical Landscapes: Facing Critical Issues of the Day (Baker Academic, 2002), 103–20.