What happened to Paul on the road to Damascus?

The light at noon

After the stoning of Stephen, Saul hunts the followers of Jesus, whom Acts calls the people of “the Way.” He asks the high priest for letters to the synagogues of Damascus, about 230 kilometers north of Jerusalem, so that he can bring any believers back in chains. Near the city, about noon by his own later account (Acts 22:6), it happens.

As he traveled, he got close to Damascus, and suddenly a light from the sky shone around him. He fell on the earth, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He said, “Who are you, Lord?”

The answer turns his world over: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:5). Saul had been hunting people. The voice says he has been hunting him.

Three days in the dark

Saul gets up with his eyes open and sees nothing. His companions lead him by the hand into Damascus, where he neither eats nor drinks for three days. In the city a disciple named Ananias has a vision telling him to go to “the street which is called Straight” (Acts 9:11), still the main street of the old city, and find the man from Tarsus. Ananias protests: this man came to arrest us. He goes anyway, lays his hands on him and calls him “Brother Saul.”

Immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he received his sight. He arose and was baptized.

That verse is where English gets the saying that the scales have fallen from someone’s eyes. Soon Saul is preaching in the synagogues, and there is a plot to kill him. He escapes through the city wall in a basket, by night (2 Corinthians 11:32–33).

One event, four tellings

Acts tells the story three times, and Paul tells it once himself. The details shift.

• Acts 9, the narrator: his companions hear the sound but see no one (9:7).
• Acts 22, Paul to a crowd in Jerusalem: they see the light but do not understand the voice (22:9).
• Acts 26, Paul before King Agrippa: the light is brighter than the sun, everyone falls, and the voice speaks in Hebrew and adds a Greek proverb, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (26:14), like an ox kicking at the farmer’s prod.
• Galatians 1, Paul’s own letter: no light, no blindness, no Ananias. God was pleased “to reveal his Son in me,” he writes. He went away into Arabia, came back to Damascus, and only after three years went up to Jerusalem to visit Peter.

Readers have long reconciled 9:7 and 22:9 by saying the men heard a noise but not the words. Many scholars think Luke simply retells the scene for each audience, as ancient historians did.

No horse, and maybe no conversion

Acts never mentions a horse: Saul “fell on the earth.” The horse comes from painters, above all Caravaggio, whose canvas of 1601 in Rome’s church of Santa Maria del Popolo lays Saul on his back beneath one. And Paul rarely sounds like a man who changed religions. He stays a Jew and describes a prophet’s call, set apart “from my mother’s womb” (Galatians 1:15), in words that echo the call of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5). In 1976 the scholar Krister Stendahl argued that it should be called a call rather than a conversion.

Churches still keep January 25 as the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. And in English a sudden change of heart is still a road to Damascus moment.