man? It would seem a blasphemous caricature of things most sacred. It is doubtful whether he had heard Jesus Himself (2 Cor. v. 16 has perhaps another meaning). He may even have been absent from Jerusalem in the first days of apostolic preaching, possibly as a rabbi in Tarsus. But if so, his ardent nature soon brought him on the scene, in time at least to hear Stephen and take part against him (Acts vii. 58, 60). If the simple message of the first witnesses, that one whose life and preaching were largely out of harmony with the Law as Saul understood it, had in fact been raised from the dead by Israel’s God and so vindicated—to the condemnation of that generation of God’s people—if this seemed to Saul mere madness, what was he to say to Stephen’s views as to the Law and the people of the Law, both past and present? (see Stephen). Stephen could not be right in the views which still divided them. Perish the thought! Perish too all those who upheld the crucified Nazarene, the accursed of the Law! For His death could mean but one of two things. Either He was accursed of God also, or—awful alternative, yet inevitable to Saul’s logical mind—the Law relative to which He was accursed was itself set aside. Saul turned from the suggestion as too shocking to his pride alike in his people and in its divine Law, for him seriously to consider its alleged credentials—the Resurrection, and the supernatural power and goodness of Him whose claims it was held to confirm. Why stay to weigh the evidence of Galilean common folk (Am-ha-aretz), themselves lax in their observance of Thorah, when over against it stood the whole weight of immemorial prescription, and the deliberate judgment of the custodians of the Law as to this man as “a deceiver”? No doubt they were self-deceived fanatics. But the logic of the movement had at length declared itself through the mouth of Stephen, and weak toleration must be abandoned.
So Saul was driven to persecute, driven by his acute sense of the radical issue involved, and perhaps hoping to find relief from his own bitter experience in such zeal for the Law. Yet the goading of unsatisfied intuitions did not cease. We may even suspect that Stephen’s philosophy of Israel’s history had made an impression on him, Saul the Persecutor. and was undermining his confidence in the infallibility of his nation’s religious authorities. If mistaken before, why not again? This granted possible, all turned on the evidence as to the Resurrection of the crucified Prophet of Nazareth. Yet though the joyous mien of His followers, even when confronted with death, seemed to betoken a good conscience before God which could hardly fail to impress him, Saul felt the status of the Law to be too grave an issue to depend on the probabilities of human testimony. So he plunged on, in devotion to what still seemed the cause of God against impugners of His Thorah, but not without his own doubts. He was, in fact, finding it “hard to kick against the goad” (Acts xxvi. 14) plied in his deeper consciousness, as he followed his inherited and less personal beliefs. He was, in language which he later applied to his compatriots, loth to “submit himself to the righteousness of God” (Rom. x. 3), when it came in a manner humbling to his feelings. Still he was in the main honest (1 Tim. i. 13), and the hindrances to his belief were exceptional. Direct personal experience on the point on which all hinged, the alleged divine vindication of Jesus as Messiah following on the legal condemnation by the national authorities, was needful to open up a clear exit from his religious impasse.
It was at this critical point in his inner history that, as he neared Damascus on a mission of persecution, there was granted him—as he believed ever after in the face of all challenge—a vision of Jesus, in risen and glorified humanity, as objective as those to the original witnesses with which in 1 Cor. xv. he classesThe Vision at Damascus. it.
As to the sense in which this vision, so momentous in its issues, may be regarded as “objective,” the following points deserve notice. On the one hand it is generally agreed (1) that Paul distinguished this appearance of the risen Jesus from his other “visions and revelations of the Lord,” such as he refers to in 2 Cor. xii. 1 sqq., and classed it with those to the Twelve and others which first created the belief that Jesus had been “raised from the dead”; (2) that this belief included for Paul a transformed or spiritualized body (cf. the note of time, “on the third day,” and the argument in 1 Cor. xv. 12 sqq., 35 sqq.), his own vision of which seems to colour his conception of the Resurrection body generally (Phil. iii. 21, though he had certain traditional notions on the subject to start with; cf. 2 Cor. v. 1 sqq. with Apoc. Baruch, xlix.–li., representing Jewish belief about A.D. 70–100, and see Dr R. H. Charles’s ed.). On the other hand, analogies furnished by religious psychology, including a sudden vision amid light and the hearing of a voice as accompaniments of religious crisis in certain cases, affect our ability to take Saul’s consciousness in the matter as a simple transcript of objective facts. There is indeed reason to believe that the dazzling light was such a fact, if it blinded Saul temporarily (Acts ix. 8–19; and affected his companions (xxii. 9, xxvi. 14). But beyond this physical prelude to his vision we cannot go critically. Thus the nature of the connexion between the light as an objective antecedent, and the vision subjective to Saul himself, remains doubtful on the plane of history. It is possible to penetrate further only by the aid of faith, with or without speculations based on certain psychical facts more and more establishing themselves to scientific minds. Religious faith, dwelling on the unique issues of the vision in the history of Christianity and arguing from effects to a cause as real as themselves, tends to postulate the objectivity which Saul himself asserts. Some do so in an absolute sense, in spite of the differences between Saul’s experience and that of his companions (Acts ix. 7, xxii. 9). Others confine the objectivity to a divine act, producing by special action on Saul’s brain a vision not due simply to the antecedents in himself. Thus it was not merely subjective, a mere vision in the sense of hallucination, but an objective vision or genuine revelation of the real, as Paul claimed. Such an objective-subjective revelation, being in this but a special form of what is involved in any real divine revelation, accords in general with modern research as to telepathy and phantasms of distant or deceased persons. But, after all, the main point for Paul’s religious history—as well as the basis of all theories of the vision—is the question as to the degree of discontinuity between his thought before and after the event. On this Paul is clear and emphatic; nor can we here go behind the evidence of one whose writings prove him a master in introspective reflection. “There was no possibility that he should by any process of mere thinking come to realize the truth” as to Jesus, so rooted were the prejudices touching things divine which barred the way (see Ramsay, Pauline and Other Studies, p. 18).
Important as is the question as to the nature of the vision which changed Saul’s career, it is its spiritual content which bears most upon the story of his life. Jesus was, in spite of all, God’s Messiah, His Righteous One, His Son, the type and ideal of righteousness in man, through spiritual union with whom like righteousness Its Spiritual Content. was to be attained, if at all. In a flash Saul’s personal problem as to acceptance with God and victory over sin was changed. It became simply a question how spiritual union with the Messiah was to come about. He had vanquished and “condemned sin in the flesh” by His perfect obedience (Rom. viii. 3, v. 19), of which the Cross was now seen to be the crowning act. As for the Law as means of justification, it was superseded by the very fact that Messiah had realized His righteousness on another principle altogether than that of “works of the Law,” and had in consequence been crucified by its action, as one already dead to it as a dispensational principle. This meant that those united to Him by faith were themselves sharers in His death to the Law as dispensational master and judge, and so were quit of its claims in that new moral world into which they were raised as sharers also in His Resurrection (Rom. vi. 1–vii. 6). Henceforth they “lived unto God” in and through Messiah, by the self-same Spirit by which He had lived the sinless life (viii. 9).
Here we have at once Paul’s mysticism and his distinctive gospel in germ, though the full working out in various directions came only gradually under the stimulus of circumstances. But already the old régime had dissolved. His first act was to make explicit, through confession and baptism, his submission and adhesion “All Things New.” to Jesus as Messiah implicit in his cry from the ground, “What shall I do, Lord?” Thereby he formally “washed away his sins” (Acts xxii. 16; cf. Rom. x. 9). Then with new-born enthusiasm he began boldly to proclaim in the synagogues of Damascus that Jesus, whose followers he had come to root out, was verily the Messianic Son of God (ix. 20; cf. Matt. xvi. 16). Yet ere long he himself felt the need for quiet in which to think
