Vouching for Saul

When the newly converted Saul came up to Jerusalem and the disciples, remembering the persecutor, “were all afraid of him,” it was Barnabas who “took him, and brought him to the apostles,” and told them how Saul had seen the Lord on the road and had preached boldly at Damascus (Acts 9:26–27). This file examines the courage and discernment of that act of surety, its consequences for the whole apostolic mission, and how the “son of encouragement” became the sponsor of the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

A Church Afraid

After his blinding vision on the Damascus road and his baptism, Saul of Tarsus began at once to preach in the Damascus synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God, “and all who heard him were amazed, and said, ‘Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called on this name?’” (Acts 9:21, RSV). When a plot against his life forced him to flee Damascus — let down over the wall in a basket (Acts 9:23–25) — Saul came to Jerusalem and “attempted to join the disciples; and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple” (Acts 9:26, RSV). The fear was entirely reasonable. This was the man who had stood by at the stoning of Stephen, consenting to his death (Acts 7:58; 8:1), and who had “ravaged the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3, RSV). To the Jerusalem believers, Saul’s claim of conversion could as easily have been a stratagem to infiltrate and destroy them. They kept their distance.

Barnabas Takes Him

Into this impasse steps Barnabas. “But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and declared to them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and that he had spoken to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus” (Acts 9:27, RSV). The verb Luke uses — Barnabas took (epilabomenos) him — is one of personal initiative and even physical conduct: Barnabas laid hold of Saul and led him in. The act is one of public surety. By bringing Saul to the apostles and vouching for the genuineness of his conversion and his preaching, Barnabas put his own credibility behind the former persecutor. If Saul proved false, Barnabas’s word would have fallen with him.

Luke does not tell us how Barnabas had come by his knowledge of Saul’s conversion and his bold preaching at Damascus — whether the two had met, whether Barnabas had reliable report from Damascus, or whether he simply discerned the man’s sincerity. What the text emphasizes is the content of his testimony: he rehearsed to the apostles the two things that mattered — that Saul had seen and been addressed by the Lord (the reality of the conversion), and that he had already preached boldly in Jesus’ name (the fruit of it) (Acts 9:27). The result was immediate: Saul “went in and out among them at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord” (Acts 9:28, RSV). The closed door opened on Barnabas’s word.

The Discernment of the Encourager

This is the first great exercise of the gift the apostles had named in Barnabas. The “son of encouragement” (Acts 4:36) is the one able to see, where others see only the menacing past, the grace of God already at work and to stand alongside the man in whom it is working. John Chrysostom dwells on exactly this in his homilies on Acts: he praises Barnabas’s character, noting that “he was a kind and single-hearted man” and that it took such a man to overcome the fear of the rest and bring Saul in (Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 21, on Acts 9:26–27; NPNF I/11). The discernment is as notable as the courage. To vouch for a Saul required not merely boldness but the spiritual judgment to read a true conversion — the same judgment Barnabas would later show at Antioch, where, “when he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad” (Acts 11:23, RSV). Where Ananias of Damascus had to be commanded by the Lord in a vision before he would go to Saul, still protesting the man’s reputation (Acts 9:13–17), Barnabas at Jerusalem acts on his own discernment.

The Consequence

It is difficult to overstate what hung on this moment. Humanly speaking, the reception of the Church’s greatest missionary turned on Barnabas’s willingness to vouch for him. Had Jerusalem’s fear prevailed, Saul might have been left isolated, distrusted by the very community he had joined, his usefulness to the mission crippled at the outset. Instead, received on Barnabas’s surety, Saul was woven into the apostolic fellowship — and when the Hellenists at Jerusalem in turn sought to kill him, the brethren brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus, his home (Acts 9:29–30). There he would remain until Barnabas, needing help at Antioch, remembered him and went to fetch him (Acts 11:25–26). The thread runs straight from the vouching to the partnership: the man Barnabas sponsored at Jerusalem became the man he recruited at Antioch and the partner with whom he was set apart for the first mission (Acts 13:2).

The episode also fixes the order of seniority that holds through the early chapters. At this stage Saul is the junior figure, the new and suspect convert; Barnabas is the established and trusted man of the Jerusalem church, the one with the standing to vouch. For several chapters Luke will write “Barnabas and Saul” in that order (Acts 11:30; 12:25; 13:2, 7), and only on the first journey, after Paphos, does it become “Paul and Barnabas” (Acts 13:42, 46, 50). The vouching for Saul is the headwater of that whole relationship: the senior apostle staking himself for the junior, who would in time outgrow him in the work but never cease to owe his first reception in the Church to the son of encouragement.

A Pattern Confirmed

Read alongside the rest of his career, the vouching for Saul reveals the consistent Barnabas. He will do the same kind of thing twice more: he will go and fetch the still-obscure Saul from Tarsus and give him his opening at Antioch (Acts 11:25–26), and he will refuse to give up on the failed John Mark, taking him again when Paul would not (Acts 15:37–39). Three times the pattern repeats — Barnabas standing alongside a man others would exclude (the feared persecutor, the unknown teacher, the proven deserter) and giving him room to become what God was making of him. The reception of Saul is the first and greatest instance, and the one on which, by the providence of God, the entire Gentile mission would be seen to hang.

See Also

References

  • The Acts of the Apostles 7:58; 8:1–3; 9:1–30; 11:23, 25–26, 30; 12:25; 13:2, 7, 42–50. (RSV consulted.)
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 21 (on Acts 9:26–27). Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 11.
  • Bruce, F. F. The Book of the Acts. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988. (On Acts 9:26–30.)
  • Keener, Craig S. Acts: An Exegetical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012–2015. (On Acts 9:27 and Barnabas’s sponsorship of Saul.)