Persecutor to Apostle

“I am the least of the apostles… because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:9–10). The reversal from persecutor to apostle is the irreducible center of Paul’s self-understanding: he reads his call not as a moral improvement but as an act of sheer mercy toward an enemy, and he makes that mercy the pattern of the gospel he preaches. This file examines the transformation — call versus conversion, the prophetic idiom of Galatians, grace measured against the memory of persecution, and the patristic reading of Paul as the paradigm of mercy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

Call Rather Than Conversion

A generation of scholarship has insisted that Paul is better described as called than as converted, and the distinction matters. Paul did not move from one religion to another in his own mind; he understood himself as a Jew who had been seized by the God of Israel and sent to the nations with the message that the promises of Israel were fulfilled in the crucified and risen Messiah (Rom. 1:1–4; 9–11). When he describes the Damascus event he reaches for the language of the prophetic call: “God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen” (Gal. 1:15–16) — words that deliberately echo the calls of Jeremiah (“before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee,” Jer. 1:5) and the Servant of the Lord (“the Lord hath called me from the womb,” Isa. 49:1, 5–6). This is the idiom of vocation, not of conviction of sin (Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, 1976; Segal, Paul the Convert, 1990).

Yet “conversion” is not wholly wrong either, for Paul’s whole evaluation of his former life was overturned: “what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ… I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord… and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (Phil. 3:7–8). His Pharisaic credentials, blameless under the Law (Phil. 3:6), he now reckons refuse beside the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. The encounter was thus both a call (a sending) and a conversion (a reversal of values), and the Orthodox tradition holds the two together without flattening either.

Grace Measured Against the Memory of Persecution

What gives Paul’s self-understanding its peculiar intensity is that he never forgets what he was. Three times in the undisputed letters, and again in the Pastorals, he names himself the persecutor: “I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it” (Gal. 1:13); “I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9); and most starkly, “This is a faithful saying… that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe” (1 Tim. 1:15–16). The memory of the persecutor is not a wound Paul nurses but a measure he uses: against the blackness of what he was, the grace that called him stands out as pure gift, owed to nothing in him. “By the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).

This is why the Damascus call is the root of Paul’s theology of grace (see Grace and Righteousness). A man who had been justified by being seized as an enemy could not preach a salvation earned by the works of the Law; the structure of his own experience — mercy to the undeserving — became the structure of his gospel (Rom. 5:6–10, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”; Rom. 4; Eph. 2:8–9). The persecutor-to-apostle reversal is the autobiography hidden inside the doctrine.

“A Pattern to Them Which Should Hereafter Believe”

Paul himself draws out the universal significance of his case (1 Tim. 1:16): if mercy reached him, the chief of sinners and the persecutor of the Church, then no one is beyond it. He is the standing proof that the gospel is good news for enemies. The Fathers seized on this with delight. St. John Chrysostom, who loved Paul above all the saints and preached seven famous panegyrics On the Praises of Saint Paul, returns constantly to the wonder that the persecutor became the teacher of the world — that the same zeal which once “made havock of the church” (Acts 8:3) was, once turned by grace, the engine of the world’s evangelization (Chrysostom, De laudibus sancti Pauli / Homilies on the Praises of St. Paul, Hom. 1–7; trans. Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet, 2000; cf. Homilies on the Acts 19–20, NPNF I/11). For Chrysostom, Paul is the demonstration that human nature, when seized by grace and cooperating with it, is capable of an almost limitless transformation — the paradigm both of mercy received and of synergeia, the cooperation of the redeemed will with God (see Chrysostom and the Apostle).

Continuity of the Zealot and the Apostle

It is worth noting what did not change. The zeal that drove Saul to persecute is the same zeal that drove Paul to evangelize; the man who “profited in the Jews’ religion above many” by his exceeding zeal for the traditions (Gal. 1:14) became the apostle who “laboured more abundantly than they all” (1 Cor. 15:10). Grace did not destroy Paul’s nature but redirected it — took the persecutor’s energy, learning, and single-mindedness and bent them to Christ. This is the Orthodox reading of the event: not the annihilation of the old Saul and the manufacture of a new Paul ex nihilo, but the redemption and reorientation of a whole man, will and intellect and passion together, by the grace that met him on the road (see The Body of Christ and New Creation on the “new creation,” 2 Cor. 5:17).

The Apostle’s Defense of His Apostleship

Because his call came directly from the risen Christ and not through the Jerusalem apostles, Paul had to defend its legitimacy against those who questioned it. The whole of Galatians 1–2 is such a defense: he received his gospel “not of man… but by the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:11–12); he did not go up to Jerusalem to the apostles before him but went into Arabia and returned to Damascus (Gal. 1:17); and when he did meet the pillars, they “added nothing” to him but gave him “the right hands of fellowship” (Gal. 2:6, 9). The persecutor-turned-apostle thus stood as a full apostle, his authority grounded not in human succession but in the direct commission of the Lord who had appeared to him — a claim he could make only because of what happened on the Damascus road (see The Antioch Incident and The Two Chief Apostles).

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, King James Version. The Epistles to the Galatians, First Corinthians, Philippians, Romans, First Timothy, Ephesians; the Acts of the Apostles; Jeremiah; Isaiah.
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Praises of St. Paul (De laudibus sancti Pauli). Trans. and ed. Margaret M. Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000.
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 11.
  • Segal, Alan F. Paul the Convert. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
  • Stendahl, Krister. Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976.