Acts 9:26

Acts 9:26. And when Saul was come to Jerusalem. What must have been Saul's feelings when, after three years' absence, he first saw the walls and towers of the Holy City again? He had left Jerusalem as the powerful commissioner of the Sanhedrim council, armed with full powers to root up the heresy spread by the followers of Jesus. He returned to the capital poor, despised, a proscribed outlaw, his brilliant earthly prospects blasted, only burning to preach the Name of the Crucified, whose devoted followers he had once persecuted with so bitter, so relentless a hostility. ‘He might,' suggests Howson (St. Paul). ‘have again, as he approached the city gates, trodden the very spot where he had so exultantly assisted in the death of Stephen; and he entered then perfectly willing, were it God's will, to be dragged out through them to the same fate. He would feel a peculiar tie of brotherhood to that martyr, for he could not now be ignorant that the same Jesus, who in such glory had called him, had but a little while before appeared in the same glory to reassure the expiring Stephen. The ecstatic look and words of the dying saint now came fresh upon his memory with their real meaning.'

He assayed to join himself to the disciples, but they were afraid of him. His great object was to see and to converse with Peter, as he tells us years after in the Galatian Epistle: ‘After three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Peter' (Galatians 1:18). No doubt the story of the strange conversion of the great Pharisee persecutor at Damascus long ago had reached Jerusalem; but then a considerable period of silence (between two and three years) had intervened, during which time Saul was in retirement and solitude in ‘Arabia.' The Jerusalem Church, therefore, must have been in a state of great uncertainty and perplexity as to the intentions of their ancient and bitter enemy. Hackett suggests, ‘The sudden appearance of Voltaire in a circle of Christians, claiming to be one of them, would have been something like this return of Saul to Jerusalem as a professed disciple.'