Acts 9:3-9

The Conversion of the Pharisee Leader Saul, 3-9.

After the Passion of the Lord, the conversion of St. Paul is the event to which attention is most frequently called in the sacred writings. Many times does this chiefest of our Christian teachers allude to it in his Epistles. Three times in this earliest of Christian histories is the relation repeated with more or less detail once by Luke in this ninth chapter; twice by the apostle himself: in chap, 22, in his address to the people from the Temple stairs; in chap, 26, in his defence before Agrippa the king, and Festus the Roman procurator.

Three times, then, is this strange and marvellous story, which has had such a mighty influence upon the destinies of mankind, repeated. In this triple relation we cannot help discerning a striking analogy to the triple relation in the three first Gospels of so many of our Lord's most remarkable acts and teaching. As in the gospel history an event or a discourse is often told three times, each recital differing from the other in many little circumstances, but each recital preserving throughout the same grand unity; so in the book of the ‘Acts' is the conversion of the Pharisee Saul told, each narrative of the great event supplying some little fact or circumstance passed over in the others, yet all the three uniting in the main features of the awful scene namely, the blinding light of glory (Acts 9:3; Acts 22:6; Acts 26:13); the voice from heaven heard and understood by the Pharisee Saul (Acts 9:5; Acts 22:8; Acts 26:14); the appearance of a glorified form, seen by and stamped for ever on the memory of him whom men knew afterwards as Paul (Acts 9:17; Acts 22:14; Acts 26:16), each recital, too, agreeing with the repeated testimony of the Epistles, that Saul himself was fully convinced of the reality of the appearance of Christ to him.