Paul himself makes no mention of a conversion on the
road to Damascus, whereas Acts of the Apostles has not one, but three accounts:
- At Acts 9:3-8, Paul was blinded by a light and fell down, then heard Jesus, who told Paul that he would be told what to do when he was in the city. His men did not see the light, but heard the voice. They remained standing.
- At Acts 22:6-11, Paul told the people he was blinded by a light and fell down, then heard Jesus, who again told Paul that he would be told what to do when he was in Damascus. This time, his men saw the light but, unlike Paul, were not blinded, and did not hear the voice.
- At Acts 26.13-19, Paul told Agrippa that he saw a brilliant light and heard Jesus, who gave him his mission, but did not command him to go to Damascus. He fell down, but there is no mention of blindness, nor is there any mention of the men seeing or hearing anything, although for some reason they also fell down. He told those at Damascus and Jerusalem about his conversion experience.
Was Acts 9:3-8 the true account of this event, and if
so was Paul confused in his two separate accounts? How would we know?
Even conservative theologians acknowledge that Luke was
not with Paul on the road to Damascus so, if Luke was the author of Acts, he must have received all three
versions from Paul, or at least one version that he subsequently amended for
his own reasons and placed in three different contexts.
Rex Wyler says,in The Jesus Sayings, page 43, that historians consider
Acts, written in the 90s, an anonymous work that freely mixes history with
legend. Authorship some decades after the death of Paul means that this
anonymous author would not have received the story from Paul himself. So Paul's
conversion on the road to Damascus was either a tradition of unknown provenance
or entirely a literary creation written by 'Luke'.
