Apostle Paul’s Pre-Conversion Experience

The importance of the Apostle Paul to Christianity is universally acknowledged. In fact, there are those who strongly believe that Christianity would have been a failure had it not been for Paul. Others consider Paul to be the true Founder of Christianity. I am obliged to disagree on all counts, as I believe God could have done without Paul and Christianity would have still emerged as a universal faith. Thus, while resolutely refusing him any such honors; I do recognize his enormous importance as the interpreter and eloquent preacher of what we believe to be the true mind of Jesus concerning the destination of the gospel and the church.

We admire the providence of God, which raised Paul up to be the apostle of Gentile Christianity, and the grace of God that prepared him for discharging the duties of that high vocation with the greatest possible dedication. He was, as we know from his own letters, beforehand a most unlikely candidate. A Pharisee of the Pharisees, a pupil of the Rabbis, an intense fanatical zealot for the Jewish law and traditions, how improbable that such a man would ever become a convert, not to mention enthusiastic preacher, of a movement which was in spirit and mind anti-pharisaic and anti-legal. But God’s plan for his life was different, and so Saul, the zealot for Jewish law and persecutor of Christians, became the renowned Paul, preacher of the faith he once sought to destroy.

It was a great spiritual transformation, and one naturally asks how it came about. By what means did this Pharisee of Pharisees and bitter opponent of Christianity change into a Christian, and such a powerful Christian at that? Paul not merely believed that Jesus was the Christ, but he espoused with all the passion he could muster, the great idea of a gospel for the world. He treated the law, which once meant everything to him, as nothing. He insisted that in Christ Jesus, there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, male and female. He further insisted on a new humanity for which differences of race and gender have no meaningful significance.

All attempts to explain Paul’s conversion without recognizing the hand of God in it is an exercise in futility. Besides the fact that God set him apart for salvation and apostleship even before creation, I think if we look cautiously beneath the surface of his conversion experience, we may discover the further truth that his transformation was not as sudden or unprepared for as we may first have thought. We begin to notice that all along, God was working in him toward the great Damascus encounter with the Light of Jesus Christ. The change in his religious attitude was not without preparation and the fact that his experience as a Pharisee contributed to bringing it about is not a matter of simple conjecture. His own letters contain some significant autobiographical hints bearing on this point. Thus, he tells us that while he was endeavoring to fulfill the requirements of the law; his attention was arrested at a certain stage by the tenth commandment of the Decalogue: Do not covet. It was through this prohibition, directed against the inward man, as distinct from outward acts, that Saul attained a new sense of moral shortcomings. What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "Do not covet." Romans 7:7. This is important for us to know for it shows for one thing that even then, Saul of Tarsus was a decent Pharisee, a man of exceptional moral sensitivity.

Saul differed from the ordinary Pharisee by his apparent capacity to be deeply distressed by the sin within. So the actual distress evoked by the law against coveting had much to do with his final abandonment of Pharisaic Judaism. When through that precept he became aware that there was a whole world of sins within of which he had theretofore remained unconscious, this marked the beginning of the end of his allegiance to Pharisaic tradition. And, Saul had to at least suspect that righteousness by method of legalism was impossible. In fact, we learn from another autobiographical hint in his letters that he did hold this suspicion, “Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died".” Romans 7:9. “I died,” that is, hope died; hope of salvation on the Pharisaic program of self-righteous. This was not yet Christianity, it was only despair of the Pharisees legalism, but it was a decisive step onwards toward the new standing ground.

At the very time Paul was persecuting followers of Jesus, he was experiencing cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, as used in psychology, refers to the internal conflict resulting from holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously, such as the inconsistency between one's beliefs and one's actions. As someone said, “a person is never as violent against a truth as when he or she is half convinced it is true, and yet is unwilling to receive it.” God was preparing him for the Damascus experience.

We might notice in passing that Saul’s madness against Christians, taken in connection with his waning faith in Pharisaic Judaism seems to imply that he considered Christianity, during his persecuting period, as a legitimate rival of legalism. Therefore, Christianity as he viewed it must have been thought of as something more than a cult within Judaism. Had it been no more than a fellowship, it would have been difficult for us to understand what there could be in the cult community to provoke such bitter hostility in Paul’s mind. The fact that he persecuted the Church is the best proof that in the soul of society a new faith community had appeared destined to alter the world. A sure instinct told the young Pharisee that there was something brewing that presented danger to the religion of the law. The Christians believing a crucified man to be the Christ would not have provoked Saul’s wrath. No, it was the spirit of the new movement, its anti-legal undercurrent, which made it for him both a source of fascination and an object of fear and hatred.

When a crisis occurs in a life of great moral intensity, the issues involved are usually very radical. The aforementioned elements of the Christian consciousness of Paul are all fair deductions of what we know from him concerning his state of mind prior to his conversion. I hope you found it helpful in some way as you continue to grow in the faith.