This gave me no help. All that I could infer from it was that Christ probably “appeared” to his enemy Paul in the same way in which he had “appeared” to his friends and followers, and that the “appearing” must have been of a cogent kind, since it convinced an enemy. Nor did I gain much more from the Galatian account, which was as follows: “But when it was the good pleasure of God—who set me apart for this service even from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace—to reveal His Son in me that I might make it my life’s work to preach the good tidings about him among the nations, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood, neither did I go up to Jerusalem to those that had been apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and turned back again to Damascus.”
Here I was in doubt whether “reveal His Son in me,” meant “reveal by my means,” or “reveal in my heart,” that is, “unveil in my soul the image of the Son, which up to that time I had smothered with self-will and obstinacy”—as though “the Son” had been all the while in Paul’s heart, but he had been refusing to acknowledge him. This latter interpretation I preferred. But still there was no mention of any words uttered by Christ to Paul at the moment of his conversion. Only, as Paul implies elsewhere that he had not seen Jesus in the flesh, that is, in person, I presumed that there must have been some such utterance as “I am Jesus,” or “I am the crucified”:—else, how would Paul have recognised the appearance?
As to the place of conversion, however, some light was afforded by the words “I turned back to Damascus,” shewing that he had been near Damascus when it happened. And the epistle to the Corinthians said that he had been let down in a basket from Damascus so as to escape the Jews. It appeared that he was persecuting the Christians up to the time of his conversion; that he was doing this in or near Damascus when he was converted; and that the Jews living in that city turned against him after his conversion, so that he had to escape from them.
Hereupon I tried to imagine Paul the persecutor, in his course of “persecuting the church,” suddenly stopped by an apparition of Christ. In respect of his acts, Paul—though he could not possibly have been so cruel—might be compared to Nero, who also persecuted the Christians. But in respect of righteousness and truth and fervour, Paul was like Epictetus. Then I recalled the story recently told me by Scaurus, how he and his father had come suddenly upon the young Epictetus, in the Neronian gardens, staring upon the Christians in their torments, and how Scaurus had remarked upon the ineffaceableness of the impression produced on his own mind and (as he believed) on that of my future Teacher. That I could well understand. But Scaurus and Epictetus were merely passive spectators. Paul was a perpetrator. “How much deeper,” I said, “and all the more deep and terrible in proportion to his sense of justice and truth, must have been the impression on Paul’s mind, when he suddenly woke up to the fact that he had been persecuting the followers of Truth, the disciples of the Suffering Servant of God, predicted by the prophets!”
Then it appeared to me that perhaps the precise words uttered by Christ in that moment of Paul’s shock and agony were not of so much importance as the feeling of shock and agony itself, followed by a great wrenching away of prejudices and misconceptions, and by a sudden influx of a dazzling light on eyes habituated to darkness. Looking again at the Philippian letter, I perceived how much Paul had to give up, how lightly he regarded the sacrifice of all his prospects of prosperity and promotion among his own people: “But whatever things were once gains to me, these I have counted as loss for Christ’s sake. Nay, more, I count all things as loss for the sake of the preeminence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord; for whose sake I suffered the loss of all that I had, and I count it all as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him—not having as my own righteousness that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that is from God based on that faith—that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and fellowship with His sufferings, being conformed with His death; if by any means I may attain to the resurrection of the dead! Not that I have already received, or am already perfected. But I pursue the chase, if by any means I may seize as a prize that for which I was also seized as a captive by Christ Jesus!”
These last words made me understand how Paul might have regarded Christ as manifested in him rather than to him. Isaiah saw God uplifted on high outside him. But Paul felt the Son of God enthroned as sovereign within him: I remembered reading in some drama how the wife of a dethroned and submissive sovereign goads him to rebel against his successor, saying—
“Hath he deposed
Thine intellect? Hath he been in thy heart?”
This was just what Paul experienced and exulted in avowing. Christ had “deposed” Paul’s former self, and substituted a new self of his own as viceroy, to rule Paul, “in his heart.” A soldier might say that Christ, in the moment of taking Paul prisoner, had (so to speak) given him back his sword, saying “Use it on my side among all the nations of the earth, that they also may receive the good tidings of the forgiveness of sins.” But in fact (according to Paul’s view) Christ had done much more than this. He had given Paul a new sword, “the sword of the spirit.” He had also made his whole nature anew, according to Paul’s own saying, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, behold all things are made new.”
Not that I was as yet convinced that Christ had actually risen from the dead. For I did not yet feel sure that Paul might not have been deceived by himself and by the Christians. But I did now feel sure that Paul was honest and did not knowingly deceive his readers. And it was becoming more and more difficult to believe that self-deception or Christian deception could have produced effects on multitudes of men so great and permanent as those which were plainly discernible in the epistles.