no very wide discrepancy, but there, as in the third, the time is said to be about noon. There is a very considerable difference in the third account, however, more especially in the report of what is said by the voice: xxvi. 13. "At midday, O King, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and those journeying with me; 14. And when we all fell to the earth, I heard a voice saying unto me in the Hebrew tongue: Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against pricks. 15. And I said: Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said: I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. 16. But rise and stand upon thy feet; for I was seen by thee for this purpose, to choose thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou sawest, and of the things in which I will appear unto thee; 17. delivering thee from the people and from the Gentiles, unto whom I send thee; 18. to open their eyes, that they may turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and a lot among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me."(1)
It will be admitted that this address is widely different from that reported in the two earlier accounts. Apologists argue that, in this third narrative, Paul has simply transferred from Ananias to Jesus the message delivered to him by the former, according to the second account. Let us first see what Ananias is there represented as saying. Acts xxii. 14: "And he said: The God of our fathers chose thee, to know his will and to see the Righteous One'(1) 15. for thou shalt be a witness to him unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard." (2) Now Paul clearly professes in the speech which he is represented as delivering before Agrippa to state what the voice said to him: "And he said," "and I said," "and he said," distinctly convey the meaning that the report is to be what actually was said. If the sense of what Ananias said to him is embodied in part of the address ascribed to the voice, it is strangely altered and put into the first person; but, beyond this, there is much added which neither appears in the speech of Ananias nor anywhere else in any of the narratives. If we further compare the instructions given to Ananias in the vision of the first narrative with his words in the second and those ascribed to the voice in the third, we shall see that these again differ very materially. Acts ix. 15. "But the Lord said unto him: Go; for this man is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before Gentiles and kings, and the sons of Israel: 16. For I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake."(3)
1 It will be remembered that this epithet occurs in Acts
iii. 14, vii. 52, and nowhere else in the New Testament.
What must we think of a writer who deals so freely with his materials, and takes such liberties even with so serious a matter as this heavenly vision and the words of the glorified Jesus?
In the third account, Jesus is represented as saying: "It is hard for thee to kick against pricks."(1) This is a well-known proverbial saying, frequently used by classical Greek and Latin authors,(2) and not altogether strange to Hebrew. It is a singularly anthropomorphic representation to put such a saying into the mouth of the divine apparition, and it assists in betraying the mundane origin of the whole scene. Another point deserving consideration is, that Paul is not told what he is to do by the voice of Jesus, but is desired to go into the city to be there instructed by Ananias. This is clearly opposed to Paul's own repeated asseverations. "For neither did I receive it from man nor was taught it, but through a revelation of Jesus Christ,"(3) is his statement. The details of the incident itself, moreover, are differently stated in the various accounts and cannot be reconciled. According to the first account, the companions of Paul "stood speechless" (ix. 7); in the third, they "all fell to the earth" (xxvi. 14). The explanation, that they first fell to the ground and then rose up, fails
satisfactorily to harmonise the two statements; as does likewise the suggestion that the first expression is simply an idiomatic mole of saying that they were speechless, independent of position. Then again, in the first account, it is said that the men stood speechless, "hearing the voice [———] but seeing no one."' In the second we are told: "And they that were with me saw indeed the light; but they heard not the voice [———] of him speaking to me."(2) No two statements could be more contradictory. The attempt to reconcile them by explaining the verb [———] in the one place "to hear" and in the other "to understand" is inadmissible, because wholly arbitrary. It is quite obvious that the word is used in the same sense in both passages, the difference being merely the negative. In the third account, the voice is described as speaking "in the Hebrew tongue,"(3) which was probably the native tongue of the companions of Paul from Jerusalem. If they heard the voice speaking Hebrew, they must have understood it The effort to make the vision clearly objective, and, at the same time, to confine it to Paul, leads to these complications. The voice is heard, though the speaker is not seen, by the men, in the one story, whilst the light is seen, and the voice not heard, in the other, and yet it speaks in Hebrew according to the third, and even makes use of classical proverbs, and uses language wondrously similar to that of the author of Acts.