The New Saul

Overview

Sunstroke, hallucination, epilepsy, and psychology have all been suggested as "natural" explanations for Saul's conversion, but none of them satisfies the historical evidence. This, the most dramatic conversion in history, became Saul's own witness of the resurrected Lord and his call to apostleship. Like Jesus, Saul had his desert experience, probably in northern Arabia, where he rethought his theology over a three-year period. Returning to Damascus, he boldly proclaimed Jesus as the promised Messiah in the synagogues of the city, provoking a plot to seize him at the city gates. But Saul was lowered in a basket from the city wall and escaped to Jerusalem, where he met the apostles Peter and James, the half-brother of Jesus, and convinced them of his conversion. He then sailed back to Tarsus, where he spent the next decade as a missionary in Cilicia and northern Syria.