by GIUSEPPE FRANGI

Paul, meaning, “little.” Or Saul–from Shaul–meaning, “called, invoked.” A Roman and a Hebrew name for the same person. Let’s try to imagine him: a short man with a bald head and crooked legs, as is recounted in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, an apocryphal text from the century following the apostle. His eyebrows meeting above a large protruding nose, a stocky body–in short, a physical type that is not easily forgotten. He was a Jew, even though born far from Judaea, in the very early years of the Christian era. “I am a Jew and a citizen of the well-known city of Tarsus in Cilicia,” he stated proudly to the tribune Lysias, who had ordered him arrested in Jerusalem. (Acts 21:39) Tarsus was indeed an important city, located in what is now southern Turkey. In 42 B.C., during the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, the city took Caesar’s side and received as recompense the status of free city. For this reason, Paul of Tarsus also had Roman citizenship, as the Acts record on another occasion when he was arrested, in Philippi. He stayed in his native city until the age of 13, attending school and learning Greek (“You speak Greek, then?” Lysias asked him with some surprise). He then continued his studies in Jerusalem, under Gamaliel, “and was taught the exact observance of the Law of our ancestors full of duty towards God.” Acts 22:3) Gamaliel was the great Gamaliel the Elder, a famous rabbi, whom the Hebrew Mishnah praises in very high terms. Gamaliel’s was also a vocational school. There Paul learned the trade that would make him self-supporting all his life, without having to be a burden to the churches he went to visit. He became a maker of tents or field coverings, which meant he worked with leather, as the Acts testify (in the Acts, Luke calls him “skenopoids”). And again, “My manner of life from my youth, a life spent from the beginning among my own people and in Jerusalem, is common knowledge among the Jews. They have known me for a long time and could testify, if they would, that I followed the strictest party in our religion and lived as a Pharisee.” (Acts 26:4-5) Thus, Paul was an observant Pharisee, as he repeats in his letter to the Philippians: “In the matter of the law, I was a Pharisee as for the uprightness embodied in the Law, I was faultless.” (Phil 3:5-6) He was also married, according to a tradition, but he was widowed early or his wife left him, so that during all the years of his preaching, we always see him alone. After Jesus’s public mission, death, and resurrection, Paul found himself in the front line, a champion of intransigence against the followers of the man from Galilee. He himself tells the story of those ferocious years of his life in his moving confession to the Galatians: “You have surely heard how I lived in the past, within Judaism, and how there was simply no limit to the way I persecuted the Church of God in my attempts to destroy it; and how, in Judaism, I outstripped most of my Jewish contemporaries in my limitless enthusiasm for the traditions of my ancestors.” (Gal 1:13-14) He did not limit himself to persecuting the followers of Jesus in the city, such as Stephen, whose martyrdom, the Acts tells us, Paul had watched in the forefront, among the most violent of the stoners. Around the year 33, he requested and was granted by the high priest permission to go uproot the Christians from other provinces of the Empire. Thus he left for Damascus, “To arrest and take to Jerusalem any followers of the Way, men or women, that he might find.” (Acts 9:2) But on the road to Damascus, the unexpected happened. Luke, his faithful disciple, in Chapter 9 of the Acts, tells the story in detail: He was wrapped in a light from heaven, and falling to the ground he heard a voice calling him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He was blinded, and had to be led by the hand to Damascus. And here another unexpected thing happened: the aggressive and presumptuous Paul was saved from his troubles by a simple Christian man, one Ananias. He came forward, somewhat fearfully, knowing well Paul’s fame and his desire to persecute all the Christians who crossed his path. But now the roles were completely reversed. Ananias went to see him, talked to him, and “it was as though scales fell immediately away from his eyes and immediately he was able to see again. So he got up and was baptized.”
The humble means of Ananias was the face the Lord used to make his choice operative. “God, who had set me apart from the time when I was in my mother’s womb, called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me.” (Gal 1:15-16) The historian of Judaism, Paolo Sacchi, writes, “When Paul had his experience on the road to Damascus, he accepted being a Christian, after believing until that moment that Christianity was an unacceptable superstition; a Christian theology did not exist. Thus it was not just any form of reasoning that persuaded Paul to become a Christian.” It was not reasoning, but an encounter: Paul, the proud and fiery-spirited Paul, was called by a simple, timid Christian from Damascus. This is the inscrutable method of God. The apostle, after his conversion, did not change his nature. He remained the proud and fiery spirit he was before, demonstrating that Christianity does not mortify anyone’s personality. In fact, he leaves it to Luke to tell the story of his conversion in all its details; in his letters, he himself never mentions it. He says only that after Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem, but took refuge in Arabia, before returning to Tarsus. This already hints at the long dialectic that would keep him ever in a state of tension with the representatives of the Twelve Apostles, a tension that culminated in his argument with Peter in Antioch. Imagine him, with his gruff and impetuous character, staying shut up in his own city for eight years after his conversion. A second Ananias had to come and dig him out. This time his name was Barnabas, “a good man, filled with the Holy Spirit and with faith,” who “urged them all to remain faithful to the Lord with heartfelt devotion.” He had been sent to Antioch in Syria by the apostles to report on the numerous conversions that were taking place there. He saw and was pleased. And he thought that this was a good time to persuade Paul to come out of seclusion. “Barnabas then left for Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he found him he brought him to Antioch. And it happened that they stayed together in that church a whole year, instructing a large number of people. It was at Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians.’” (Acts 11:24-26) And from that day on, the Apostle of the Gentiles never rested.