Paul is probably one of the most misunderstood people of all time. The church celebrates his conversion on January 25^th every year. When it falls on a Sunday, as it does this year it is transferred to the following day. But today I want to set the record straight about Paul and the significance of his conversion. So be prepared to be surprised. He was born in Tarsus, in modern day southeastern Turkey, during the first part of his life he was known as Saul. His early life overlapped with Jesus' earthly life. He was a member of the tribe of Benjamin who was born outside of Judea, - a Hellenistic Jew, so he spoke Greek as fluently as Hebrew, but he was also a Roman citizen. If he had three feet he would have one foot in Jewish culture, a second in Hellenistic and a third in Roman As such, he was uniquely qualified to take the message of a Jewish messiah to Greeks and Romans.

A number of people today, including some in the church, dislike Paul. Some for example see Paul him as a ?male chauvinist pig' whose writings have been used to justify patriarchy. In fact Paul both believed and lived out the truth that "in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave not free". 

One of the reasons that Paul is so important for Christians is that he wrote so much of the New Testament. Traditionally, 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament have been ascribed to Paul, although most scholars doubt that the Pastoral Epistles, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, were actually written by Paul himself; these seem to date from a later time, but they contain authentic Pauline material. If we set aside these three small books, more than a third, almost half, of the New Testament comes from Paul. He would be important just for this reason but there in addition, Paul brought the Christian church, as we understand it, into being. Right from the outset he understood the universal significance of Jesus - that in Jesus God had come to the whole of humanity, not just Jews as their deliverer.

There are three things for us to recognize to accurately understand the significance of Paul's Conversion.

1.                  A Bit About First Century Judaism.  Most Christians assume in the first century Judaism was all about earning God's favor- i.e. people pulling themselves up by their own efforts- by their own boot straps. We assume that Jews thought they earned justification, righteousness, and acceptance by God by their slavish obedience to the law. Until recently most scholars thought that Paul's clash with Judaism was because Jews tried to earn salvation by obedience to the law rather than by accepting it as an unearned gift from God.  About 15 years ago an English scholar, Ed Sanders, ushered in a revolution in interpretation of Jewish thought.  Sanders decisively showed that for first century Jews obedience to the law was NOT the means of earning acceptance by God - rather it was the response of gratitude for all that God had already done for them. In Saunders jargon Jews kept the law not to "get in" to the covenant people of God but to "stay in."  This view is now widely accepted by most scholars. If this is true why did Paul reject Judaism? That leads to the second issue

2.        Where did Paul fit in the spectrum of Judaism? We know that Paul was a Pharisee. There were two competing schools of thought among first century Pharisees, the Hillelites and the Shammaites. Paul belonged to the Shammaite faction. How do we know? Because he uses the term "zeal", in various autobiographical passages, Paul describes himself as "zealous" or "having greater zeal" than his contemporaries. We think of "zeal" as meaning devotion to personal prayer, the church, bible reading, or caring for people. That's not what it meant for a Shammaite. They believed that they could hasten the coming of God's kingdom and they were zealous to do everything that they could to bring about the glorious day when God's promises, made through Old Testament prophets, of full redemption for Israel, freedom from their oppressors, and a glorious new temple would be fulfilled; the establishment of the Kingdom of God here on earth.

So in our terms, Saul, as he then was, was a religious zealot and this had significant political overtones. Zeal necessitated his stamping out, by whatever means were necessary, all forms of Jewish disloyalty to the Torah, the law. Also he believed himself required to assist in throwing off, by whatever means it might involve, the pagan yoke which polluted Israel's land and prevented her from attaining the freedom that was her covenantal birthright. Secondly, in his zeal Paul intended to whole-heartedly keep the Torah and to force other Jews to keep the Torah in his way, using violence as and when necessary. In our age he was not dissimilar to supporters of Osama bin Laden.  Only when we understand Saul was this kind of fanatic can we make sense of the facts that, as a Hellenistic Jew, he was present at and looked after the garments of those who were stoning another Hellenistic Jew, Stephen.  Only then can we understand how Paul can be on his way to Damascus with letters of authority from the chief priests to imprison and even kill other Jews.

3.        Paul's conversion and its immediate significance. Paul's conversion    probably occurred around 33-34 AD. Later when he speaks of his Damascus experience he makes clear that for him it was not a mystical, visionary experience, not an ecstatic experience, it was not any sort of "spiritual" experience. Paul maintained that he had seen the Risen Christ in just the same way that the other apostles had seen the Risen Christ in the weeks after his resurrection. Paul believed that on the road to Damascus he was granted the last resurrection appearance, one which was out of sequence - in Luke's language, Paul saw the Risen Christ after his ascension.

It is important that we grasp this because Paul's awareness of Jesus as having been bodily raised from the dead is paramount to understanding the significance of what happened to him on the road to Damascus. There Paul came face to face with the fact that his expectation of what God would do in the world, how he would do it, through whom he would do it, when he would do it, was completely wrong. Paul came to understand that the one true God had done for Jesus of Nazareth in the middle of time, what Paul thought he was going to do for Israel at the end of time. Paul assumed that Yahweh would vindicate Israel after her suffering at the hands of pagans. Instead, Yahweh had vindicated Jesus after his suffering at the hand of pagans. Paul thought Yahweh's vindication of Israel would happen at the end of time inaugurating the Kingdom of God with a flourish, ushering in the Age to Come. Instead the great resurrection had happened to one man all by himself.

The resurrection demonstrated for Paul that Jesus, far from being a charlatan, deceiving a few ignorant Jewish people into following him, was God's Messiah. God had definitively worked in Jesus in the way that Paul had thought he was going to work in Israel. The ?Age to Come' had come, but it had not fully come. There was still hardship and suffering. There was a sense of incomplete vindication. Paul on the road to Damascus realized that he had to discard his prior ideas and beliefs and start all over again in understanding both what God had done and was doing in the world and particularly what he was doing through Jesus. For Paul the Damascus Road was not simply an invitation for his soul to be saved so that he might then go to heaven, it was the recognition that God had decisively acted in Jesus to implement his purpose of salvation for the whole world. Paul had a new calling and a new cause. So do we!