Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

We can study that. When, therefore, something shakes someone to the very core, so that that person emerges from the cataclysm in some ways the same but in other ways radically different, there are, no doubt, many explanations that could be given. Such explanations ought not to cancel one another out. What we can try to do, and will now try to do in the case of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road and thereafter, is to take what we know of our subject before the event and what we know of him after the event and place these apparently contrasting portraits within the rich cultural and spiritual Jewish world of his day, replete as it was with various forms of the controlling Jewish narrative. We must look carefully to see what emerges, not only about the event itself, whatever it was, but about the way in which the “zeal” of the eager young Torah student emerged in a different form as “zeal” for what he called the “good news,” the euangelion, the gospel, the message about Jesus—the fulfillment, shocking though it seemed, of the ancestral hope. Some saw it at the time, and many have seen it since, as one narrative replacing another. The word “conversion”