Scholarship has offered a range of explanations for Paul’s conversion as alternatives or supplements to theistic ones. Scholars also debated whether Paul was neurotic or a genius. Enlightenment scholars often attributed Paul’s conversion experience to hallucination or psychological abnormality. Psychoanalytic approaches of his experience were once common; whatever the merits of psychoanalysis for living persons, however, it is quite precarious for use on the dead, particularly given the limited information we possess.
Various psychological studies helpfully cite Western patterns of conversion, but in some respects Paul’s experience does not adequately fit the grid. Exclusively psychological explanations have usually faltered partly due to their following of widely circulated premises that contradict textual evidence, such as positing Paul’s alleged guilty feelings for persecution (contrast Gal. 1:14; Phil. 3:6) or positing myths about Jewish legalism once promulgated by NT scholars.
Among scholars of antiquity, Arthur Darby Nock, who compared philosophic conversion, followed the earlier psychological approach to conversion, in contrast to the social (corporate influence) dimension often preferred today. Although the reestablished categories of interest often remain limited, recent decades have shifted toward sociological models of conversion because they claim to be more quantifiable.
Conversion accounts were familiar in antiquity. Some were conversions to philosophy; others included new ethnic allegiance, as in the case of proselytes to Judaism, but both involved drastic lifestyle changes. Ancients also recounted experiences with gods and angels, so even those who did not share Paul’s convictions could allow that he had a genuine superhuman encounter (cf.Acts 23:9). Some scholars today account for Paul’s encounter in terms of Jewish merkabah mysticism, but Paul’s letters do not reveal a reconversion penchant toward mysticism, and his own accounts of the encounter more closely resemble OT call narratives. Paul himself distinguishes his personal encounter with the resurrected Christ (1 Cor. 15:8) from his later visions (2 For. 12:1).
It is anachronistic to imagine that Paul “converted” from “Judaism” to “Christianity.” Nevertheless., Paul was converted to a new course of life and from one Jewish sect to another. Some question whether converting from one sect to another is actually conversion, but this seems to me a semantic question based more on modern conflicts than ancient ones. (E. P.Sanders thus efficiently resolves the dispute over whether Paul’s call was also a conversion simply by defining the terms in question.)
Using the sociological definition of conversion, Paul was converted. In contrast to those who argue that Paul was only converted or only called, he was both converted (Phil. 3:4-11) and called (1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8-11, Gal. 1:11-23). Luke, who sandwiches his first narration of Paul’s experience between the accounts of the African treasurer’s conversion and that of Cornelius, certainly viewed it as both (Acts 8:26-10:48). Converts typically view their reconversion lives through a post conversion lens, and Paul is no exception (cf. Phil. 3:4-14, esp. 3:13). Whatever other analogies we find helpful, Paul’s experience transformed him from persecuting a new sect to joining it.
This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.
For more on the book of Galatians, check out Galatians: A Commentary.
