| Detail | Version 1 (Acts 9:3–9) | Version 2 (Acts 22:6–11) | Version 3 (Acts 26:12–18) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time of day | Not stated (“as he journeyed”) | About noon | At midday |
| Source of light | A light from heaven | A great light from heaven | A light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun |
| Who fell to the ground | Paul; the men with him “stood speechless” | Paul; the companions are not mentioned | All of them |
| What the companions perceived | Heard a voice but saw no man | Saw the light but heard not the voice | Not stated |
| Language of the voice | Not stated | Not stated | Hebrew |
| Identity of the voice | “I am Jesus” | “I am Jesus of Nazareth” | “I am Jesus,” with a mandate of apostleship added |
| Further dialogue | Only told to go into the city | Paul asks, “What shall I do, Lord?” | Long and complete, including the apostolic mission |
| The commission | To be told in the city | To be told in the city | Given on the spot: to preach to the Gentiles |
| Paul’s sight afterward | Blind for three days | Could not see for the glory of the light | No blindness mentioned |
The three versions give different pictures of what is supposed to be one event: how many fell, whether the voice was heard, the detail of the dialogue. The differences raise questions about the reliability of the telling, and about the possibility of addition or reworking by Paul, above all in the third version delivered before King Agrippa. They have long been debated by historians of Christianity and scholars of the biblical text.
Some Christians defend the contradiction by arguing that the Greek histēmi (ἵστημι), translated “stood,” need not mean standing physically and could mean “fixed” or “in place,” so that there is no conflict with the statement that all fell to the ground.1 An explanation of that kind is too technical to persuade, because it does not arise from a natural reading of the text. The claim that Paul’s companions had time to get up again before the dialogue is a supposition supported by no detail in the narrative.2
The same defence is offered for the voice. In the first account the men hear the voice, and in the second they do not, so the Greek φωνή (phōnē) is made to mean a voice in one verse and a mere sound in the other.
Luke gives no warrant for the switch. Three verses before, in the first account, the same noun names the voice that spoke to Saul, and in the second Paul specifies what his companions did not hear: “the voice of him that spake to me.”3
Interpretations that try to harmonize the contradiction are ad hoc: they depend on possible meanings of a word or on the timing of events, and that dependence exposes the weakness of the narrative. If the story had happened and been transmitted consistently, it would need no elaborate reinterpretation to explain basic conflicts over who fell and who heard the voice.4
Who hunted Paul at Damascus?
The two sources disagree even on how Paul left the city. In his own words, the danger came from a king’s official: “In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me: And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.”5
Luke tells another story. “The Jews took counsel to kill him,” and “they watched the gates day and night to kill him. Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down by the wall in a basket.”6
In Paul’s telling, the governor of the Nabataean king Aretas holds the city against him. In Luke’s, the Jews watch the gates, and the disciples lower him. The one man who was there and the one writer who was not cannot agree on who hunted him.
Possibility cancels proof
Paul plainly reshaped his story to convince King Agrippa, and in that he succeeded. In the science of logic (manṭiq), any proof that carries an element of possibility or doubt is unfit to serve as valid evidence, on the principle al-iḥtimāl yusqiṭ al-istidlāl (الاحتمال يسقط الاستدلال, “possibility cancels the proof”). When a piece of evidence admits another meaning, and is not the only certain explanation, the argument falls as a valid basis for a conclusion.
The three conflicting versions of the Damascus story cannot be reconciled naturally without forced interpretation. A narrative this vague and changeable raises deep logical doubt, and on the principle above it should be rejected. The inference from a private vision to a public office is, ex hypothesi, unsecured: the premise admits three versions and the conclusion admits none.
It is unfit to ground Paul’s “apostleship”, still less to become doctrine in a religion. A confused and contradictory story ought to produce suspicion, not certainty.
A borrowed narrative form
The narrative style attached to Paul’s experience, above all the Damascus episode, shows features that resemble the accounts of commissioning or mystical experience common in Graeco-Roman tales and epics. The light from the sky, the disembodied voice and the dramatic apostolic appointment echo the structure of the hero’s quest or the chosen figure in classical literature such as Virgil’s Aeneid.
These features raise the question whether the experience was authentic revelation or a deliberate construction imitating a religious narrative form familiar to the Mediterranean world. They strengthen the case that Paul built his apostolic image through literary adaptation.7
A Yale scholar’s verdict
Some modern Christian scholars have criticized the Damascus event that is claimed as the basis of Paul’s “apostleship”. Dale B. Martin, a New Testament scholar at Yale, questioned the historical reliability of the Acts narrative when set against Paul’s own letters:
Acts portrays Paul’s visionary experience more as a conversion to “the Way” than a call to apostleship. But that is not how Paul saw it. In the one place we hear Paul’s own description of his experience, Paul speaks of it not as a “conversion”… Rather, he uses images and language like the descriptions of the calling of a prophet in the Old Testament.8
He adds:
A firsthand account written a few years after the event must be historically preferable to one written decades later by someone not present.9
Martin’s fuller notes on the question, which set the Paul of Acts against the Paul of the letters point by point, were sent to the author of this site and are published here with his permission: “Luke” versus Paul: the notes of Dale B. Martin.
That finding agrees with a further observation: the whole narrative of a bright light from heaven and a voice from nowhere is found only in Acts. It appears in none of the letters attributed directly to Paul.
The absence raises a serious question about the authenticity of the experience. Did it happen at all, or is it a rhetorical composition that serves to justify the apostleship of a man who had begun as the enemy of the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam (ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him)?
- Acts 9:7. ↩
- Acts 26:14. ↩
- Acts 9:4, 9:7; 22:9. ↩
- Acts 22:9. ↩
- 2 Corinthians 11:32–33 (KJV). ↩
- Acts 9:23–25 (KJV). ↩
- Several modern scholars pursue this approach under the name “mimesis criticism,” the study of how writers imitate or adapt literary elements from earlier works for rhetorical or ideological ends. Prominent among them is Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) and Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), who argues that New Testament narratives may have been shaped by classical Graeco-Roman epic as much as by historical experience. ↩
- Dale B. Martin, New Testament History and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 204. The author was able to correspond personally with the late Dr. Martin in a series of closed discussions between October 2022 and March 2023 on Paul and his writings, before his sudden death in November 2023. Video recordings of those discussions remain in the author’s keeping. ↩
- ibid., p. 75. ↩
