Acts 9 in Relation to OT Prophetic Call Narratives

T. David Gordon

I. Examples of Call Narratives in OT

Exodus 3:1-6 Moses

Judges 6:1-24 Gideon

1Sam 3:1-14 Samuel

Isa. 6:1-8 Isaiah

Jer. 1:4-10 Jeremiah

II. Ordinary Features of Call Narratives

A. Theophany/Epiphany (burning bush, audible voice, etc.)

B. Call extended

C. Expression of reluctance

D. Acquiescence in call

III. The Claim of Call Narratives

The existence of this literary form functions to identify its recipient not only as a messenger from God, but a special kind of messenger, one who is intricately involved in God’s governance of His people. As Norm Habel put it:

There can be little doubt that the classical prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and II Isaiah appropriate and develop the call traditions reflected in the structure of the calls of Moses and Gideon. By using the same call Gattung the prophets in question establish a specific link with the past history of Israel. Their own calls, it would seem, are viewed from the historical perspective of the commission of the ancient mediators of Israel. This proposition agrees with an assertion noted in the call narratives themselves, that the prophets are both messengers and “more than messengers”, both spokesmen and mediators of Yahweh’s historical involvement. In this sense the prophets are successors to the saviors of old. Thus, for Jeremiah it was not only a question of claiming to be a prophet like Moses, but also of extending the historical line of continuity from the ancient mediators via the divine commission and its form.

In the light of the previous discussion, the prophetic call accounts also seem to be the product of later reflection as the prophets concerned announce their credentials to Israel at large, either orally or in writing, in accordance with the tradition of their predecessors. By employing this form the prophets publicly identify themselves as God’s ambassadors. The call narratives, therefore, are not primarily pieces of autobiographical information but open proclamations of the prophet’s claim to be Yahweh’s agent at work in Israel.[1]

IV. Acts 9:1-19 (and Acts 22:4-16, Acts 26:9-19, Gal. 1:13-17)

It is evident that the narratives of Paul’s call share all the features of the prophetic call narrative. It is also apparent that Luke, in Acts, takes several deliberate steps to present Paul as a prophet. Not only is he listed in Acts 13:1 in a list of five prophets, Luke also calls attention to the fact that Paul is a recipient of visions, a qualification that God had indicated would be true of prophets in Numbers 12:6: “If there is a prophet among you, I the LORD make myself known to him in a vision (ἐν ὁράματι); I speak with him in a dream.” Luke records that before Paul met Ananias, he had “seen in a vision (ἐν ὁράματι) a man named Ananias” (Acts 9:12). Luke thus establishes that Paul qualifies as a “prophet of the Lord” according to God’s own criteria earlier disclosed to Moses.[2] Further, at Gal. 1:15-16, we even see an unmistakable allusion to the calls of Jeremiah and Isaiah in the narrative of Paul’s call:

Gal. 1:15 But when he who had set me apart before I was born (literally, “from my mother’s womb”), and who called me by his grace, 16 was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles…

Ὅτε δὲ εὐδόκησεν [ὁ θεὸς] ὁ ἀφορίσας με ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου καὶ καλέσας διὰ τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί, ἵνα εὐαγγελίζωμαι αὐτὸν ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν

[The ESV translation not only obscures the parallel to Jer. 1 and Isa. 49; it violates the ESV’s stated principle of “literal where possible.” There is a perfectly good way to say “was born” in Greek, and Paul uses the expression at Rom. 9:11 (“though they were not yet born,” μήπω γὰρ γεννηθέντων), Gal. 4:23 (“the son of the slave was born,” μὲν ἐκ τῆς παιδίσκης κατὰ σάρκα γεγέννηται), and Gal. 4:29 (“at that time he who was born,” τότε ὁ κατὰ σάρκα γεννηθεὶς). But Paul employed the language of the Greek Old Testament here (“from the womb”), as a deliberate allusion to the calls of Jeremiah and Isaiah, an allusion utterly obfuscated by the ESV translation. Other ETs mistranslate here also; but they do not profess to be “literal where possible” translations, so they are just bad translations; they are not inconsistent with their stated principles.]

Jer. 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

πρὸ τοῦ με πλάσαι σε ἐν κοιλίᾳ ἐπίσταμαί σε καὶ πρὸ τοῦ σε ἐξελθεῖν ἐκ μήτρας ἡγίακά σε προφήτην εἰς ἔθνη τέθεικά σε.

Isa. 49:1, 5, 6--“ Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. … And now, saith the LORD that formed me from the womb to be his servant… I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.” (κύριος ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομά μου… οὕτως λέγει κύριος ὁ πλάσας με ἐκ κοιλίας… τέθεικά σε εἰς διαθήκην γένους εἰς φῶς ἐθνῶν τοῦ εἶναί σε εἰς σωτηρίαν ἕως ἐσχάτου τῆς γῆς.

Note especially the striking similarity between

Paul: ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου καὶ καλέσας

and Isaiah: ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου ἐκάλεσεν.

Despite the evident effort by Luke and Paul to present the Damascus theophany as a call narrative, the narrative is still commonly (and, in my judgment, erroneously) referred to as Paul’s “conversion.” Krister Stendahl is right in saying: “If, then, we use the term ‘conversion’ for Paul’s experience we would also have to use it of such prophets as Jeremiah and Isaiah.”[3] Seyoon Kim has pointed out that the verb εὐδόκησεν in Gal. 1:16 “seems to come from Isa. 42:1,” because in portions of the textual tradition, προσεδέξατο is replaced with εὐδόκησεν. Kim, Paul and the New Perspective, op. cit., 2002, p. 102. So also Karl Olav Sandnes, Paul—One of the Prophets? (WUNT 2/43. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1998): “Paul presents his commission in a manner reminiscent of the literary form that is used in the OT to depict the call of the prophets…Paul here actually describes his Christophany in the form of a prophetic call. Attention has to be paid to this form critical observation, for it defines the framework for the interpretation of the overloaded subordinate clause” (pp.58, 59). So also Seyoon Kim: “Since Gal 1:24 seems to allude to Isa 49:3 and Gal 2:2 to Isa 49:4, the call of the Ebed of Isa 49 appears to be in the forefront of Paul’s mind while he recalls his own call to apostleship on the road to Damascus.” Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 101.

V. Why we tend not to see Acts 9 as a call narrative (despite its obvious similarity to other call narratives in the Bible). I can think of six reasons (though I regard none of them as being especially reasonable) why the tendency to mis-read the Damascus narrative is so persistent.

A. Experientialist hermeneutic

The Scriptures are framed in a redemptive-historical framework. They record those events that have great consequences for the accomplishment of redemption. The Pietist/Evangelical traditions tend to read the scriptures within a personal-historical framework (we talk about “personal testimony,” and “personal relationship with Christ,” and even encourage people to ask what a passage of scripture “means to you,” etc.). We are very interested, that is, in the individual’s experience of redemption; whereas the Scriptures are a bit more interested in the divine accomplishment of redemption, and the spokesmen God appointed to proclaim that redemption publicly.

B. Exemplarist hermeneutic

We also tend to read some narrative books (perhaps especially Acts) as containing examples of commendable behavior. We expect Scripture to record such; when in fact, Scripture often narrates events that are unique, once-for-all or one-of-a-kind. How many bushes talk for instance? Just the one in Exodus 3 (and the “singing bush” from the movie The Three Amigos, but I think that one may be fictive). So Exodus 3 says nothing about what we should do, what bushes should do, etc.; it merely records the significant calling of Moses to be a spokesman for God. Numbers 22:28-30 records the conversation between Balaam and his donkey when the donkey saw the angel of the Lord and Balaam struck the donkey. This tells us nothing of donkeys, or of whether or what conversation we should have with them, or whether we should strike them; the event was probably unique. We cannot “apply” such narratives to ourselves any more than we can “apply” the narrative of Sherman’s burning of Atlanta (and one may hope that we do not regard Sherman’s scorched earth policy as exemplary).

C. Revivalist hermeneutic

Revivalism expects revival, and tends to regard sudden religious change as normative. It therefore looks for the record of such in Scripture, despite the fact that Scripture contains few, if any, such records of sudden conversion, and expressly teaches, in the OT, in the teaching of Jesus, and the teaching of his apostles, that ordinarily the ministry of the word is gradual, non-episodic, analogous to agricultural growth (Psa. 1126:6, Mat. 13:3-9, 1 Cor. 3:6-9).[4]

D. Personal hermeneutic

There is a hermeneutic, common in evangelical circles (at least at the popular level) that I regard as virtually guaranteed to lead to error: We are often told to ask of a biblical passage, “What does this passage mean to you personally?” If we convened a synod of devils to design a question virtually guaranteed to prevent people from understanding the Bible correctly, that august assembly would undoubtedly devise this question. One can easily imagine Screwtape instructing Wormwood to plant such a thought in people’s minds, to ask “what the Bible means to you.” The biblical documents are not personal letters; they are public documents, designed for the visible covenant people of God on earth as the visible people of God on earth. I might as well ask what a biblical passage means to my cat as ask what it means to me; it wasn’t designed for the cat and it wasn’t designed for me (individually considered). When I read Grant’s Memoirs five or six years ago (with due apologies to my fellow native Richmonders), I did not ask “What do Grant’s Memoirs mean to me?” He did not write them to me or for me; he wrote them for the public that he had served in wartime and afterward, because his life had public consequences for a public people. Biblical narrative is analogous to Grant’s Memoirs; biblical narratives recount events of public consequence, so that we may have a public/shared/common faith in the God who revealed Himself in the biblical narrative. To read them, attempting to find some peculiar or particular personal meaning misses their entire point, which is to inform a common public with a common record of events of common importance. When Paul was converted (and possibly even whether—was Balaam’s donkey converted? No; but God spoke through him) is of entirely no consequence to the Christian church; that his ministry fulfilled the third of God’s three pledges to father Abraham was and is entirely consequential.

E. Paul appears to have embraced a different religion

After the Synogogue-ban of A. D. 94, Christians were no longer permitted to be members of the Jewish synagogue. Prior to that, however, what we call “Christianity” had not emerged as a separate world religion from what we call “Judaism.” Paul probably did not think of himself as a Christian. He thought of himself as a Jew, as a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” who lived during the time when the final, third pledge to Abraham was fulfilled. When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, and there was no movement to rebuild it, obviously a new religion was born; a religion that did not need to make sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, what we now call “Judaism” is as different from Second Temple Judaism as is Christianity, as Rabbi Neusner has indicated. Christianity has every bit as good a claim to be the heir of Second Temple Judaism as does Judaism:

“Both Judaism and Christianity claim to be the heirs and products of the Hebrew Scriptures...Yet both great religious traditions derive not solely or directly from the authority and teachings of those Scriptures, but rather from the ways in which that authority has been mediated, and those teachings interpreted, through other holy books. The New Testament is the prism through which the light of the Old comes to Christianity. The canon of rabbinical writings is the star that guides Jews to the revelation of Sinai, the Torah....The claim of these two great Western traditions, in all their rich variety, is for the veracity not merely of the Scriptures, but also of Scriptures as interpreted by the New Testament or the Babylonian Talmud....while most people are familiar with the story of the development of Christianity, few are fully aware that Judaism constitutes a separate and distinctive religious tradition.…Both the apostles and the rabbis thus reshaped the antecedent religion of Israel, and both claimed to be Israel. That pre-Christian, prerabbinic religion of Israel, for all its variety, exhibited common traits: belief in one God, reverence for and obedience to the revelation contained in the Hebrew Scriptures, veneration of the Temple in Jerusalem (while it stood), and expectation of the coming of a Messiah to restore all the Jews to Palestine and bring to a close the anguish of history. The Christian Jews concentrated on the last point, proclaiming that the Messiah had come in Jesus; the rabbinic Jews focused on the second, teaching that only through the full realization of the imperatives of the Hebrew Scriptures, Torah, as interpreted and applied by the rabbis, would the people merit the coming Messiah…For the Christian, therefore, the issue of Messiah predominated; for the rabbinic Jew, the issue of Torah; and for both, the question of salvation was crucial.”[5]