Transcript
A (0:02)
Hello and welcome to Form. Now, my name is Ben Akers and I'm the executive director of Formed. And joining me today is Dr. Jim Prothero, who is a professor at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. And today we're going to be talking about The Conversion of St. Paul, this feast day that we celebrate on January 25th in the liturgical calendar. And we celebrate this feast day of a persecutor of the Church who moves to an apostle of the church. And we're going to be talking about this is the only conversion that's actually celebrated on the calendar. We're here at the Augustine Institute. And St. Augustine is a great hero of ours and he has a big conversion in his own life when he hears this voice, take and read, take and read, and the word of God reaches out in a sense and grabs him and converts him to the faith where he knows that he should become a baptized Christian. But we don't celebrate his feast day on the liturgical calendar, but we do celebrate the conversion of. So today we're going to be talking about St. Paul and his conversion. Jim, what do we know about. Sometimes I hear Paul, sometimes I hear Saul. What do we know about Saul, Paul in the New Testament?
B (1:04)
Oh, sure. So as you said, he's sort of a man with two names, right. As we encounter him in Scripture, is.
A (1:14)
That like a first and last name, like Jim Prothero?
B (1:16)
No, not quite. So it's. It would be common for especially people who wanted their children, who were Jews and were faithful and gave their children Hebrew names, but also wanted them to be able to sort of like live in Greek society without a lot of weird stuff. His name Saul, as we say it, would have been Shaul, which is not really a set of sounds that you have in Greek or in Latin.
A (1:47)
So it said the Hebrew name.
B (1:49)
Yeah. So Shaul Saul would be his Hebrew name. Right. Named after the first king of Israel and also from Paul's same tribe, tribe of Benjamin. He would be named after him, but he would also have another name that sounds like it in this case, Paul, Paulus Saul, that he would sort of go by in Roman and Greek society. And from what we can tell of Paul, he's not raised in Jerusalem. He's raised in. Or he's not born in Jerusalem, he's from Tarsus, which is in Asia Minor, where they spoke Greek as a first language.
A (2:29)
Is that modern day Turkey?
B (2:30)
Modern day Turkey, that's right, yeah. And he seems to have been from a family that was able to educate him well, to send him off for study in Jerusalem, probably to study the writings of God's word, to study the scriptures. But also he seems to have gotten a good education otherwise than being able to write and speak in Greek very well. He says that his parents were citizens of the Roman Empire, which is today. You know, you just get citizenship when you're born, if you're in a country. And it's not a sort of weird circumstance, but it was a great privilege to have citizenship in the Roman Empire. And to have this sort of gave you certain political privileges, certain abilities to appeal your case to the highest authority, even to the emperor, which is something that Paul does late in the Book of Acts. He's been in prison for years, moving from one prison to another. And finally he says, take me to Rome, I'm a citizen. Just get me out of here.