- Era
- First century
- Region
- Judea, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome
- Category
- Apostle and martyr
- Feast
- June 29 with the Apostle Peter
Jump to Zeal Without Sight Receiving Sight Through Another The Apostle to the Nations Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us
Zeal Without Sight
Paul first appears in Acts under his Hebrew name, Saul. A devout Jew trained in the Pharisaic tradition, he regarded the young Church as a dangerous corruption. When Stephen was stoned, witnesses laid their garments at Saul’s feet. He then entered Christian homes, dragged away believers, and sought authority to arrest disciples in Damascus.
Saul was not indifferent to God. He was fiercely zealous—and catastrophically wrong. His life warns that religious intensity does not by itself guarantee faithfulness. Zeal can become a weapon when it is severed from truth, humility, and love.
On the Damascus road, a light from heaven surrounded him and a voice asked, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” When Saul asked who was speaking, the answer came: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Christ identified Himself with the people Saul was harming.
Receiving Sight Through Another
Saul entered Damascus blind. The Lord then sent a disciple named Ananias—the sort of man Saul had intended to arrest—to lay hands on him. Saul recovered his sight, was baptized, and began proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God.
His conversion was intensely personal, but never private or self-authorized. Christ met him directly and then placed him into the hands of the Church. He received healing and Baptism from a disciple, later consulted the apostles, and carried out his mission within the Body of Christ.
The change did not erase his past. Paul remembered that he had persecuted the Church and called himself the least of the apostles. Yet memory became humility rather than despair: “By the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain.”
The Apostle to the Nations
Paul travelled through the eastern Roman Empire establishing and strengthening Christian communities. He preached in synagogues, marketplaces, homes, prisons, and public halls. He worked with his hands, endured beatings, shipwreck, hunger, rejection, and repeated imprisonment, and carried pastoral concern for communities that were often confused and divided.
His epistles now occupy a central place in the New Testament. They proclaim that salvation is the gift of God in Jesus Christ; that Jew and Gentile are brought into one Body; that faith must become a life of love; and that the Church is not a collection of isolated believers but the Body of Christ.
Paul eventually appealed his case to Caesar and was taken to Rome. Early Christian tradition holds that he was beheaded there during Nero’s persecution, probably in the 60s. As a Roman citizen, he would not ordinarily have been subjected to crucifixion.
Why the Church Remembers Him
Paul is sometimes treated as though he invented a version of Christianity separate from Christ. The Church hears him differently: as an apostle whose Gospel was received from the risen Lord, tested in suffering, and lived in communion with the other apostles.
His life reveals both the severity and tenderness of grace. Christ does not confirm Saul in his sincerity. He stops him, exposes him, forgives him, and changes the direction of his life.
What His Life Asks of Us
We are capable of being confidently wrong, even about God. Paul teaches us to let Christ interrupt us. He also destroys the excuse that our past makes obedience impossible. Repentance does not make the past good; it permits grace to prevent the past from possessing the future.
Holy Apostle Paul, pray to Christ our God that our zeal may be purified, our minds renewed, and our lives offered in service to His Gospel.
A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.
- Acts 7:54–9:31 and 13–28; 1 Corinthians 9 and 15:1–11; Galatians 1–2; Philippians 3; 2 Corinthians 11–12; 2 Timothy 4
- St. Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History
- The Holy Apostle Paul — Orthodox Church in America
The same Gospel, a week at a time
The saints spent their lives inside these passages. Words for the Narrow Way takes one saying of Christ and gives it seven days — the passage in full, what the Greek is doing, how the Fathers read it, and one practice to carry through the week.