The Conversion of Paul the Apostle is a turning point understood not only as a change in religious allegiance but as an encounter that made Christ the inward principle of Paul’s life. The book compares accounts of the event, attends to what their different forms can—and cannot—say about it, and shows how later interpreters made Paul a central example of Christian mystical experience.

Accounts of the Conversion

Luke gives three versions of Paul’s conversion in Acts: 9:1–18, 22:6–21, and 26:12–23. Across these accounts, light surprises Paul and a voice addresses him; in the third version, the voice speaks Hebrew. The recurrence of light and voice gives the accounts shared features, while their presentation of the experience is not identical.

Paul’s own account in Galatians 1:13–17 is markedly more concise. He says that God was pleased to reveal the Son to him, and states that he was converted without building the event into a scene of mythical imagery. The contrast matters: the conversion can be narrated through vivid external signs, as in Luke, or recorded as a direct statement about divine revelation, as in Paul. Neither form makes the experience fully available to description.

From Encounter to Christ-Mysticism

Albert Schweitzer’s interpretation places the event at the center of Paul’s understanding of Christian life. He argued that Paul’s mysticism was not a mysticism of becoming one with God, but a Christ-mysticism: through encounter with Christ, a person enters into relationship with God. Schweitzer pointed to Paul’s declaration, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” as an expression of that changed center of life.

Schweitzer described Paul’s lasting achievement as grasping union with Christ as essential to being Christian. In this reading, conversion is not only an episode in Paul’s biography. It is the beginning of a way of understanding religious life in which Christ is not merely the object of belief but the presence through whom the believer’s relation to God is transformed.

The Conversion and Paul’s Later Experience

The book distinguishes Paul’s conversion from his account in 2 Corinthians 12 of a person caught up to the third heaven and into Paradise. Paul was uncertain whether this happened in or out of the body, and said that the person heard things no mortal was permitted to repeat. The third heaven and Paradise function as images for an experience that could not be conveyed directly; they do not constitute another account of the conversion itself.

This distinction clarifies the range of Paul’s mystical testimony. The conversion accounts communicate a decisive encounter through light, voice, or the plain assertion of revelation. The later heavenly account instead emphasizes the limits of speech: Paul turns to symbolic language because ordinary description cannot contain what was experienced. Together, the episodes show why Paul became a rich source for Christian mysticism without making every mystical experience identical to his conversion.

Paul as an Example of Immediate Religious Experience

Rufus Jones treated Paul as an example of the primitive spirit of Christianity, grounding his gospel in an immediate encounter with the Divine on the road to Damascus. For Jones, this encounter did not remain an external episode; it became an inward principle of Paul’s self. He read Paul’s words about Christ living in the believer alongside the claim that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells within people.

Jones’s interpretation also places a limit on what the conversion can establish from the outside. The abiding reality of God, he argued, cannot be secured by dogmatic assertion alone; it becomes real through personal experience. Paul’s conversion thus serves both as a remembered event and as a model of the experiential claim at the heart of Jones’s account of early Christianity.