Acts 26:15

Evidently the following verses contain a summary of what in the other two accounts of the Conversion is spoken to Paul by Ananias, and revealed by the Lord in a vision, cf. Acts 9:15; Acts 22:14 (so Alford, Felten, Zöckler). This is far more satisfactory than to suppose that the two narratives in 9 and 22 are really dependent upon 26, the author having employed in them an oral tradition relating to Ananias, without being at all aware that by introducing such an account he was really contradicting a point upon which Paul lays special stress, viz., the fact that he had received his apostleship neither from man nor through man, Galatians 1:1 (so Wendt (1899), p. 189, and McGiffert, pp. 120 and 355). But in the first place nothing is said as to the Apostle receiving his Apostleship from Ananias; he receives recovery of sight from him, but his call to his Apostleship commences with his call before Damascus: “epocha apostolatus Paulini cum hoc ipso conversionis articulo incipit,” Bengel; and see specially Beyschlag, Studien und Kritiken, p. 220, 1864, on Galatians 1:15 (Witness of the Epistles, p. 379, 1892); and, further, the introduction and omission of Ananias are in themselves strong corroborations of the naturalness of the three accounts of the Conversion. Thus in chap. 22, Acts 26:12, cf. Acts 9:10, “non conveniebat in hunc locum uberior de An. narratio, Acts 9:10 ff., sed conveniebat præconium ejus, quod non est illic” (Blass); so too it was natural and important to emphasise before a Jewish audience the description of Ananias (in Acts 9:10 he is simply τις μαθητής) as εὐλαβὴς κατὰ τὸν κόμον, well reported of by all the Jews, whereas in 26 “tota persona Ananiæ sublata est, quippe quæ non esset apta apud hos auditores” (Blass). The three narratives agree in the main facts (see notes in comment., and Zöckler, Apostelgeschichte, 2nd edit., p. 216), and “the slight variations in the three accounts do not seem to be of any consequence,” Ramsay, Saint Paul, p. 379, cf. also Renan, Apostles, p. 13, E.T., Salmon, Introd., p. 121. Clemen, who agrees in the main with Wendt in regarding 26 as the original narrative, refers chap. 9 to his Redactor Antijudaicus, and chap. 22 to his Redactor Judaicus; he sees evidences of the hand of the former in 9, 10, 15, 17, and of the latter in Acts 22:12; Acts 22:14. If Acts 22:17 f., and the words in Acts 26:15, πρὸς πάντας ἀνθρώπους, do not fit in with this theory, they are ascribed by Clemen to the later Redactor Antijudaicus; but the latter expression πρὸς π. ἀνθ. is already contained in the meaning of the original source, Acts 26:17; Acts 26:20 a and c (20 b belonging, according to Clemen, to the Redactor Judaicus). Space forbids any further examination of passages in the three narratives with regard to which the partition critics, Clemen and Jüngst, are again hopelessly at variance with each other, but cf. Jüngst, Apostelgeschichte, pp. 84, 87, 89, 94, and the strictures of Knabenbauer, Actus Apostolorum, p. 11 (1899). But it is strange to find that Clemen should be prepared to fall back upon the view of Baur, Paulus, Acts 2:13, that the narrative of Paul's blindness was derived from the spiritual blindness referred to in Acts 26:17, and that therefore this narrative is evidently older than the other accounts in 9 and 22, which introduce a tragical blindness. As Wendt points out, there is no hint in the text that Paul's blindness was symbolical, and there is nothing to suggest the circumstantial narratives relating to Ananias in the phrase Acts 26:17, which relates not to the Apostle's own conversion, but to his power of converting others.