Jesus, the disciples ‘shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth’ ” (Acts 1:8).26 Such a program, however, depends on there being particular people who respond to the call to witness, each in his or her peculiar manner. Nearer the end of his narrative Luke dwells especially on St. Paul.
Intriguingly, Paul often witnesses by telling his own story. This is not only because it is interesting but also because it describes Paul’s own call to be a witness. The story is well known, one of the most reported in the New Testament. We hear it first within the sequence of Luke’s narrative in chapter 9 of Acts, and then it is retold twice in considerable detail by Paul himself (as Luke has it) in chapters 22 and 26. Finally, Paul alludes to the episode in his letters more than once, that is, in Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 9 and 15. So many references invite comparative study. Yet our interest here is focused on the two accounts Luke accredits to Paul when he retells the story of how he became a witness. These are especially interesting since they are also cases of witnessing, that is, Paul is witnessing about becoming a witness.
In the first case, in chapter 22 of Acts, Paul has just been arrested in Jerusalem amid a cloud of confusion. As they are about to take him into the barracks and away from the angry crowd, the arresting Roman soldiers are surprised to discover that Paul speaks Greek; they had been operating under the mistaken assumption that he was a notorious Egyptian revolutionary.27 The surprise seems to help Paul, since the soldiers grant him his request to “speak to the people” (22:39) — namely, the Jews. He tells the interesting tale of his life, focusing on the road to Damascus experience. Here he accents the part of the story where, after the encounter, he is put under Ananias’s wing in Damascus. It is Ananias who tells him: “The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will and to see the Righteous One and to hear words from his mouth. You will be his witness to all men of what you have seen and heard. Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name” (22:14-16, emphasis added).28
Ananias’s role is important in this telling not only because it is from him that Paul gets his charge to be a witness, but also because he (Ananias) can perform something of a witnessing role for Paul’s listeners. Paul’s encounter on the road is not his to interpret; he needs others to place the strange event in a fruitful context of meaning. Indeed, Ananias speaks for the church, and so for the God who is calling it forth throughout the progression of Luke’s narrative in Acts. Moreover, it is not by accident that Luke’s Paul includes about Ananias that he is a “devout man according to the law and well spoken of by all the Jews living [in Damascus]” (22:12). In this role Paul clearly hopes his Jewish audience will hear Ananias as a kind of second source, a corroborating witness.
Perhaps this is the reason it is not surprising that Ananias is omitted in the subsequent retelling in chapter 26. Here Paul is speaking before the Roman Agrippa, who no doubt will be entirely unimpressed by the devout follower of the law in Damascus. This change in the story might seem disingenuous, as if Paul is playing to his audience. But of course he is — for he wants them to listen. He is, after all, witnessing.
Paul witnesses so as to win people over, which is not to say that he speaks falsehood to do so; that would be absurd, since he believes he is preaching the truth about all that is, which clearly cannot be held together with a lie. Yet the story can be both truthfully and differently told, which Luke’s Paul is happy to do if the different telling will bring different people differently into the truth.
Witness in this regard is not merely passing over plain, unadorned truth. As mentioned earlier, it is affecting truth; if it is “believed” yet bears no active fruit in response, it has failed as witness. As Jesus says, you need ears to hear it — which implies that some listen but do not hear. If the gospel is to be “heard” it must penetrate into one’s life. And this cannot happen if it remains foreign. As he witnesses, Paul means to bring his witness close. For some, the story of Ananias will help; for others it will not.
While Ananias disappears in the second story, the crucial point he speaks in the first story about Paul’s call to be a witness remains. As Paul relates,
“About noon, O king, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ Then I asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’ ” (26:13-18 NIV, emphasis added)
These passages not only demonstrate how witness is crucial to the program of Acts but also focus our attention on the particular stories where witness is displayed. Especially in these cases, one telling builds on another. Luke here tells us what Paul told Agrippa or the crowd in Jerusalem about what Jesus or Ananias told him — and this is all about witnessing, which itself involves telling. Witness, then, is displayed as it is introduced; indeed, this is inevitable, for witness to the Christ always requires that the one who witnesses is him- or herself drawn up into the message.
One might fear that the layering, witness upon witness, would produce monotony. Yet, to the contrary, the stories are lively and bring strong reaction. This is partly because, as just noted, it is the prerogative, perhaps even the duty, of the teller to retell the story in such a way as to intrigue. But, more to the point, the nature of Christian witness brings the teller into the story and invites the listener to investigate her. Her life is opened by her speech as witness. In academic argument we typically protest when this occurs: the argument should stand on its own legs. Not so with witness; if the witness fails to instantiate that to which she witnesses, her listeners rightfully reject what she says. Put another way, with respect to Christian witness, ad hominem is entirely fair game. Since this is so, as opposed to “pure” argument, witness is dull only if the one witnessing is dull. And, indeed, if the Christian witness is a dull person, something is wrong — since there is no greater adventure than the Christian life.
This is not a throwaway point. Christian witness is about nothing more or less than how we were made to live, or, expressed more classically, what is our true end. With the story St. Paul tells we are presented with his encounter or “experience” with Christ, yes, but this means little if it does not take his life somewhere, indeed, in the direction it was meant to go. This is why both accounts of the Damascus road encounter take as their focus the new calling or “appointment” Paul receives in it. The calling is the message, but the message requires, as we have seen, both word and deed. This, in fact, is an essential component of the point, made earlier with respect to Kerr’s work, that theology requires, indeed, is a form of practical reason. In this way, the life of Christian witness is linked inextricably to crucial questions of morality properly understood, namely, what is the good life for human persons.29 The life of Christian witness is, as St. Paul has come to know both by hearing and also by doing, the truest and best way to live. To be sure, it can be lived differently, as Acts shows us by showing us so many different witnesses. But each is a full, profoundly interesting life, the life the particular witness was meant for, and which the witness now lives out as a gift received from Christ to whom he or she bears witness.
Evidently dullness was not a problem for Paul, although in another sense “interesting” came to be. For interesting living is also imaginative living, and this is not always well received. So it is that both accounts of Paul’s witnessing about being appointed as a witness carry forward to a reaction. In the first we get the following report from Luke: “The crowd listened to Paul until he said this [that he was sent by God to the Gentiles]. Then they raised their voices and shouted ‘Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live’ ” (Acts 22:22). In the second, Luke tells us that Festus, who is
