How did Paul become blind?

Answer 1

A:Christians believe that Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus and that as a result of that experience, he was blinded and taken to Damascus, where he converted to Christianity and became an evangelist.

Acts of the Apostles, written decades after Paul's death, provides three parallel but different miraculous stories in which Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus. In each account there was a blinding light, which appeared only to Paul in the version at Acts 9:3-8 and probably at Acts 26.13-19, but appeared to both Paul and his men at Acts 22:6-11 (although only Paul was blinded). Paul alone heard a voice from heaven at Acts 22:6-11 and probably at Acts 26.13-19, but both Paul and his men heard the voice at Acts 9:3-8. Each of these stories says that the voice from heaven said it was Jesus, and from this one could believe that Paul did accept that it was really Jesus.

The three accounts of this event actually appear to have been based on the ancient play of Euripedes called the Bacchae. This alone would be enough to cast serious doubts on the explanation in Acts.

Paul himself provides very little information about how he came to believe that he was called to be the apostle to the gentiles. He never mentions any divine vision that led to his conversion nor of his being temporarily blinded; in fact his epistles seem to have ruled this out. In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul said that after his conversion, he travelled to Arabia, and only then went to Damascus (bypassing Jerusalem), then Jerusalem, Syria and Cilicia, and, after a period of fourteen years, back to Jerusalem (Galatians 1:17-2:1). On this evidence, we could reasonably say that Jesus did not meet Paul on the road to Damascus, at least not at the time of his conversion, and Paul was certainly not required to go immediately to the nearest city (Damascus) because of blindness.