Before the world knew him as the Apostle Paul, he went by another name — Saul of Tarsus — and he was far from a saint. He was a man who stood by, unmoved, while a mob stoned a follower of Jesus to death. A man who hunted down the early acolytes of Jesus’ teaching, dragging them into the streets, certain the whole time that he was doing exactly what God required of him.
And then, on the now-famous road to Damascus, he was changed.
Megan Phelps-Roper knows something about being certain you’re righteous while doing real harm to people — and about what it means to become, unrecognizably, someone else. Here, she tells the story of history’s most famous conversion, and the question underneath it that she still can’t quite shake: if the man hunting down Christians for execution could become the person who carried their message across the known world, who else’s ending have we already decided?
