Read for yourself the account in Acts 9. Saul clearly went through a profound conversion. But consider for a moment the various elements of his encounter with the Lord. Do you think that any one of the elements was the primary cause of Saul’s conversion, producing the new man, Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles?

Over a number of years, I have noted a very interesting phenomenon – and you might like to try this for yourselves. After reading Acts 9, try to recall the significant elements of Paul’s conversion experience. Then ask yourself if any one of these was the primary cause of the change in Paul’s life. The observation I have noticed, almost without exception, is that there is always one element that people fail to mention or even notice! Try it for yourself. Simply list the things that you think are the key elements of this event – i.e. Saul is blinded by a bright light, etc.

When you have finished, see whether you noted what I think is often the missing element. The element that is frequently missed is the fact that Saul was baptized. Did you list it? It is clear from Paul’s letters that he understood his own conversion and his baptism as a sort of death.
He died as Saul, the persecutor of the Church, and rose again as Paul the Apostle. An old life was put to death, and a new life began. Another important understanding that came from the Damascus road, was Paul’s conviction about the identification between Christ and his followers, the Church. This understanding came from the Damascus road because the voice that Saul heard said: ‘Why are you persecuting me?’ He had to ask: ‘Who are you?’ The reply was: ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.’ In other words, Jesus was revealing an identity between himself and his followers.

Paul must have asked the question: ‘What precisely brings about this identity?’ Read Romans 6:1-11. The answer to Paul’s question was baptism. ‘Did you not know that when you were baptised, you died with Christ, you were buried with him in the tomb …?’ We might wish to reflect on what Paul says here: ‘Did you not know …?’

In baptism we were identified with Christ, and indeed identified with his death and his resurrection. Paul goes on to say of Christ that ‘the death he died he died to sin, once  for all, but the life he lives he lives to God’ (Rom. 6:10).
In other words, Paul saw Christ’s death in a completely new way – no longer as the rather unsavoury capital punishment of a criminal or heretic, but as an act which broke through the barrier of sin and passed through into the presence of God. Paul changed from seeing Jesus’ death in terms of the just carrying out of the Law, to achieving something that even obedience to the Law had never achieved, namely, permitting entrance into the holy presence of God. Luke also understood Jesus’ death in the same way. In his account of Jesus’ death, Luke records that the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom and that Jesus, as it were, passed through, commending his spirit into the Father’s hands.

It is not easy for us to appreciate the radical nature of this insight. To interpret the event of the crucifixion in terms of the highest elements of the Jewish faith – the temple and the Holy of Holies, wherein dwelt the presence of God, was utterly scandalous; the Holy of Holies could not even be approached, save once a year, and that only by the High Priest. Even he had to take sacrificed blood. The veil of the temple represented the separation between God and humankind created by sin. In spite of the enormous privilege Israel felt at having the presence of God in their midst, he was still inaccessible.

Paul’s conversion meant that he saw Christ’s death as the act in history that broke down the barrier of separation and opened the way to God. In Romans 3:24-26, Paul describes Christ as ‘the propitiatory’ or ‘the propitiation’, or the ‘mercy seat’. These are strange words in English, but they refer to the seat above the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary of the temple. It was above this ‘seat’ that the glory of God was present, and it was upon this seat that, once a year, the High Priest sprinkled sacrificed blood to symbolize the hoped-for union between God and his people.

In describing Jesus as the propitiation or ‘mercy seat’, Paul was claiming not only that the true and real way of reaching the presence of God was through and with the death of Jesus, he was also claiming that the temple and the sacrifices that took place within it, especially the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement, was only a shadow, not a reality. All that Paul, as a Jew, had held most holy – the very centre of his religious life – now paled into mere shadow, in the face of a new reality. Jesus himself was the reality, of which the Old Testament religion was but the figure or symbol. What had seemed reality before, was no longer reality compared with the realism of the sacrificial death of Jesus! This conversion of Paul not only affected the man himself deeply, it has also had the profoundest effect on the Church ever since.

The effect on Paul was a complete revolution in the way that he understood the Scriptures – that is, the Old Testament. Not only did the death of Jesus bring about the removal of the great barrier between God and humanity – the veil of the temple – it also removed what Paul calls ‘the veil that is over the minds of those who read the Scriptures’ (see 2 Cor. 3). For Paul, the whole Old Testament is transformed by the event of Christ. We actually see the process of understanding this taking place in Paul. Now, for Paul, the only value that the Old Testament has, and in fact, this is now its true glory, is that it is a shadow, a prefigurement, of the reality that was to come in Jesus. From now on, this is also the true value that all Christians place on the Old Testament.


Yes, the Old Testament does have a value in itself, as the record of God’s progressive revelation of himself throughout the history of Israel. However, this value is caught up, as it were, and reaches its fulfilment in Jesus. In Jesus, the truer, deeper, but hidden value and meaning of the Old Testament becomes clear. By comparison, to read the Old Testament without seeing the reference to Christ is to see only ‘a dead letter’.

This is not at all to suggest any sort of condemnation of the Jewish faith. The Church recognizes the immense value of the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament) in the Jewish religion. At the same time, it is also true that for Christians the Jewish Scriptures have been changed. Although they now still have all the value that the Jewish people afford them, in Jesus Christ they are transformed into one great prefigurement of himself. It is precisely for this reason that Christians continue to read them and use them especially in the liturgy.

We are not like Paul, who was a Jew deeply immersed in his Jewish faith. We are more like the Gentiles, who came into Jerusalem (into Christ) through a different gate from that through which Jewish believers entered. For Paul, the Scriptures that he loved were transformed by Christ. Gentiles had no love for the Scriptures until, in coming to Christ, they learned to recognize Christ in them. Even though we have a different starting point from Paul, we can expect the same unveiling of the Scriptures about which he speaks.

Our reactions to the different difficult aspects of the Old Testament can be the beginning, the first moment, of a work of grace in our minds and hearts – a moment when God opens our minds to the presence of Christ and his mysteries, hidden in the Old.

This article was written by Monsignor Paul J. Watson, Director of the Maryvale Institute. Birmingham.