Australian Catholic University
Somewhere between Jerusalem and Athens: The (Narrative) Conversion of Paul in Acts Reconsidered
Were it not for the Book of Acts, we would be able to reconstruct very little about Paul from his own writings. The author of 2 Peter only too readily admits that Paul’s letters contain much in them that is “hard to understand” (2 Pet 3:16). Calvin Roetzel (1999) has even gone so far as to claim that it was the author of Acts who rescued Paul from falling into obscurity by devoting over half of his book to this apostle. Having argued elsewhere that Paul was a reputation entrepreneur for Jesus (Nathan and Vollmer, 2015), I wish to use Gary Fine’s reputation theory (Fine, 2001) to argue that the author of Acts was a reputation entrepreneur for Paul. I shall pay particular attention to Paul’s ‘difficult reputation’ as a former persecutor of the church and trace the way in which the author of Acts narratively fleshes out the metamorphosis that Paul himself summarily described others as saying of him: “the one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy” (Gal 1:23). By doing so, I shall demonstrate that Gary Fine’s work on difficult reputations is helpful in further outlining the ways in which history, narrative and memory interact and intersect.