Acts 22:13-26

¹³Standing close to me, he said ‘Saul, my brother, recover your sight.’ And then and there I recovered my sight and looked up at him.

¹⁴Then he said ‘The God of our ancestors has appointed you to learn his will, and to see the righteous one, and to hear words from his lips;

¹⁵for you will be a witness for him to all the world of what you have just seen and heard.

¹⁶And now why wait any longer, Be baptised at once, wash away your sins, and invoke his name.’

¹⁷After my return to Jerusalem, while I was praying one day in the Temple, I fell into a trance,

¹⁸and saw Jesus saying to me ‘Make haste and leave Jerusalem at once, because they will not accept your testimony about me.’

¹⁹‘Lord,’ I answered, ‘these people know that I used to imprison and scourge, in synagogue after synagogue, those who believed in you;

²⁰and, when the blood of your martyr, Stephen, was being shed, I was myself standing by, approving of his death, and took charge of the clothes of those who were murdering him.’

²¹But Jesus said to me ‘Go; for I will send you to the Gentiles far away’.”

²²Up to this point the people had been listening to Paul, but at these words they called out, “Kill him! A fellow like this ought not to have been allowed to live!”

²³As they were shouting, tearing off their clothes, and throwing dust in the air,

²⁴the commanding officer ordered Paul to be taken into the Fort, and directed that he should be examined under the lash so that he might find out the reason for their outcry against him.

²⁵But just as they had tied him up to be scourged, Paul said to the captain standing near, “Is it legal for you to scourge a Roman citizen, unconvicted?”

²⁶On hearing this, the captain went and reported it to the commanding officer. “Do you know what you are doing?” he said. “This man is a Roman citizen.”