Acts 26:3-16

³especially as you are so well-versed in all the customs and questions of the Jewish world. I beg you therefore to give me a patient hearing.

⁴My life, then, from youth upwards, was passed, from the very first, among my own nation, and in Jerusalem, and is within the knowledge of all Jews;

⁵and they have always known — if they choose to give evidence — that, in accordance with the very strictest form of our religion, I lived a true Pharisee.

⁶Even now, it is because of my hope in the promise given by God to our ancestors that I stand here on my trial —

⁷A promise which our twelve tribes, by earnest service night and day, hope to see fulfilled. It is for this hope, your Majesty, that I am accused — and by Jews themselves!

⁸Why do you all hold it incredible that God should raise the dead?

⁹I myself, it is true, once thought it my duty to oppose in every way the name of Jesus of Nazareth;

¹⁰and I actually did so at Jerusalem. Acting on the authority of the chief priests, I myself threw many of the people of Christ into prison, and, when it was proposed to put them to death, I gave my vote for it.

¹¹Time after time, in every synagogue, I tried by punishments to force them to blaspheme. So frantic was I against them, that I pursued them even to towns beyond our borders.

¹²It was while I was traveling to Damascus on an errand of this kind, entrusted with full powers by the chief priests,

¹³that at midday, your Majesty, I saw right in my path, coming from the heavens, a light brighter than the glare of the sun, which shone all around me and those traveling with me.

¹⁴We all fell to the ground, and then I heard a voice saying to me in Hebrew — ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? By kicking against the goad you are punishing yourself.’

¹⁵‘Who are you, Lord?’ I asked. And the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting;

¹⁶but get up and stand upright; for I have appeared to you in order to appoint you a servant and a witness of those revelations of me which you have already had, and of those in which I will yet appear to you,