Acts 26:7-24

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 travelling 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 travelling 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,

¹⁷since I am choosing you out from your own people and from the Gentiles, to whom I now send you,

¹⁸to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God; so that they may receive pardon for their sins, and a place amongst those who have become God's people, by faith in me.’

¹⁹After that, King Agrippa, I did not fail to obey the heavenly vision;

²⁰on the contrary, first to those at Damascus and Jerusalem, and then through the whole of Judea, and to the Gentiles as well, I began to preach repentance and conversion to God, and a life befitting that repentance.

²¹This is why some men seized me in the Temple, and made attempts on my life.

²²However I have received help from God to this very day, and so stand here, and bear my testimony to high and low alike — without adding a word to what the prophets, as well as Moses, declared should happen —

²³That the Christ must suffer, and that, by rising from the dead, he was destined to be the first to bring news of light, not only to our nation, but also to the Gentiles.”

²⁴While Paul was making this defence, Festus called out loudly, “You are mad, Paul; your great learning is driving you mad.”