A Fresh Look at The Conversion of St. Paul
An old book takes on an attractive appearance.
Before I read The Conversion of St. Paul by Baron Lyttelton, I did not grasp the full significance of the apostle’s amazing turnaround from persecutor to apostle. Paul and his writings had long held my admiration and I unhesitatingly accepted his account of a spiritual encounter with Christ; it has the ring of truth. Lyttelton, however, shows that the authenticity of Christianity can rest its case on this one event and the subsequent career of Paul. (See our August 22 story, “What One Event Did Lyttleton Say Proved Christianity?”) He convincingly demonstrates that Paul was neither an imposter nor a fanatic.
In a masterful introduction to an 1869 reprint, Henry Rogers observed that any attempt to falsify Paul’s conversion ensnares the critic in a tangle of paradoxes and improbabilities. If Paul's story is not authentic, so cleverly are the falsehoods disguised with details of verisimilitude that we can never trust another history, however persuasive its trappings.
This blog is an earnest appeal to CHI readers to take a look at Lyttelton's old but truly worthy argument for Christianity. It will repay anyone who takes the time to read it. The book is well under a hundred pages.
I could simply have directed the reader to one of several online versions. However, the first version I encountered was printed in an old style not readily accessible to most readers. The next was badly discolored and stained. Although I am grateful to Internet Archive and Google Books for making these texts public, I decided to make reading Lyttelton a pleasurable experience by producing a more attractive epub version. (Get it here.)
The text is conformed to American spelling and I replaced a few archaic words with modern equivalents. One or two of Lyttelton’s citations needed expansion to make his references easier to locate and this small service I performed. Apart from that, I added a few notes, either appended to the author’s existing notes, or as standalone comments that I hope may be helpful to casual readers. Lyttelton’s endnotes are followed by his name; mine are followed by the initials “D.G.”
The most significant change I made was to replace Scripture quotations with text from the World English Bible. I chose this translation because it is based on the accurate New American Standard Version and is in the public domain. Changing the Bible version sometimes required small adjustments to Lyttelton’s text so quotes would segue smoothly into the flow of his argument.
—Dan Graves, November 2024