The Acts of the Apostles: The Story of Paul

The Acts of the Apostles is the only ancient book that tells the story of Paul as a connected life. His own letters are the deeper and earlier evidence for who he was and what he taught, but they are occasional writings — arguments and pastoral notes, not biography. It is Acts that supplies the narrative thread: a young man holding cloaks at a stoning, a light on the Damascus road, a decade of near-silence, a return to public life through the city of Antioch, three long circuits through the Roman provinces, an arrest, a chain of trials, and a sea voyage that carries a prisoner to Rome. This article follows that thread. As in our companion reference on the Apostle Paul, every substantial claim is labelled by its evidentiary weight — (Scripture) for what the text states, (Tradition) for what later Christian tradition holds, (Scholarship) for the reconstructions of modern historians — and dates are given as ranges, because the chronology is a reconstruction anchored on only a handful of fixed points. Scripture here is quoted from the public-domain Douay-Rheims translation, with chapter and verse given for every quotation. For what kind of document Acts is, who may have written it, and when, see the source entry on the Acts of the Apostles.

The shape of the book

Acts is the second volume of a two-part work, a Gospel and its sequel, both addressed to a certain "Theophilus" (Acts 1:1). (Scripture) Its programme is announced in its opening scene, where the risen Jesus tells the apostles: "you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth" (Acts 1:8). (Scripture) The book then unfolds along exactly that geography. Its first twelve chapters centre on the Jerusalem community and on Peter; from chapter 13 onward the focus turns decisively to Paul and to the movement of the message outward, through Asia Minor, across the Aegean into Greece, and finally to Rome itself — "the uttermost part of the earth" from a Jerusalem vantage point. Roughly the second half of the book is, in effect, the story of Paul, and much of what most readers know about his life is found here and nowhere else in the New Testament. (Scholarship)

Saul the persecutor

Paul enters the narrative not as a believer but as an enemy of the believers. He appears first at the margin of another man's death — the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr: "the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man, whose name was Saul" (Acts 7:58), and "Saul was consenting to his death" (Acts 8:1). (Scripture) What follows is a portrait of zeal turned to violence: "Saul made havoc of the church, entering in from house to house, and dragging away men and women, committed them to prison" (Acts 8:3). (Scripture) He is last seen, before his transformation, setting out for Damascus with letters of authority to arrest more (Acts 9:1–2).

This is one of the best-attested facts of Paul's life, because he says the same of himself, without softening it, in his own letters: "beyond measure, I persecuted the church of God and wasted it" (Galatians 1:13). (Scripture) Where the narrative of Acts and Paul's undisputed testimony converge like this, the historian's confidence is highest. (Scholarship) The city of Tarsus in Cilicia, named later in the book as Paul's birthplace, is where this Saul had come from; on the world of that "no mean city" see where Tarsus is.

The road to Damascus

The turning point, dated by scholars to roughly AD 33–36, is narrated three times in Acts — once by the author (Acts 9:1–19) and twice on Paul's own lips in later defence speeches (Acts 22:6–21; 26:12–18). (Scripture) The core is constant across all three: a light from heaven, a fall to the ground, and a voice — "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" (Acts 9:4) — followed by a blindness that is healed at Damascus through a disciple named Ananias. (Scripture) The three tellings differ in incidental detail, such as whether Saul's companions heard the voice or saw the light, a difference scholars regularly note; the event itself is uniform. (Scholarship)

Acts frames the moment as a commissioning as much as a rescue. To the hesitant Ananias the Lord says of Saul: "this man is to me a vessel of election, to carry my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel" (Acts 9:15). (Scripture) That sentence is a table of contents for the rest of the book: the Gentiles, the kings before whom Paul will stand trial, and his own people. Paul himself, in his letters, describes the same experience not as a "conversion" in the modern psychological sense but as a divine call to "preach him among the Gentiles" (Galatians 1:16). (Scripture)

From Tarsus to Antioch

Acts and Paul's letters agree that the years immediately after Damascus were not spent in the public eye. Acts reports that when a plot against Saul's life formed, the believers "brought him down to Caesarea, and sent him away to Tarsus" (Acts 9:30). (Scripture) There the narrative loses sight of him for roughly a decade — the so-called "silent" or "hidden" years, about AD 36–45 — a genuine blank in the record rather than a hidden story. (Scholarship)

He is brought back into the narrative by one man. Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus who had earlier vouched for the newly converted Saul before the wary Jerusalem believers (Acts 9:27), "went to Tarsus to seek Saul" and brought him to Antioch on the Orontes (Acts 11:25–26). (Scripture) There, Acts records, "for a whole year they conversed... in the church: and they taught a great multitude, so that at Antioch the disciples were first named Christians" (Acts 11:26). (Scripture) Antioch becomes the operational base of the whole Gentile mission — the city the journeys launch from and return to. This retrieval by Barnabas is the hinge that turns Paul from a figure of the silent years into the missionary of the rest of the book.

The first journey: Saul becomes Paul

Acts organises the central years of Paul's career, roughly AD 46–57, as a sequence of journeys out from Antioch. On the first (c. AD 46–48), Paul and Barnabas travel first to Cyprus and then into the highlands of southern Asia Minor — Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe (Acts 13–14). (Scripture) It is on Cyprus, at the court of the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, that the narrative quietly changes the hero's name: from this point Luke writes "Then Saul, otherwise Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost" (Acts 13:9), and "Paul" it remains. (Scripture) The shift coincides with Paul stepping into the leading role beside Barnabas.

The journey also establishes the pattern Acts will repeat: Paul preaches first in the synagogue, wins some hearers and provokes others, and turns increasingly toward the Gentiles. At Lystra he is stoned and left for dead (Acts 14:19); the same city later gives him his closest companion, Timothy.

The Council at Jerusalem

The success of the Gentile mission forces a question the young movement could not avoid: must Gentile converts be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses? Acts 15 narrates a meeting at Jerusalem — commonly dated c. AD 48–50 — that answers no. (Scripture) The decision is widely regarded by historians as the hinge on which the movement turned from a current within Judaism into a universal, largely Gentile faith. (Scholarship)

Here the careful reader meets the central method-question of reading Acts. Paul gives his own first-person account of a Jerusalem meeting in Galatians 2:1–10, and many scholars identify it with the council of Acts 15 — but the identification is genuinely debated, and the two accounts differ in detail. (Scripture; the identification is Scholarship-debated.) Where Acts and Paul's own letters can be compared, the standard practice is to treat the letters as first-order evidence and Acts as a valuable but theologically shaped narrative; the source entry on Acts sets out that principle at length.

Into Europe: the second journey

The second journey (c. AD 49–52) begins in disagreement. Paul and Barnabas "parted asunder" over whether to take John Mark with them again (Acts 15:39); Barnabas sailed to Cyprus with Mark, and Paul chose Silas instead (Acts 15:40). (Scripture) The two are soon joined by Timothy. It is on this journey that the mission crosses from Asia into Europe, after a night vision of "a man of Macedonia" calling for help (Acts 16:9): to Philippi, where Paul and Silas are imprisoned and both invoke Roman citizenship (Acts 16:37); to Thessalonica and Beroea; to Athens, where Paul addresses the philosophers at the Areopagus and quotes their own poets, "For in him we live, and move, and are" (Acts 17:28); and to Corinth, where he stays about eighteen months. (Scripture)

The Corinth stay carries the single firmest date in the whole story. Acts places Paul before the proconsul Gallio at Corinth (Acts 18:12–17), and Gallio's one-year term is independently datable from an inscription found at Delphi to about AD 51–52. (Scholarship) Everything else in the chronology is calculated forward and backward from that anchor.

Ephesus and the third journey

On the third journey (c. AD 52–57) Paul is based for roughly two to three years at Ephesus (Acts 19), the great city of the province of Asia, where his preaching provokes a riot of the silversmiths whose trade depended on the temple of Artemis (Acts 19:23–41). (Scripture) From there he passes again through Macedonia and Greece before turning back toward Jerusalem. The journey's emotional centre is his farewell to the elders of Ephesus at Miletus, where he tells them he will not see their faces again and sets his own resolve: "I fear none of these things, neither do I count my life more precious than myself, so that I may consummate my course" (Acts 20:24). (Scripture) Most of Paul's undisputed letters — including Romans — belong to these journeys and the imprisonments that followed. (Scholarship)

Arrest in Jerusalem and the defence speeches

Back in Jerusalem, about AD 57, Paul is seized in the temple courts after a riot and rescued from the crowd by a Roman tribune (Acts 21:27–36). (Scripture) It is at this moment, asked whether he is the Egyptian rebel the tribune had taken him for, that Paul first identifies himself: "I am a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city" (Acts 21:39), and, in the speech that follows, "brought up in this city, at the feet of Gamaliel" (Acts 22:3). (Scripture) The birth in Tarsus, the education under Gamaliel, and the Roman citizenship all reach us through these defence speeches — and all appear only in Acts, never in Paul's own letters.

The citizenship becomes decisive when the tribune prepares to have him scourged. Paul asks whether it is lawful to flog "a man that is a Roman and uncondemned" (Acts 22:25); the commander, who had bought his own citizenship "with a great sum," is answered simply, "But I was born so" (Acts 22:28). (Scripture) There follow the great set-piece hearings of the book's final chapters — before the Sanhedrin, before the procurators Felix and then Festus at Caesarea, and before King Agrippa II, to whom Paul recounts the Damascus road a third time and who replies, "In a little thou persuadest me to become a Christian" (Acts 26:28). (Scripture)

Appeal to Caesar and the voyage to Rome

Held at Caesarea for about two years (Acts 24:27), Paul at last exercises the privilege the narrative has been holding in reserve: as a Roman citizen he appeals over the heads of the provincial court, "I appeal to Caesar" (Acts 25:11). (Scripture) The appeal sends him to Rome, and the sea voyage that carries him there is told in vivid, circumstantial, first-person detail — one of the "we-passages" in which the narrator writes as though he were aboard (Acts 27:1–28:16). (Scripture) The storm, the fourteen days adrift, the shipwreck on Malta, and the winter there before the last leg to Italy make this one of the most detailed accounts of ancient seafaring to survive from antiquity. (Scholarship)

The open ending

Acts closes with Paul in Rome under a mild form of house arrest, receiving visitors and "preaching the kingdom of God... with all confidence, without prohibition" (Acts 28:30–31). (Scripture) And there, around AD 60–62, it simply stops. It does not record the outcome of the appeal, or Paul's release, or his death. (Scripture)

This abrupt ending is one of the long-standing puzzles of the book, and it bears directly on how Paul's death is dated. Some read the silence as a sign that Acts was written before the trial concluded, and therefore early, about AD 62; others take it as a deliberate literary choice by a later author, content to leave the message triumphantly "without prohibition" in the capital of the empire. (Scholarship) What Acts does *not* do is narrate a martyrdom. The New Testament nowhere describes Paul's death. That it took place at Rome under Nero, and — from about AD 200 — that Paul was beheaded as befitted a Roman citizen, is the report of later Christian tradition, early and consistent but not first-hand: the letter known as 1 Clement (c. AD 95–96) is the earliest witness, and it names neither the manner nor the exact place. (Tradition) Scholars bracket the date between about AD 62 and 67. (Scholarship)

Reading Acts as the story of Paul

To read Acts as "the story of Paul" is to accept a particular kind of source. It is a narrative with a theological purpose, shaped and selective, written — on the majority view — a generation after the events it describes, though it may draw on eyewitness material in the we-passages. (Scholarship) It gives us facts about Paul that we could learn nowhere else: the Tarsus birth, the schooling under Gamaliel, the tent-making trade (Acts 18:3), the Roman citizenship, the very name "Saul," and the shape of the journeys. It is worth distinguishing, always, what Acts *reports* from what it *proves*, and reading it alongside the first-person witness of the undisputed letters. That is why this reference keeps a separate source entry on the Acts of the Apostles, and treats the letters as the primary control. Short answers to common questions are gathered on the questions and answers page.

Why the story is remembered in Tarsus

The arc that Acts traces — from a young man consenting to a killing, through a road, a decade of silence, and a mission that ends in the capital of the empire — begins in a single city: Tarsus of Cilicia, on the plain of what is now southern Turkiye, the "no mean city" of Acts 21:39. It is there, in the birthplace named by the book itself, that the story is honoured today. On 28–30 June 2027, around the 29 June Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, St Paul Global Week — a faith-tourism gathering organised by Funny Tourism — will bring pilgrims to Tarsus and Mersin, with the Feast Day prayer programme broadcast live worldwide. You are warmly invited to explore the programme, to learn why Tarsus, to read about the Hosted Delegation Leaders programme for those who wish to bring a group, or simply to contact the organiser.