Damascus: The City Where Saul's Road Ended and Paul's Began

Damascus holds a singular place in the story of St Paul. Every other city in his itinerary is somewhere he preached; Damascus is where he was made. The road that led toward its gates carried Saul the persecutor, and the wall he descended in a basket released Paul the apostle — a man whose next refuge, in the arc of the Acts of the Apostles, would be his native Tarsus in Cilicia (Acts 9:30). Damascus and Tarsus are thus the two poles of the conversion narrative: the city of the encounter and the city of the long preparation that followed.

The Ancient City

Damascus is commonly counted among the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth (Scholarship). It owes its endurance to geography: the Barada river descends from the Anti-Lebanon mountains and dissolves into the Ghouta, a ring of orchards and gardens that made the city a green island at the edge of the Syrian desert. Egyptian records of the second millennium BC already name it, and in the Iron Age it was the capital of Aram-Damascus, the Aramaean kingdom that appears throughout the books of Kings as both rival and neighbor of Israel (Scripture). The city passed to the Assyrians in 732 BC, then in turn to Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic rule, contested between the successor dynasties of Alexander.

Rome arrived when Pompey organized Syria as a province in 64–63 BC. Ancient geographers list Damascus among the cities of the Decapolis, the loose federation of Hellenized towns east of the Jordan, though the precise nature of its membership is debated (Scholarship). By the first century AD it was a prosperous caravan city: routes converged on it from Mesopotamia, from the Nabataean south with its incense trade, from the Phoenician coast, and — by way of the coastal road north through Antioch and the pass of the Cilician Gates — from Anatolia and Tarsus. A traveler of Paul's generation would have known Damascus and Tarsus as stations on one connected network of roads, which is part of why the geography of Acts moves so naturally between them.

Like other Hellenistic foundations, the city was laid out on a grid, its principal east–west artery a colonnaded street roughly 1,500 meters long — the Via Recta, the "street that is called Strait" of Acts 9:11. Damascus also held a large Jewish community; the first-century historian Josephus reports many thousands of Jews in the city (Scholarship), and Acts 9:2 presupposes multiple synagogues there.

Paul at Damascus in the Acts of the Apostles

According to Acts 9:1–2, Saul of Tarsus obtained letters from the high priest in Jerusalem authorizing him to seek out followers of "the way" in the synagogues of Damascus and bring them bound to Jerusalem. The journey between the two cities is roughly 220 kilometers — about a week's travel on foot (Scholarship). As he drew near the city, Acts records, a light from heaven shone about him, and he heard a voice: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" (Acts 9:4, Douay-Rheims). Blinded, he was led by the hand into Damascus, where he waited three days, neither eating nor drinking, in the house of a man named Judas "in the street that is called Strait" (Acts 9:11).

There the disciple Ananias, warned in a vision and initially reluctant — he knew Saul's reputation — laid hands on him. Saul's sight returned, and he was baptized (Acts 9:17–18). Immediately he began to preach in the synagogues of Damascus that Jesus is the Son of God (Acts 9:20), astonishing hearers who knew why he had come. Paul's own letters add texture the narrative of Acts compresses: in Galatians 1:17 he writes that after the revelation he went into Arabia and returned again to Damascus (Scripture) — "Arabia" here most plausibly meaning the neighboring Nabataean kingdom (Scholarship).

After "many days" (Acts 9:23), a plot formed against his life, and the gates were watched day and night. The disciples "taking him in the night, conveyed him away by the wall, letting him down in a basket" (Acts 9:25, Douay-Rheims). Paul himself confirms the episode in 2 Corinthians 11:32–33, adding that the governor under King Aretas guarded the city — a reference to the Nabataean king Aretas IV, and one of the few synchronisms that lets scholars anchor Paul's chronology, placing the conversion around c. AD 33–36 and the escape some three years later — after the sojourn in Arabia of Galatians 1:17–18 (Scripture) and before Aretas IV's death c. AD 40 (Scholarship). Paul retold the Damascus road twice more in Acts: before the crowd in Jerusalem (Acts 22:6–16) and before King Agrippa at Caesarea (Acts 26:12–18).

From Damascus, Paul went up to Jerusalem, and when danger followed him there the brethren brought him down to the coast and sent him away to Tarsus (Acts 9:30). His silent years in Cilicia — until Barnabas came to Tarsus to seek him (Acts 11:25) — are the direct sequel to the Damascus story, and they are treated fully in Paul's early travels.

What Remains Today

Damascus has been rebuilt continuously for millennia, yet the Roman city Paul entered is still legible in the Old City's plan.

The Street called Straight survives in name and in fact: the modern thoroughfare running from Bab al-Jabiya in the west to Bab Sharqi in the east, partly covered by the Midhat Pasha market, follows the line of the Roman Via Recta. The ancient street lies several meters below the present surface, but a Roman monumental arch, uncovered in the twentieth century and re-erected at street level, marks the old colonnade partway along its course (Scholarship).

Bab Sharqi, the East Gate, is the best-preserved of the Roman gates — a triple-arched gateway of the second or third century AD, later than Paul but standing on the line of the wall he knew (Scholarship). Nearby, in the Christian quarter, an underground chapel known as the House of Saint Ananias occupies an ancient cellar level traditionally identified as the home of the disciple who baptized Paul (Tradition). Further along the southeastern wall stands Bab Kisan, the gate that tradition associates with the basket escape of Acts 9:25; a chapel dedicated to St Paul is built into the gate itself (Tradition). The present masonry is largely medieval and later, so these sites commemorate the events rather than preserve their first-century fabric (Scholarship).

The great Umayyad Mosque at the heart of the Old City incorporates the massive temenos walls of the Roman temple of Jupiter Damascenus — the sanctuary precinct that dominated the city in Paul's lifetime. Southwest of the city, on the old road toward Galilee and Jerusalem, the hill of Kaukab is venerated as the traditional site of the conversion itself (Tradition); the actual spot on the road cannot be identified (Scholarship).

Visiting Context

Damascus is the capital of Syria, and its walled Old City is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Pauline sites cluster conveniently: Straight Street, Bab Sharqi, the Ananias chapel, and Bab Kisan all lie within a short walk of one another in and beside the Christian quarter of Bab Touma. The Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 25 January, is observed with particular devotion in the city's churches.

Conditions for international travel to Syria have varied considerably in recent years, and prospective visitors should consult current travel guidance before planning a journey. For orientation, the atlas places Damascus within the full map of Pauline sites, and the pilgrimage guide treats the practicalities of following Paul's footsteps — including Tarsus and Cilicia, where the Damascus road's story finds its continuation, and which remain readily accessible to travelers today.