Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“But Saul, also known as Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, ‘You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?’”
NL Daily Devotion for Wednesday, April 28, 2021
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
And just like that, Saul is now Paul. I mean, it isn’t even a deliberate, intentional change. It’s just, “Oh yeah, by the way, lots of people in the Bible have more than one name, and, you know, Saul also goes by Paul.” Yet he never goes by Paul again for the rest of the book of Acts, and is Paul in all of his surviving epistles.
I haven’t done any real research on this, but this is what I did find with a quick Google search on the meanings of both names, and how interesting it is. Saul is a common Jewish name meaning “asked for” or “prayed for.” It goes back to Israel’s first king, whom the Israelites both asked and prayed for. Paul is just the closest approximation of Saul in Greek. They were interchangeable. But the Greek “Paulos”/Latin “Paulus” means small or humble. And Paul, while seemingly not humble at all in some cases, certainly was in others, accepting persecution and imprisonment for the sake of the gospel. So while Saul didn’t automatically change his name to Paul when he was converted, he was certainly humbled as Saul for all his persecution of the Christians and spent the rest of his life making amends for it.
If I could change my name to something descriptive of my faith, what would I choose?
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