Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

Christianity as a concept, this scene is more important than the death of Jesus. For it is only with Paul that the term Christian comes into being: ² the birth of Jesus itself would have fulfilled the condition of his coming; in this sense, his death is superfluous. ³ The movement from a title (“Jesus the Christ” or “Jesus the Savior”) to a name (“Jesus Christ,” where “Jesus” and “Savior” become one and the same) required not so much his death, but rather a betrayal, much the same way as the movement from name (“Julius Caesar”) to a title (“Caesar”) also required one. In this sense, the two key figures in the formation of Christianity are Judas and Paul; Jesus being the medium through and in which it was created. Judas' betrayal moved the name into a singular; Paul's writings transformed the singular into the universal.

But for Saul to be created, Saul had to first move through a period of blindness, and it is this that we must look at for the moment.

The first question that arises from the above passage from the Acts of the Apostles is, if “the people with me saw the light,” then why did they not go blind, as Saul did? After all, he claims that “the light had been so dazzling that I was blind.” Either he had been seeing a “light from heaven” that was different from the light his companions saw, or he was lying (Saul didn't have the best of reputations), or he was mistaken about the cause of his blindness. For if it was not the first two possibilities, then would the case be that Saul's blindness was not caused by the light, but rather by the “voice [that] spoke to me” that his companions “did not hear”? ⁴ In this sense, does Saul need to be blind to the Word in order that he can truly discover what the Word is? In order for Saul to fulfill his role of being the “chosen [one] to know [God's] will, to see the Just One and hear his own voice speaking,” ⁵ he would first have to be blind to all that was being written (and perhaps even said) about God. This was the only