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

call of the divine, a response to the “voice” of God, a response to the other, will never be known: we will always remain blind to Paul's intent. All that we can discern is that this betrayal of God by becoming the voice of God himself was necessary in order to universalize the Christian. Hence, in our reading of Paul, Paul himself will always remain blind—opaque, invisible—to us. All that we can ever know is about Paul: we will never know the character of Paul, but instead, all we know is the character Paul.

One might also consider the fact that Paul did not author the Acts of the Apostles; the only potential author ever suggested has been Luke, ¹¹ as he is considered a close companion of Paul (being from Antioch, there is a chance that he might even have been present at the first use of the term Christian). In this sense, the Saul—and later Paul—of the Acts of the Apostles is a character in the narrative of the author. Interestingly, nowhere in his own writings does Paul mention the fact of his blindness. In fact, the closest he comes to doing so is when he states that after being chosen by God, he “went off to Arabia…[for] three years…and later straight from there back to Damascus”; ¹² in this case, there is yet another blindness, a blind spot of three years about which nothing is known. Could it be that Paul had to suppress the fact that his “vision” was one of blindness, that his vision of God was precisely one of nothing? Instead of being enlightened, all he had was momentary darkness.

Assuming that the author of the Acts of the Apostles is consistent, why is there, then, an inconsistency between the narratives in Acts 9:3–9 and the passage which we have been reading? For Acts 9:7 states that “the men traveling with Saul stood there speechless for though they heard the voice they could see no one,” which contradicts Acts 22:9, which states, “the people with me saw the light but did not hear his voice as he spoke to me.” This reopens the possibility of Saul's non-truth-telling, but