Hello, welcome to Form Now. My name is Ben Acres, and I'm the executive director of Formed.

And joining me today is Dr. Jim Prothro, who is a professor at the Augustine Institute Graduate School

of Theology. And today we're going to be talking about the conversion of St. Paul, this feast day

that we celebrate on January 25th in the liturgical calendar.

And we celebrate this feast day of a persecutor of the church who moves to an apostle of the church.

And we're going to be talking about this is the only conversion that's actually celebrated on the calendar.

We're here at the Augustine Institute.

And St. Augustine is a great hero of ours.

And he has a big conversion in his own life when he hears this voice, take and read, take and read, and the Word of God reaches out in a sense and grabs him and converts him to the faith where he knows that he should become a baptized Christian. But we don't celebrate his feast day on the liturgical calendar, but we do celebrate the conversion of St. Paul. So today we're going to be talking

about St. Paul and his conversion. Jim, what do we know about, sometimes I hear Paul,

sometimes I hear Saul. What do we know about Saul Paul in the New Testament? Oh, sure.

So as you said, he's sort of a man with two names, right, as we encounter him in Scripture.

Is that like a first and last name like Jim, Protho?

No, not quite.

So it would be common for especially people who wanted their children who were Jews and were faithful and gave their

children Hebrew names but also wanted them to be able to sort of like live in Greek

society without about a lot of weird stuff his his name Saul as we say it would

have been Shaul which is not really a set of sounds that you have in

Greek or in Latin. So it's a Hebrew name? Yeah, so Shaul, Saul would be his Hebrew name, right,

named after the first king of Israel and also from Paul's same tribe, tribe of Benjamin. He would be named after him, but he would also have another name that sounds like it,

in this case, Paul, Paulos, Saul, that he would sort of go by in Roman and Greek society.

And from what we can tell of Paul, he was, he's not raised in Jerusalem.

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