Acts 22

Stott quotes

It was tantamount to saying that Jews and Gentiles
were equal, for they both needed to come to God through Christ,
and that on identical terms.

     Looking back over Paul's defence, we may perhaps say that he
made two major points. The first was that he himself was a loyal
Jew, not only by birth and education but still. True, he was now a
witness where before he had been a persecutor. But the God of his
fathers was his God still. He had not broken away from his
ancestral faith, still less apostatized; he stood in direct
continuity with it. Jesus of Nazareth was `the Righteous One' in
whom prophecy had been fulfilled. And Paul's second point was that
those features of his faith which had changed, especially his
acknowledgment of Jesus and his Gentile mission, were not his own
eccentric ideas. They had been directly revealed to him from
heaven, the one truth in Damascus and the other in Jerusalem.
Indeed, nothing but such a heavenly intervention could have so
completely transformed him.