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Sometimes it takes a while to get to what’s important.

I got an email from a concerned reader a couple weeks back about the lead article on the Year of St. Paul in the July 3, 2008 issue.

“It is not in the scriptures that he fell from a horse,” she wrote. “Scripture only  states that ‘he fell to the ground.’”

The reader wanted to know where it was taken from, if it was a quote from another source.

“The beginning of my story wasn’t a quote, as such,” I wrote to her. “It’s just one journalist’s recap of St. Paul’s conversion.”

This reader helped me to realize that the tradition of depicting St. Paul riding a horse appeared in my lead and I didn’t even notice. That’s how ingrained it was.

So was Paul riding a horse on the way to Damascus?

I began to do a little research. I found out that there was a medieval custom of representing pride as a falling horseman. So the horse helps us see that Saul, the proud Pharisee, is humbled (grounded) when confronted by Christ. The artwork representing St. Paul’s conversion, which generally depicts him falling off a horse, probably has this in mind.

I also found out that it’s 180 miles to Damascus from Jerusalem. Even on a horse it would have taken him a week to get there. But I still wasn’t convinced.

So I consulted Larry Fraher, a professor at the Kino Institute. He told me right away that there was no mention anywhere in the New Testament of Paul riding a horse.

The word “horse” appears in the New Testament in the Letter of James and in Revelation. And then there’s the bit about St. Paul being taken to Caesarea accompanied by “horsemen” (Acts 23:23).

Fraher noted that St. Paul was a Roman citizen, of a higher social class than most, including the Twelve. So, he might have been able to afford a horse, but we can’t know for certain.

I also mentioned my search to Fr. Vernon Meyer, of St. Patrick Parish in Scottsdale, a Bible scholar who is leading  pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to Greece and Athens for the Pauline Year.

“Only a Roman soldier would be on a horse and then only the wealthy,” he said. “Jews most likely would not have been allowed to ride horses. So while tradition has given Paul a horse, the Scripture says nothing. In that case we supply meaning.”

Fr. Meyer compared the horse to the apple in the Garden of Eden.

“Tradition made it an apple that they ate, but the Scritpure only says, ‘the fruit of the tree.’ It doesn’t specify,” he noted.

So was St. Paul riding a horse on his way to Damascus? I still didn’t have definitive answer. Is this kind of study what the Holy Father had in mind when he declared the Year of St. Paul? I felt as though I was searching for a historical fact buried in the past.

I looked up the homily Pope Benedict XVI gave to commence the Pauline Year, hoping it would help me refocus.

“We are not gathered to reflect on past history, irrevocably behind us,” the pope said. “Paul wants to speak to us — today. That is why I chose to establish this special ‘Pauline Year’: in order to listen to him and learn today from him, as our teacher, ‘the faith and the truth’ in which the reasons for unity among Christ’s disciples are rooted.”

He went on: “In a world in which falsehood is powerful, the truth is paid for with suffering. The one who desires to avoid suffering, to keep it at bay, keeps life itself and its greatness at bay; he cannot be a servant of truth and a servant of faith. There is no love without suffering — without suffering and renouncing oneself, of the transformation and purification of self for true freedom.”

So, I definitely took the long way around on this one. The Year of St. Paul isn’t about agonizing over the exact historical facts of St. Paul’s life. It’s about making St. Paul’s example alive today, 2,000 years after his birth.

-JD

(The Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls has a pretty informative Web site, including a recounting of Paul as “Apostle to the Gentiles.”)