Two questions about the Apostle Paul tend to get tangled together in people’s minds, and both rest on a misunderstanding.
- The first: is Paul the same person as King Saul from the Old Testament? No. They lived roughly a thousand years apart.
- The second: did God change Saul’s name to Paul on the Damascus road, at the dramatic moment of his conversion? Also no. That detail has become so familiar from sermons and Sunday-school lessons that most of us assume it must be in the Bible. It isn’t. It’s a piece of church tradition, not Scripture.
What the text actually says is more interesting than the legend. Saul already carried both names from birth, and the quiet switch to “Paul” arrives at one of the great turning points in the story of the early church. So let’s clear up both misconceptions, look at what the names mean, and see why the change happened exactly when it did.
King Saul and Paul the Apostle: Two Completely Different People
Let’s start with the bigger confusion, because a surprising number of people genuinely wonder whether the Saul of the Old Testament grew up to become the Paul of the New.
He didn’t. These are two different men, separated by about a 2000 years of history.
A thousand years apart
- 1050 BC — King Saul: Saul son of Kish, anointed as Israel’s first king (1 Samuel 9–10). A tall, troubled monarch whose reign ended in failure and whose life closed in battle on Mount Gilboa.
- AD 5 — Saul of Tarsus born: a Jewish boy, born a Roman citizen, in the city of Tarsus in what is now southern Turkey. He would grow up to persecute the church, meet the risen Christ, and become its greatest missionary.
- The gap — roughly a millennium: King Saul had been dead for about a thousand years before Saul of Tarsus was even a name his parents were considering.
So why do people mix them up? Two reasons: they share a name, and they share a tribe. The Apostle Paul tells us plainly he was of the tribe of Benjamin (Philippians 3:5)—the very tribe King Saul came from (1 Samuel 9:1–2). It’s quite likely Paul’s parents named him after Israel’s first king, their tribe’s most famous son. But a shared name and a shared tribe are the whole of the connection. One was a king who lost his crown; the other was a tentmaker who served a kingdom he never wore on his head.
What the Bible Actually Says: God Didn’t Changed the Name
Now the second misconception—the one even lifelong churchgoers tend to hold: the idea that God formally renamed Saul “Paul” at his conversion, the way he renamed others.
Here’s the surprise. There’s no such moment anywhere in Scripture.
The change first appears, almost in passing, in a single verse:
Then Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him (Acts 13:9).
Notice the wording: who also is called Paul. Luke—the author of Acts—isn’t reporting a renaming. He’s simply telling us, as an aside, the man we’ve known as Saul also goes by the name Paul. From this verse on, Luke mostly calls him Paul. No ceremony. No announcement from heaven. No “you shall no longer be called Saul.” The name was already his.
This becomes obvious when you set it beside the genuine renamings in the Bible, every one of which came with a direct act of God:
- Abram to Abraham: God Himself declares the change and ties it to a promise—Your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations (Genesis 17:5). The new name (Hebrew Avraham) means “father of many.”
- Jacob to Israel: renamed after a night of wrestling at the river Jabbok—Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel (Genesis 32:28). Israel means “he struggles with God.”
- Simon to Peter: Jesus gives the name Himself—you shall be called Cephas (which means Peter) (John 1:42). Petros is simply the Greek word for “rock.”
In each case there’s an explicit, God-given moment: a new name marking a new calling. The move from Saul to Paul has none of that. No voice from heaven, no covenant attached, no “no longer shall you be called.” Just Luke quietly noting a name the man already owned. The tradition that God renamed him is understandable—it makes a tidy story—but it isn’t what the text says.
What “Saul” And “Paul” Each Mean
If God didn’t choose “Paul” as a new spiritual name, where did each name come from, and what do they mean? This is worth slowing down on, because the meanings are rather lovely—and a little ironic.
- Saul (Hebrew Sha’ul): “asked for” or “prayed for.” It comes from the Hebrew verb sha’al, “to ask.” It’s the same idea behind Hannah’s words when she named her longed-for son: I have asked for him from the LORD (1 Samuel 1:20). A child named Saul was, in effect, a child prayed for.
- Paul (Latin Paulus): “small” or “humble.” It was an ordinary Roman family name—a cognomen—carried by respectable Roman households for generations.
Here’s the irony worth pausing on. God set this man apart before he was born (Galatians 1:15) to carry the gospel across the Roman Empire and to write a substantial portion of the New Testament—and the name that stuck to him for all of it means “small.”
Some readers link this to Paul’s own description of himself as the least of the apostles (1 Corinthians 15:9), as though he leaned into the meaning of his name. It’s a tempting connection. But the New Testament scholar NT Wright, among others, cautions this is probably reading too much in. Paulus was simply Paul’s Roman name from birth, not a humble title he adopted; the meaning is a happy coincidence rather than a deliberate statement. A fitting one, though: the man who insisted it was all grace carried a name that meant “small.”
The Dual-Naming World Paul Was Born Into
To understand how one man had two names with no renaming involved, you have to picture the world he was born into.
First-century Jews living under Roman rule very often carried two names:
- A Hebrew or Aramaic name for home and synagogue: the world of family, Torah, and Jewish identity.
- A Greek or Roman name for the marketplace and the courts: the world of trade, citizenship, and civic life.
This wasn’t a sign of compromise or a divided heart. It was simply how you lived as a Jew inside a Greek-speaking, Roman-governed empire. You used the name that fitted the room you were in.
Paul was a Roman citizen by birth—But I was born a citizen, he tells a Roman officer (Acts 22:28)—and citizens carried Roman names. So from his earliest days he would have been Sha’ul to his family and Paulus in the wider Roman world. Both names were his long before he ever met Christ.
He was far from unusual in this. Scripture is full of the same pattern:
- John Mark: introduced as John, also called Mark (Acts 12:12)—a Hebrew name and a Roman one held together.
- Jesus himself: the Greek name Iēsous (Jesus) simply renders the Hebrew Yeshua (Joshua).
So when Luke shifts from “Saul” to “Paul,” he isn’t recording a transformation. He is reaching for the name that suited the audience the story had now reached.
Why the Shift To “Paul” Happened When It Did
If both names were always his, the interesting question isn’t what changed—it is why Luke makes the switch precisely where he does. The timing is no accident.
- The setting: Paul and Barnabas reach Paphos on the island of Cyprus, during the first missionary journey, and meet the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus—a Gentile governor.
- The pivot: It’s here, addressing a Roman ruler, that Luke writes Saul, who also is called Paul (Acts 13:9). From this point on, the Roman name takes over.
- The reason: from Acts 13 onward the mission turns increasingly towards Gentiles—Greeks and Romans, for whom “Paul” was natural and familiar and “Saul” was foreign. (In Greek, the word saulos even carried the unflattering sense of a mincing or swaggering walk—hardly the name to lead with among Greek speakers.)
Paul himself later put the principle into words: I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some (1 Corinthians 9:22). Leading with his Roman name among Romans was that instinct in action—meeting people where they were, and removing every needless barrier to the gospel.
John Calvin, commenting on Acts, saw the hand of God’s providence in the whole arrangement: the Lord had been quietly preparing this man—his learning, his citizenship, his two names—long before the road to Damascus, fitting him for the precise work he’d be given. Nothing was wasted; everything was readied.
What this Tells Us About How God Works
Step back, and the small matter of a name turns out to teach us something large about the way God tends to work.
He didn’t erase Saul and replace him with a brand-new Paul. He took the man who was already there—his rigorous training under the rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), his Roman citizenship, his fluency in two cultures, his two names—and pressed all of it into service for the gospel.
That’s worth holding onto, because we often expect grace to work by demolition: to wipe out who we were and start again from scratch. More often, Scripture shows grace working by redemption and redirection:
- Our background isn’t wasted: the very things that made Saul of Tarsus who he was became the tools God used in Paul the apostle. Our history, our skills, even our ordinary circumstances can be taken up and turned to good purpose.
- God works through ordinary providence: no miracle was needed to give Paul a Roman name. God had arranged it through the perfectly ordinary fact of where, and to whom, he was born. He governs the small details as surely as the dramatic ones.
- Conversion redirects more than it erases: the Damascus road changed the whole direction of Paul’s life, but it didn’t throw away his learning or his citizenship. It re-aimed them.
The change that mattered in this man’s life was never a change of name. It was a change of Lord—and that change God did make, decisively, on a road outside Damascus, turning a persecutor of the church into its most tireless servant. The name “Paul” simply went along for the journey.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
Why does God Himself rename people in Scripture, such as Abraham and Jacob, and what does He want them—and us—to infer from it?
When God renames someone, He is exercising the right of a maker over what He has made: the One who gives the name defines the person’s identity and calling. Abram (“exalted father”) becomes Abraham (“father of a multitude”) to seal a covenant promise he could not yet see fulfilled; Jacob (“he grasps the heel,” the deceiver) becomes Israel (“he struggles with God”) after a night that broke and remade him. In each case the new name announces a new vocation and a settled relationship with God, not merely a fresh label. The lesson reaches further than the two men: our truest identity is His to give, not ours to invent. Scripture even closes the loop by promising God’s people a new name at the end—I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written (Revelation 2:17)—a sign that the work He begins in naming He means to complete.
Did Paul take the name “Paul” from Sergius Paulus, the Roman official he had just met?
It’s an old and tidy theory—the 4th-century scholar Jerome suggested Paul adopted the name as a kind of trophy of his first prominent Gentile convert. But it doesn’t hold up. Luke introduces the name who also is called Paul (Acts 13:9) as something already true of him, not something acquired that day at Paphos. The likeliest explanation is simpler and a little ironic: the shared name was a coincidence that made the encounter a natural place for Luke to switch from the Hebrew “Saul” to the Roman “Paul,” just as the Gentile mission was getting under way.
When the risen Christ spoke to Paul on the Damascus road, which name did He use—and in what language?
He used the Hebrew name. Three times Acts records Christ’s words, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (Acts 9:4), and in Paul’s own retelling he adds a telling detail—that Jesus spoke in the Hebrew tongue (Acts 26:14). At the most decisive moment of his life, the Lord addressed him not as Paul the Roman citizen but as Saul the son of Israel, in the language of his fathers. It’s a quiet reminder that grace met him exactly where he was, in the words closest to his heart.
Do we actually know Paul’s full Roman name?
No—and that tends to surprise people. A Roman citizen usually carried three names, the tria nomina: a first name, a family name, and a cognomen or personal surname. “Paulus” was almost certainly his cognomen, the everyday name by which he was known, while his first and family names have been lost to history entirely. So the apostle whose letters fill so much of the New Testament comes down to us under barely a third of his official Roman name—the humble third, fittingly, that means “small.”
Why is he so often called “Saul of Tarsus”?
Tarsus was his birthplace, and it was no backwater. Paul himself called it no mean city (Acts 21:39)—a prosperous centre of trade and learning in Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey, with a reputation for philosophy and rhetoric that ancient writers ranked alongside Athens. Growing up there, and then training in Jerusalem under the rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), gave Paul a rare double formation: thoroughly Jewish in faith, yet at home in the Greek-speaking Roman world. “Saul of Tarsus” names the man, and all that learning, before it was turned towards Christ.
Were other believers in Acts also known by two names, like Paul?
Yes—it was common enough that Luke mentions it without fuss. Joseph, the generous Levite from Cyprus, was surnamed Barnabas by the apostles, which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation (Acts 4:36). The teachers at Antioch included Simeon that was called Niger (Acts 13:1), and the disciple Thomas was also known as Didymus, “the twin” (John 11:16). A nickname, or a name in two languages, was simply part of life in the first-century Mediterranean, so Paul’s pair of names was unremarkable to those who knew him.
Where were Jesus’ followers first called “Christians,” and when?
At Antioch—and the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch (Acts 11:26)—the very church that would soon send Paul and Barnabas out on the first missionary journey. The name was probably coined by outsiders, quite possibly as a jibe: “those of Christ’s party.” Yet it stuck, and the church came to wear it gladly. There’s a neat symmetry in it: at almost the same point in Acts where one man steps forward as “Paul,” the whole movement receives the name it still carries 2000 years later.
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