How Saul of Tarsus Became Paul
Most people know that Apostle Paul was a pious Jew. Many New Testament readers would note that he was a Pharisee trained with the rabbis at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). And at the same time, an overwhelming majority of Christians also see Apostle Paul as a radical convert to Christianity. But how accurate is this idea? One common way of rationalizing Paul as a Christian is that a Jew, a Pharisee named Saul, was baptized, converted from Judaism to Christianity, and from then on was known as the Christian Apostle Paul.
The name-changing transaction can be truly misleading. It is broadly known that when people convert to another religion, they often change their names. To use a contemporary example, Cassius Clay converted to Islam, and most people today know this champion and boxing legend as Mohammad Ali. Indeed, through the ages, when pagans converted to Christianity, they received “Christian” names. And the reason for such practice makes perfect sense.
Imagine a man by the name Dion becomes a convert to Christianity. Dion is a wonderful Greek name. The problem is that Dion is a diminutive form of Dionysius – who is a Greek god of wine and grape harvest associated with drunken orgies and all sorts of debauchery. A new Christian named after a Greek deity was a problem. Thus, a common practice was to baptize him and give him a new, better-fitting name – Daniel, or David. There is nothing scandalous in that.
Though such name-changing is very common today, this is not what happened with Paul, despite what people imagine. Unlike Abraham or Jacob, he did not get a new name as a result of his encounter with God. He had more than one name from the beginning (Acts 13:9). A common Jewish custom, even today, especially among those who live outside of Israel, is to give multiple names to their children. One may be an ancestral Hebrew name, but another one is for use in the culture where they live, which is much more common and easier for locals to pronounce (Acts 13:9). We know that Yohanan in the gospels was also called Mark, and a common Greek name equivalent for Jesus (Yehoshua) was Jason (see Acts 17:5-9).
Pinchas Shir
Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin and had a name of Hebrew origin – Shaul (שָׁאוּל). It comes from the root that means "to seek," "to ask," "to inquire," and "to question" even. This is the name of the first king of Israel, who was also a Benjamite. A Greek spelling of that name would be Σαῦλος (Saulos) – “Saul”. This is the name by which Jesus addressed Paul in the Damascus road vision (Acts 9:4). But for some reason, Paul also had another name Παῦλος (Paulos) or “Paul” in English. Maybe it was tied to his Roman citizenship, or there was some other reason behind it. It is hard to know for sure.
Παῦλος (Paulos) is not a very common Greek name. We do not find many people with this name prior to the first century. Paul was known to stress his insignificance (1 Cor 2:3; 2 Cor 12:9–10), and in Latin his name means "small," "little," or "humble." But perhaps it was a completely made-up name. That happens too. In fact, Παῦλος (Paulos) differs from Σαῦλος (Saulos) only by one letter. I can't be dogmatic about this, but it is possible that this is how this second name came to be. Paulos could simply be a slight alteration of the Greek spelling of the apostle’s Hebrew name Shaul (שָׁאוּל).
The idea that Paul converted and changed his name from Saul to Paul is merely an attribution to a known conversion-related practice, not a genuine historical explanation. Paul is how the apostle was broadly known in the non-Jewish world. And since he labored as an apostle to the Gentiles, Παῦλος (Paulos) - Paul was the name he used most frequently in his ministry. There was no striking supernatural reason for a new name, and no official name change took place. The biblical fact is that many who knew him continued to address him as Shaul (Acts 11:25; 12:25). So, no, Paul was not his special “Christian” name. Jerome might have started this thinking unintentionally when he suggested that Paul changed his name for the reason of "humility." I would venture to say that Shaul was simply a Jew with more than one name, like millions of his kinsmen in the first century CE.
Pinchas Shir