It's in There... NOT!

(Third in a series)

St. Paul's Horse

Check it out, folks, there's no horse in that story! You can read the whole story of Saul's (later, Paul) conversion in Acts 22, but here's the part where they usually add the horse:

⁵as the high priest and all the Council can testify, I even obtained letters from them to their brothers in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished.

 ⁶"About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. ⁷I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, 'Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?'(NIV)

Where the idea came from, I haven't a clue, but Christian artists through the centuries have pictured Paul falling off his "high horse." This fresco, "The Conversion of Paul the Apostle" by Ben Long, appears in St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

Horses in the Bible are often associated with war, but in Zechariah 9:9, the prophet places hope for the nation in the hands of a "gentle" king who rides not a war horse but "a colt, the foal of a donkey." (NIV)

  Biagio D'Antonio, Il Passagio Del Mar Rosso (The Crossing of the Red Sea)