The Small One

Acts 13:9–10

Then Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him, and said, O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?

The name change does not happen on the Damascus road. It does not happen in Arabia, or in Antioch, or at the commissioning. It happens on the island of Cyprus, in a city called Paphos — which Hitchcock defines as «which boils, or is very hot.» Fausset adds a detail worth pausing over: Paphos was the cult centre of Aphrodite, the goddess said to have risen from the sea-foam at this very shore. The boiling place, the seat of pagan desire, is where the demanded one becomes the small one.

Luke records it almost casually: «Then Saul, who also is called Paul» (Acts 13:9). The Greek is devastatingly simple: Saulos de, ho kai Paulos — “Saul, the one also Paul.” The morphology shows both names in the nominative — Saulos (G4569) and Paulos (G3972) — side by side, as if Luke is showing us the hinge of a door swinging. After this verse, Luke never calls him Saul again. The hinge has turned. The door has closed on the old name.

Paulos (G3972) is of Latin origin. Strong’s defines it as «little; but remotely from a derivative of G3973, meaning the same.» The literal meaning is small. And G3973 — pauō — means «to stop, to cease, to restrain, to desist, to come to an end.» It is the word from which we get the English pause. The demanded one ceases. The one who demanded becomes the one who is small. The one who kicked against the goad has stopped kicking.

And the word-level analysis of Acts 13:9 reveals something else: among the Greek words in that verse is atenizō (G816) — to gaze intently — the same word used when Stephen gazed into heaven at his stoning (Acts 7:55). The watcher of Stephen’s death has become the one who gazes with the same Spirit-filled intensity. The hinge verse contains both the old name and the new name, both the filling of the Spirit and the gaze that once belonged to the crowned one.

And here the morphology reveals something astonishing. In Acts 13:10 — the very verse where Paul first speaks under his new name — the word he uses is pauō itself: «wilt thou not cease» to pervert the right ways of the Lord? At the moment of the name change, the man whose name derives from pauō commands another to pauō. The small one’s first act is to speak his own name as a command: stop. The demanded one has become the one who tells others to cease.

But look at what he is doing at the moment of the name change. He is not retreating into humility. He is confronting a sorcerer named Bar-jesus — literally “son of Jesus,” a false claim — also called Elymas, which Hitchcock defines as «a magician, a corrupter.» But the name Elymas itself comes from the Arabic alim — «wise» — the same root from which the Islamic ulema derives. The “wise one” is about to be struck blind. And Paul does something extraordinary: he blinds him.

Acts 13:11

And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness; and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand.

Read that again. The man who was blinded on the Damascus road now blinds another. The man who had to be led by the hand (Acts 9:8) now causes another to seek someone to lead him by the hand. The parallel is exact. It is as if God is showing that the experience Paul went through — the blinding, the helplessness, the leading — was not punishment but preparation. What was done to him, he now does through the Holy Ghost. The difference is that Paul’s blindness led to scales falling and sight restored. Elymas’ blindness is for a season — temporary, corrective, merciful in its own way. Even in judgement, the small one is more restrained than the demanded one ever was.

The morphology of Acts 13:9 confirms the spiritual dimension: plēstheis (G4130) is an aorist passive participle — «having been filled» with the Holy Ghost. He did not fill himself. He was filled. It is the same passive voice as his baptism (ebaptisthē, Acts 9:18). The pattern of Paul’s new life is passivity before God and authority before men. He receives, and then he acts. The vessel is filled, and then it pours.

And the result of this confrontation? «Then the deputy, when he saw what was done, believed, being astonished at the doctrine of the Lord» (Acts 13:12). The deputy’s name was Sergius Paulus — and Hitchcock defines Sergius as «net.» The corrupter is blinded. The net is caught. And the man doing the catching has just been renamed small. Hawker notes a tradition that deserves mention: the deputy himself shared the name Paulus, and some have held that Paul took this name from his first notable Gentile convert, as a Roman would give his name to a friend in token of love. Whether or not this is so, the coincidence is striking — the first Gentile who believed already bore the name that would follow the apostle to his grave.

There is a deeper pattern here that runs through the whole of Scripture: God’s servants become small so that God can become large through them. Gideon’s army was reduced from thirty-two thousand to three hundred before God would use it (Judges 7:2–7). David was the youngest and smallest of Jesse’s sons when Samuel came to anoint a king (1 Samuel 16:11). John the Baptist said it plainly: «He must increase, but I must decrease» (John 3:30). And Paul — the man whose name now means small — will write to the Corinthians: «when I am weak, then am I strong» (2 Corinthians 12:10).

But Paul did not merely accept the name. He lived into it with an escalating intensity that borders on the absurd. To the Corinthians he writes: «I am the least of the apostles» (1 Corinthians 15:9). The least — elachistos (G1646). Then, to the Ephesians, he goes further: «Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given» (Ephesians 3:8). The word he uses here is elachistoteros (G1647) — and it appears exactly once in the entire Bible, because Paul invented it. It is a comparative form of a superlative. Grammatically, it should not exist. You cannot be “more least” any more than you can be “more smallest.” But Paul coins the word anyway, pressing the meaning of his own name — Paulos, small — to its linguistic breaking point. Less than the least. Smaller than the smallest. And then, in 1 Timothy 1:15, he goes further still: «Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.» The progression is complete: least apostle, leaster-than-least saint, chief of sinners. The name small was not small enough for the man who bore it.

And there is one more word that seals the transformation. The Greek verb for “persecute” is diōkō (G1377). In classical Athenian usage, the lexicon reveals, ho diōkōn was a legal term: the prosecutor. Saul was not merely persecuting in a general sense — he was conducting formal prosecution, obtaining warrants, building cases. Paul uses the word to describe what he was: «persecuting the church» (Philippians 3:6). But diōkō also means to pursue, to press toward. And just eight verses later, Paul uses the same word for what he has become: «I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus» (Philippians 3:14). The persecutor has become the pursuer. The same Greek word that described his violence now describes his devotion. The demanded one who once diōkō-ed the church now diōkō-s the prize.

Theologians have a word for this pattern: kenosis — from the Greek kenoō (G2758), meaning to empty, to make void, to strip of significance. Paul himself uses it in Philippians 2:7, describing how Christ «made himself of no reputation» — literally, emptied Himself. And here is a detail that underscores his name: the word kenoō appears five times in the New Testament — and all five are in Paul’s letters. No other writer uses it. The theology of divine self-emptying comes exclusively through the apostle whose name means small. What Christ did cosmically, Paul enacts personally: the emptying of the demanded self to make room for the small, the surrendered, the filled.

The first Saul, King Saul, lost his smallness and was destroyed. Samuel told him: «When thou wast little in thine own sight, wast thou not made the head of the tribes of Israel?» (1 Samuel 15:17). The first Saul grew tall and fell. The second Saul shrinks himself into a new name — Paulos, little — and rises. The kenosis has begun. The emptying that will carry him from Paphos to Rome, from the boiling place to the seat of power, is not a loss but a liberation. The demanded one is free now. Free from his own demands. Free to be small. And the small are the ones God fills.

First Corinthians 1:27–29

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence.

From this point forward, Luke calls him Paul. The demanded one is gone. The small one walks on.