“I truly thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and this I also did in Jerusalem. And I both shut up many of the saints in prisons, having received authority from the chief priests, and when they were put to death I gave my vote against them. And punishing them oftentimes in all the synagogues, I strove to make them blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities.”
He then described how he himself had been a persecutor of Christians in the earliest days, having seen himself as an enemy of Jesus Christ. And in the course of this he had imprisoned men (like he was now imprisoned) and had received authority from the very chief priests (who are now trying to put him to death), to put others to death. Indeed he had been so incensed against Christians that he had beaten them in the synagogues and had tried to force them, by torture and threats of death for them and their families, to blaspheme the name of Christ, and had even followed them to foreign cities for that purpose. He wanted his listeners to know that, although he had been full of religious zeal, he now recognised that he had been totally in the wrong, as his change of life revealed (just as it would now be wrong for them to punish him in the same way, without any real justification). He also wanted them to recognise what a genuine person he was in whatever he did. Let them also consider what amazing thing would be required to alter the course of his life.
‘Gave my vote against them.' Not as a member of the Sanhedrin, which he never claims to have been, but as one who in one way or another signified assent to the verdict reached, either by yelling his agreement from the crowd who observed the court, or possibly because he was co-opted onto a committee formed by the Sanhedrin to see to these matters. Possibly it includes when having arrested ‘blasphemers' they discussed among themselves whether they should kill them discreetly in order to save the courts the trouble. But the point is that he was always ‘for' their death. Such a man could surely never have changed unless something remarkable had taken place.
His Experience of the Glory of the Lord, and the Lord's Voice From Heaven