theme of Acts. Significantly, it is stipulated here of Saul as a divine necessity: “I will show him how much he must [dei] suffer” (v. 16; see 1:16, 22; 3:21; 4:12). Not only does the prospect of rejection and hardship place Saul in a continuum within Israel’s history that includes the Messiah and his successors, it profoundly qualifies Paul’s entire narrative in Acts. It forces the kind of “gut check” that turns the reader from a fixation on the heroic and invincible Paul of Christian legend toward