During this period, Paul was hiding in Arabia, reflecting on everything that had happened. When he returned, he went straight to the Apostles in order to become one of them. He never met Jesus and was not part of the group that crucified him, but he believed that because of his experience on the road to Damascus, he had been reborn under Christ. In some ways Paul was considered a mystic because he had shared a religious union with Christ and that experience changed his life forever. "Paul saw his conversion as the working out of a plan devised much earlier by God. The goal of that plan was the extension of God's grace to the Gentiles" (Murphy-O'Connor 80).

             The conversion was not really a conversion it was merely a revelation, a transformation. "If Paul was 'converted' 'from' something 'to' something else, it certainly was not 'from' Judaism 'to' 'Christianity'. Paul continued to be a Jew to his dying day, a fact which most Christians nowadays choose to neglect and which many Jewish scholars find exasperating" (Wilson 61). Paul didn't really completely give up Judaism, he just realized that many of the practices were wrong. "Perhaps the acrimonious sectarianism of Judaism struck Paul as foolish and nauseating" (Wilson 71). He became what some scholars call a Christian Jew. "His beliefs about Jesus were simply added to his Judaism" (Freed 9). He believed that Jesus was the Messiah not by birth, but because of "his suffering, death, and resurrection" (Freed 8). This bears similarity to the myth that he grew up with about Herakles (Hercules). In that legend of his predecessors, Herakles, a half-god, descended in to Hades to fight for them. In sacrificing himself, he became their savior. .

             Paul would spend his remaining years attempting to teach the new Way in the synagogues of the region. He would be rebuffed, sometimes violently, and was frequently jailed. His final arrest brought him to Rome to answer charges where, after two years of imprisonment, he died about 64 AD.