tells how the god Ammon appeared to Thutmose III, pharaoh of Egypt in the
fifteenth centuryBCE, when he was still a humble priest and promised him to
be elevated to the throne of Egypt. Samuel, thefirst judge of Israel in the Old
Testament, hears God’s voice calling him at night as a child (1 Sam. 3). Isaiah
sees God in a vision while he is in the temple of Jerusalem and is commis-
sioned as a prophet of Israel (Isa. 6). The Hellenistic philosopher Dio Chry-
sostomos (40– 112 CE) received his commissioning from divine revelation in an
oracle (Discourses13.9). In brief, the idea that the gods send somebody to
fulfill an important function and communicate their message to the people
was well known in antiquity and Paul presumably relied on this cultural script
when talking about his own commission by Jesus on the Damascus road. The
three versions of Paul’s conversion in Acts also employ the same narrative
script, but each time it is elaborated in a different way.
In Biblical Studies, commission narratives were previously studied in the
framework ofform-criticism. For example, Baltzer’sdefinition of a commis-
sion narrative included the following elements (Baltzer, 1975, p. 193):
1 title and linage of the commissioned person;
2 call of the commissioned person;
3 place and time of the commissioning;
4 audience at the commissioning;
5 words of commissioning;
6 sphere of activity;
7 assignment of duty;
8 mention of the extraordinary situation;
9 exhortation;
10 act of initiation.
In the form-critical approach, lists of motifs include a variety of elements
in a text, including actions, sequences of actions, and other components.
Although the list assumes some temporal and logical order, it adds little to
explaining why things occur in a particular sequence. It is even more difficult
to explain variation in this framework: how and why can some motifs be
omitted or their order changed? Commission narratives can vary substantially.
For example, in some stories a helperfigure mediates between the deity and
the hero. In the narrative of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9, both Ananias and
Barnabas are helpers, the former also being mentioned in Acts 22. However,
the third version of the narrative in Acts 26 makes perfect sense without even
mentioning a helperfigure. Paul in Galatians 1 does not mention any helper,
either—in fact, he takes pride of having received his apostleship and his
knowledge about Jesus directly from God, without the mediation of humans,
and without“conferringflesh and blood”(Gal. 1:16).
Does script theory provide a better explanation of recurrent narrative
patterns than form criticism? Scripts provide explanations of both the logical
72 Cognitive Science and the New Testament