Observations on the Conversion of St. Paul

The essay takes the form of a letter to Gilbert West, and its argument is a closed disjunction. Paul was either an impostor who knew he was lying, or an enthusiast deceived by his own imagination, or deceived by the fraud of others, or he was telling the truth. Lyttelton works through the first three and argues that each is incompatible with the known facts of Paul’s conduct, his sufferings and his lack of any worldly gain.

The evidential move that gives the book its long life is the concentration on a single figure. Rather than defending the whole canon, Lyttelton stakes the case on one man’s change of mind and the life that followed it — an argument from a changed life, made a century before the phrase became common.

The book was widely reprinted through the nineteenth century, often bound with West’s companion volume, and the pair became standard texts of English apologetics. Samuel Johnson thought the essay unanswerable.

The American Tract Society printing is free at Archive.org. Our edition is a clean, corrected typesetting.

This edition follows the American Tract Society’s New York printing of Lord Lyttelton’s Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul. The letter was first published at London in 1747.

We checked this printing for cuts before using it, and checked it harder than usual. The same society printed Soame Jenyns’s View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, and that printing says on its own front page that “a few passages, not essential to the argument, have been omitted” — so a Tract Society text cannot be taken on trust. This one announces nothing of the kind. It runs to 23,430 words against 24,216 for the complete 1805 setting, and the difference is accounted for by the other book’s library bookplate and its pages of publisher’s advertisements. It ends on Lyttelton’s own last sentence, “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ,” which is where the 1805 text ends too. We are satisfied it is complete.

The alternative was one of the eight eighteenth-century settings, every one of them printed with the long s — the letter a scanner reads as an f. That produces errors no dictionary can find, because the wrong reading is usually a real word: “fins” for sins, “fo” for so. Those scans run at 147 to 177 unknown words per thousand; this one runs at 21.

What has been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the author. Running heads, page numbers and catchwords have been removed; words broken at the line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary settles the question. Lyttelton’s spelling, punctuation and wording stand.

The letter is set in the five parts Lyttelton gives it: the address to West, the three things he argues St. Paul was not, and the conclusion. The third is very short, and it is short in the original — “I need say little,” he writes, “to show the absurdity of this supposition.”

This book is the companion to Gilbert West’s Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we also publish. Lyttelton’s letter is addressed to West and praises his book on the resurrection.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.