The Damascus road is Christianity's archetype of conversion, and it is worth noting how little it resembles what most conversions look like. Paul is not seeking, not doubting and not persuaded; he is ambushed while carrying arrest warrants, and the encounter costs him his sight, his career and his standing. His own account in Galatians is far barer than the three tellings in Acts and says only that God was pleased to reveal his Son in him. The most humanly interesting figure in the story is Ananias, the local disciple sent to lay hands on the man who came to arrest him, who tells God he has heard about this person and would rather not — one of the few places in scripture where someone objects to an assignment and is simply overruled and goes. The blindness and the scales are the detail everyone remembers; the three days of fasting in the dark, between the old life and the new, is the one the tradition uses.