Did the men with Paul on the Damascus road hear the voice?

Hard question · Acts and the letters · raised by 6 of the lists sceptics circulate

The passages

The objection

Acts 9:7 says the men travelling with Saul stood speechless, “hearing a voice, but seeing no man”. In Acts 22:9 Paul himself says they saw the light, “but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me”. Both are in the same book by the same author. Did they hear the voice or not?

The answer

They heard the sound of the voice but did not make out the words. The Greek verb akouō, like English ‘hear’, can mean either to perceive a sound or to hear with understanding; in 1 Corinthians 14:2 the KJV renders it “no man understandeth him”. In Acts 22:9 Paul does not say that his companions heard nothing, but that they did not hear “the voice of him that spake to me”, that is, they did not grasp what was said to him, and modern versions translate it so: “they could not understand the voice of the One speaking to me” (BSB). The message was for Saul, who was chosen to “hear the voice of his mouth” (22:14).

John 12:28–29 shows the same thing: when the Father spoke from heaven, the crowd heard something, but some said it had thundered and others that an angel had spoken. Many also point to the Greek cases. In Acts 9:7 ‘voice’ is in the genitive (akouontes tēs phōnēs), in 22:9 in the accusative (tēn de phōnēn ouk ēkousan), and some grammarians hold that the accusative can stress hearing the content. But Luke does not keep strictly to this, for Saul’s own hearing of the voice is in the genitive in 22:7 and in the accusative in 9:4 and 26:14, so the cases alone cannot settle the question; the meaning of the verb and Paul’s own wording do. (Whether the men stood or fell is a separate question: Acts 26:14 describes the first moment, when they all fell, and Acts 9:7 the men afterwards, standing speechless.)

They heard Saul’s voice

John Gill preferred another reading: the men heard Saul speaking (“Who art thou, Lord?”) but saw no one he spoke to, and did not hear Christ’s voice at all. He allowed the ‘sound without the words’ reading as the alternative.

Still open

How much weight the change of case can bear is debated among grammarians. Some, such as Nigel Turner, allow that it may be meaningful in these two verses, while others find no consistent rule; the answer above does not depend on it.

From the classic commentators

The verb is to be taken in the sense of understood, as Mark 4:33; 1 Corinthians 14:2, which explains the apparent discrepancy with Acts 9:7.Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament, on Acts 22:9 (1887)

so these men heard the voice that spake to Saul, but heard not the articulate words. Apparent discrepancies like these, in the different narratives of the same scene in one and the same book of Acts, furnish the strongest confirmation both of the facts themselves and of the book which records them.Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary, on Acts 9:7 (1871)