Untimely Birth

Paul uses an unusual phrase hosper ektroma “untimely birth” to describe his vision of Jesus and conversion to Christianity (1 Cor. 15:8). N.T. Wright points out that normally, ektroma refers to a miscarriage or abortion, and clearly Paul doesn’t mean the word in it’s normal, literal usage since the result of such a birth is death. But it could refer to the timing of his birth into Christ, referring to “his not being ready to be born.”

Wright notes that this phrase might also refer to the drama of the event: “He was, as it were, ripped from the womb in a traumatic way, blinded by the sudden light like an infant whose organs had not yet developed sufficiently to cope with the demands fo the outside world… Paul explains the difference between himself and the others not in terms of his seeing Jesus being a different sort of ‘seeing’, but in terms of his own personal unreadiness for such an experience. It took an emergency operation, he may be saying, to bring him into the list of witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection; his ‘seeing’ of Jesus was the same as theirs in terms of the Jesus they saw, but it was radically different in terms of his own experience, being ripped from the womb of zealous Judaism, to come face to face with the crucified and risen Lord.” 

The phrase is used twice in the Septuagint. First, in Job 3:16, where Job laments his life wishing that he might never have been born alive — that he might have been still born. In that sense, Paul could be referring “not to the process of his ‘birth’ as such, but to the condition he was in immediately before it: he was like someone as good as dead, unable to see anything, but all that was changed in a fresh act of life-giving grace.” Wright points out that the other possible allusion may be Numbers 12:12 where Moses prays for Miriam who has been struck with leprosy for her insurrection against Moses. This actually fits quite well with Paul’s situation: “If Paul is alluding to this story he is doing so in order to align himself with Miriam, and the early church with Moses, the ones who have seen the Lord face to face. Hosper to ektromati, again, would then allude, not so much to his experience of being ‘born’, as to the state he was in as a result of his persecution of those who had rightly claimed to have seen the Lord.”