Converts
A convert is someone whose face has been turned toward Yahweh — moved out of iniquity, idolatry, or estrangement and brought into the worship and people of the God of Israel. Scripture records this turning in three registers: the inward conversion of an Israelite who had grown cold or wandered, the proselyte from the nations who joins himself to Yahweh, and the individual narrative of a man, woman, or city that meets the living God for the first time and is changed.
The Inward Turn
The vocabulary of conversion in Scripture is the vocabulary of turning. The psalmist asks for restored joy and resolves to teach his ways so that "sinners will be converted to you" (Ps 51:13); the law of Yahweh itself does the work, "restoring the soul" and "making wise the simple" (Ps 19:7). David's prayer is for the willing spirit that makes the turning hold (Ps 51:12).
The wisdom tradition presses the same call into proverb. Sirach exhorts the wavering reader: "Do not be ashamed to turn from iniquity, And do not stand before a rushing stream" (Sir 4:26); "Do not delay to turn to him; And do not put it off from day to day. For suddenly his indignation will go forth; And in the time of vengeance you will be consumed" (Sir 5:7). The path is named explicitly — "Turn to the Lord and forsake sins, Supplicate before his face and lessen offence. Turn to the Most High, and turn away from iniquity, And vehemently hate the disgusting thing" (Sir 17:25-26). The promise is that "to those who repent he grants a return, And comforts those who lose patience" (Sir 17:24). Repentance is paired with cleansing: "Turn from iniquity, and purify your hands; And from all transgressions cleanse your heart" (Sir 38:10).
Saul, called to be Israel's first king, illustrates the turning at the level of an individual life: "when he had turned his back to go from Samuel, God gave him another heart" (1Sa 10:9). Jesus uses the same word of Peter on the eve of his denial — "you, when once you have turned again, establish your brothers" (Lu 22:32) — making conversion a category that applies to a disciple as well as to a sinner. James generalizes the apostolic case: "if any among you⁺ errs from the truth, and one converts him; let him know, that he who converts a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death, and will cover a multitude of sins" (Jas 5:19-20). Love is the sign of the converted heart, "for love is of God; and everyone who loves is begotten of God, and knows God" (1Jn 4:7).
The Stranger Who Joins Himself
From the beginning the law makes provision for the convert from outside. The Passover statute prescribes the path: "when a stranger sojourns with you, and [before he] keeps the Passover to Yahweh, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he will be as one who is born in the land" (Ex 12:48). The post-exilic community ate the Passover with "all such as had separated themselves to them from the filthiness of the nations of the land, to seek Yahweh, the God of Israel" (Ezr 6:21). By the time of Jesus's last week, the practice had reached far enough that "there were certain Greeks among those who went up to worship at the feast" (Jn 12:20).
The prophets push the door wider. Where Deuteronomy had excluded the castrated man — "He who is castrated, or has his penis cut off, will not enter into the assembly of Yahweh" (De 23:1) — Isaiah promises that the foreigner who has joined himself to Yahweh is not to be separated from his people, and the eunuch is not to call himself "a dry tree" (Is 56:3). Sirach recognizes the same horizon: "cast your fear upon all the nations" (Sir 36:2), the petition that the God of Israel be acknowledged outside Israel.
Ruth the Moabite
Ruth's confession to Naomi is the convert's vow stated in its bare form. "Don't entreat me to leave you, and to return from following after you, for where you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people will be my people, and your God my God" (Ru 1:16). What follows is the convert's slow incorporation: she is identified to Boaz as "the Moabite damsel who came back with Naomi out of the country of Moab" (Ru 2:6), gleans behind his reapers from morning on (Ru 2:7), and "stuck by the maidens of Boaz, to glean to the end of barley harvest and of wheat harvest; and she dwelt with her mother-in-law" (Ru 2:23). Her obedience to Naomi's instruction is unreserved — "All that you say I will do" (Ru 3:5) — and Boaz's verdict on the foreigner who has joined Israel is unqualified: "all the city of my people does know that you are a worthy woman" (Ru 3:11).
Nineveh's Repentance
Nineveh, founded out of the Assyrian heartland (Ge 10:11) and later Sennacherib's capital (2Ki 19:36), is a great pagan city against which Nahum's burden is pronounced (Na 1:1) and whose desolation is foretold by Zephaniah (Zep 2:13). Yet Yahweh sends Jonah there with the express purpose that it might turn. "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me" (Jon 1:2). When Jonah finally obeys, the response runs from top to bottom of the city: "the people of Nineveh believed [the Speech of] God; and they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them" (Jon 3:5). The king himself rises from his throne, lays aside his robe, and covers himself with sackcloth (Jon 3:6); he proclaims through the city that man and beast alike fast, "and let them cry mightily to God: yes, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in his hands" (Jon 3:8). The verdict is given in the same vocabulary the wisdom writers used of Israel: "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil which he said he would do to them; and he did not do it" (Jon 3:10).
The book closes with Yahweh's defense of his pity for "Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than sixscore thousand of man who can't discern between their right hand and their left hand" (Jon 4:11) — the convert-city set against the prophet's reluctance. Jesus reads the episode as a precedent against his own generation: "The men of Nineveh will stand up in the judgment with this generation, and will condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and look, a greater than Jonah is here" (Lu 11:32).
The Mariners on the Sea
A second conversion, smaller and earlier, runs alongside the Ninevite one. The crew Jonah hires at Joppa is a mixed crew of pagan sailors, "and cried every man to his god" (Jon 1:5). When the lots reveal Jonah, they interrogate him until he gives them his confession: "I am a Hebrew; and I fear Yahweh, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land" (Jon 1:9). Their fear escalates from fear of the storm to fear of Yahweh: "Then the men were exceedingly afraid" (Jon 1:10). Even as they prepare to throw him over, they pray to the God they have just learned of — "We urge you, O Yahweh, we urge you, let us not perish for this man's soul, and don't lay innocent blood on us" (Jon 1:14). When the sea ceases from its raging, the conversion is sealed in worship: "Then the men feared Yahweh exceedingly; and they offered a sacrifice to Yahweh, and made vows" (Jon 1:16).
Nebuchadnezzar's Confession
The Babylonian king who carried Judah into exile becomes, by the end of Daniel 4, a Gentile monarch confessing Yahweh. His decree opens with a doxology meant for "all the peoples, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth" (Da 4:1): "It has seemed good to me to show the signs and wonders that the Most High God has wrought toward me. How great are his signs! And how mighty are his wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation to generation" (Da 4:2-3). The conversion is forced on him by humiliation — the seven times of madness in which he eats grass with the beasts of the field — but the recovery is a confession: "at the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up my eyes to heaven, and my understanding returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and I praised and honored him who lives forever" (Da 4:34). The decree closes with a verdict that fits any convert: "Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven; for all his works are truth, and his ways justice; and those who walk in pride he is able to abase" (Da 4:37).
The First Disciples
In the Fourth Gospel the first conversions are immediate and contagious. Andrew, "one of the two who heard John [speak], and followed him" (Jn 1:40), goes straight to his brother — "He finds first his own brother Simon, and says to him, We have found the Messiah (which is, being interpreted, Christ)" (Jn 1:41). The next day Philip's call comes from Jesus directly — "Follow me" (Jn 1:43) — and Philip in turn finds Nathaniel and says, "We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph" (Jn 1:45). The pattern is set: the convert becomes the witness to the next convert in the same hour.
Nicodemus
A second pattern in John is conversion that ripens slowly. Nicodemus is introduced as "a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews" (Jn 3:1) who comes to Jesus by night and acknowledges, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, except God be with him" (Jn 3:2). Jesus addresses him as "the teacher of Israel" who does not yet understand (Jn 3:10). When the council seeks to arrest Jesus, "Nicodemus, he who came to him before, being one of them" (Jn 7:50), interrupts the proceedings with the question, "Does our law judge a man, except it first hear from him and know what he does?" (Jn 7:51). The Fourth Gospel's burial scene, which would carry the story to its end, lies inside the segment of John (19:36-21:25) that the Updated Version does not yet print, so the reader has Nicodemus's defense of Jesus before the council as the last UPDV witness to his trajectory.
The Samaritan Woman and the City
An extended single-conversion narrative occupies the bulk of John 4 — the woman at Sychar's well. Jesus, weary, asks her for a drink (Jn 4:6-7), and the unlikeliness of the request is the hinge — "How is it that you, being a Jew, ask me for a drink, being a Samaritan woman?" (Jn 4:9). The exchange moves from water to husbands ("for you have had five husbands; and he whom you now have is not your husband: this you have said truly," Jn 4:18) to mountain and worship ("the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such does the Father seek to be his worshipers," Jn 4:23) to the messianic self-disclosure: "I am he who speaks to you" (Jn 4:26).
The converted woman becomes evangelist: "the woman left her waterpot, and went away into the city, and says to the men, Come, see a man, who told me all things that I ever did: can this be the Christ?" (Jn 4:28-29). The result is a town's worth of converts. "From that city many of the Samaritans believed on him because of the word of the woman, who testified, He told me all things that [ever] I did" (Jn 4:39); when they have heard him themselves, they say to her, "Now we believe, not because of your speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Savior of the world" (Jn 4:42). The Samaritan grateful leper in Luke gives the same trajectory in miniature — "he fell on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan" (Lu 17:16) — the only one of the ten healed who returned to glorify God.
The Gerasene Demoniac
A man "always, night and day, in the tombs and in the mountains, he was crying out, and cutting himself with stones" (Mr 5:5) stands in the Synoptics as an image of the convert reclaimed from outside the bounds of the human community. After Jesus passes through, he is found "sitting, clothed and in his right mind" (Mr 5:15). Luke's parallel narrates the aftermath: the man "from whom the demons had gone out prayed him that he might be with him" (Lu 8:38), and Jesus instead commissions him as a witness. "Return to your house, and declare how much God has done for you. And he went his way, publishing throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him" (Lu 8:39).
The Man Born Blind
In John 9 the healing produces the convert. Pressed by the Pharisees, the man cuts through their theology with a plain testimony: "Whether he is a sinner, I don't know: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see" (Jn 9:25). He is cast out of the synagogue, and Jesus seeks him out: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" (Jn 9:35). The answer is the consummation of the conversion: "Lord, I believe. And he worshiped him" (Jn 9:38).
Zacchaeus and the Gentile Officers
A son of Abraham can be converted as much as a stranger. To Zacchaeus the rich tax-collector Jesus says, "Today has salvation come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham" (Lu 19:9) — conversion as rescue from inside the covenant. From outside Israel, a Gentile officer sends elders of the Jews to plead for his slave, "asking him that he would come and save his slave" (Lu 7:3). At the cross, a captain who has watched Jesus die confesses, "Truly this man was the Son of God" (Lu 23:47). The Lukan figures of conversion thus span the social map — a tax-collector inside Israel, a Gentile officer petitioning Israel's elders for help, and a Gentile officer at the foot of a cross.