Then Saul, (who also is called Paul,) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him,
Acts 13:9 (KJV)
No. The voice on the Damascus road says “Saul, Saul,” the disciple sent to him says “Brother Saul,” and Luke goes on calling him Saul for four more chapters. Then, on Cyprus, he writes that Saul “also is called Paul.” Two names, and nobody in Acts renames him.
The voice on the road
Saul was on his way to Damascus with letters to bring believers back bound, the same man who had stood by at Stephen’s stoning and dragged men and women to prison. A light from heaven shone round him, and Acts 9:4 goes on: “And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” When the Lord sends a disciple named Ananias to him, in 9:11 he gives the address and the name: “enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus.”
After the baptism Luke still writes Saul. “Saul increased the more in strength,” in 9:22. “When Saul was come to Jerusalem,” in 9:26. In 11:25 Barnabas goes “to Tarsus, for to seek Saul,” and the two of them teach at Antioch for a whole year. Even the Holy Ghost, sending them out in 13:2, says, “Separate me Barnabas and Saul.” When Luke is telling the story himself, rather than quoting someone, the last time he writes “Saul” is the verse at the top of this page. After it he writes Paul.
Brother Saul
Ananias objected, in 9:13: “Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem.” The Lord answered, in 9:15, that this man was “a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel.”
He went anyway, to the man who had come to arrest people like him:
And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.
Acts 9:17 (KJV)
That is the first word any disciple says to him in Acts: Brother. God did not wait for Saul to become someone else before calling him. He called him by the name he had, and the man God sent called him family.
Where Luke starts writing Paul
The verse at the top happens on the island of Cyprus, in front of its governor, whom the King James calls “the deputy of the country,” a man named “Sergius Paulus,” in 13:7. A sorcerer opposes them, and Luke writes, “Then Saul, (who also is called Paul,).” Four verses later it is “Paul and his company.” From there on, as the work moves among Gentiles and Roman officials, Luke uses Paul. He never says why, and he does not connect it with the governor’s name.
Later, in 22:28, Paul tells a Roman commander, “But I was free born,” a Roman citizen from birth, so a second name is no surprise. Acts never says when he got it.
God does rename people
The renaming story is easy to believe because God does rename people. In Genesis 35:10, “God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel.” Jesus tells Simon, in John 1:42, “thou shalt be called Cephas.” And Luke himself records it when it happens: in Acts 4:36, Joses, “who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas.”
For Saul he records nothing like that. Nothing in Acts says “no more Saul,” the way Genesis says “no more Jacob.” When Paul retells the road twice, the voice still says “Saul, Saul,” the second time spoken, he says, “in the Hebrew tongue,” his own people’s language. His letters open with Paul, and writing to Rome he still says, in Romans 11:1, “I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin”: the tribe of King Saul, whose name he carried.
What changed at Damascus is what the churches in Judea heard about him, in Galatians 1:23: “he which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed.” Readers sometimes add a detail the text never had, the way Lucifer, a word from one taunt against the king of Babylon, became a name for Satan. A renaming at Damascus is the same kind of addition.
By the name he had
None of this takes away what did happen to him. Paul himself wrote, in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” The man was made new, and nobody gave him a new name for it.
In Isaiah 43:1 God says to his people, “I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.” On the road to Damascus he did that with a persecutor. God met Saul by the name he already had and claimed him, and the first believer who touched him called him brother.