Sunstroke and Paul’s Conversion
One of the German rational higher critics in writing of Paul’s conviction on the road to Damascus, declares that Paul got a sunstroke, and in his fever he thought he saw visions and heard voices, but that the whole thing was a subjective delusion and not an objective reality. A. F. Schauffler remarks in the Sunday School Times: “Now, I never knew that sunstroke turns a persecutor into a preacher, or that it makes an evangelical man out of a skeptic. One of my classmates who was with me in city missions got half a sunstroke in the city of New York, and he never did another stroke of work for a year and six months. Paul gets a full sunstroke and begins instantly to preach marvelously. If this German theory be correct, then you had better close your theological seminaries and stand all your young men out against a brick wall and sunstroke the whole of them, and then ordain them.”