But the record says nothing about thunderstorm and fever, and both combined could not produce
such an effect upon any sensible man, much less upon the history of the world. Who ever heard
the thunder speak in Hebrew or in any other articulate language? And had not Paul and Luke eyes
and ears and common sense, as well as we, to distinguish an ordinary phenomenon of nature from
a supernatural vision?- The Vision-Hypothesis resolves the conversion into a natural psychological process and
into an honest self-delusion. It is the favorite theory of modern rationalists, who scorn all other
explanations, and profess the highest respect for the intellectual and moral purity and greatness of
Paul.^388 It is certainly more rational and creditable than the second hypothesis, because it ascribes
the mighty change not to outward and accidental phenomena which pass away, but to internal
causes. It assumes that an intellectual and moral fermentation was going on for some time in the
mind of Paul, and resulted at last, by logical necessity, in an entire change of conviction and conduct,
without any supernatural influence, the very possibility of which is denied as being inconsistent
with the continuity of natural development. The miracle in this case was simply the mythical and
symbolical reflection of the commanding presence of Jesus in the thoughts of the apostle.
That Paul saw a vision, he says himself, but he meant, of course, a real, objective, personal
appearance of Christ from heaven, which was visible to his eyes and audible to his ears, and at the
same time a revelation to his mind through the medium of the senses.^389 The inner spiritual
manifestation^390 was more important than the external, but both combined produced conviction.
The vision-theory turns the appearance of Christ into a purely subjective imagination, which the
apostle mistook for an objective fact.^391
which otherwise would have died like Essenism, without leaving a trace of its memory. He is the founder of independent
Protestantism. He represents le christianisme conquérant et voyageur. Jesus never dreamed of such disciples; yet it is they who
will keep his work alive and secure it eternity." In this work, and more fully in his St. Paul, Renan gives a picture of the great
apostle which is as strange a mixture of truth and error, and nearly as incoherent and fanciful, as his romance of Jesus in the Vie
de Jésus.(^388) So Strauss (Leben Jesu, § 138, in connection with the resurrection of Christ), Baur (with much more seriousness and force,
in his Paul, P. I., ch. 3) and the whole Tübingen School, Holsten, Hilgenfeld, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, Hausrath, and the author of
Supernatural Religion (III. 498 sqq.). Baur at last gave up the theory as a failure (1860, see below). But Holsten revived and
defended it very elaborately and ingeniously in his essay on the Christusvision des Paulus, in Hilgenfeld’s "Zeitschrift" for 1861.
W. Beyschlag (of Halle) very ably refuted it in an article: Die Bekehrung des Paulus mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die
Erklärungsversuche von Baur und Holsten, in the "Studien und Kritiken" for 1864, pp. 197-264. Then Holsten came out with
an enlarged edition of his essay in book form, Zum Evang. des Paulus und des Petrus, 1868, with a long reply to Beyschlag.
Pfleiderer repeated the vision-theory in his Hibbert Lectures (1885).
Some English writers have also written on Paul’s conversion in opposition to this modern vision-theory, namely, R.
Macpherson: The Ressurection of Jesus Christ (against Strauss), Edinb., 1867, Lect. XIII., pp. 316-360; Geo. P. Fisher:
Supernatural Origin of Christianity, N. York, new ed. 1877, pp. 459-470, comp. his essay on "St. Paul" in Discussions in History
and Theology, N.Y. 1880, pp. 487-511; A. B. Bruce (of Glasgow): Paul’s Conversion and the Pauline Gospel, in the "Presbyt
Review" for Oct. 1880 (against Pfleiderer, whose work on Paulinism Bruce calls "an exegetical justification and a philosophical
dissipation of the Reformed interpretation of the Pauline system of doctrine").
(^389) He describes it as an οὐράνιος ὀπτασίαActs 26:19, and says that he saw Christ, that Christ was seen by him, 1 Cor. 9:1;
15:8. So the vision of the women at the tomb of the risen Lord is called an ὀπτασία τῶν ἀγγέλων, Luke 24:23. But even Peter,
who was less critical than Paul, well knew how to distinguish between an actual occurrence (an ἀληθῶς γενόμενον) and a merely
subjective vision (a ὅραμα) Acts 12:9. Objective visions are divine revelations through the senses; subjective visions are
hallucinations and deceptions.
(^390) Gal. 1:16, ἀποκαλύψαι τόν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί, within me, in my inmost soul and consciousness.
(^391) Baur was disposed to charge this confusion upon the author of the Acts and to claim for Paul a more correct conception of
the Christophany, as being a purely inner event or "a spiritual manifestation of Christ to his deeper self-consciousness" (Gal.
1:16, ἐν ἐμοί); but this is inconsistent with Paul’s own language in 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8. Holsten admits that, without a full conviction
A.D. 1-100.