112 The Fundamentals set out to destroy. To become a Christian was to incur the hatred, the contempt, the torments and the violent deaths suf- fered by Christians in that day. Why then this sudden change in Paul’s own views regarding the unpopular teachings of the Nazarene? Would he have endured “the loss of all things” and exulted over it, for what he knew was a fraud? Would he have spent a life of the most arduous toil to induce others to make every earthly sacrifice while he knew that behind it all he was practising a delusion? I t would be an imposture as unprofitable as it was perilous, both to himself the deceiver and to the others whom he deceived. The theory confutes it- self. Only the sternest conviction that he had received a divine revelation could have induced Paul to pass through what he himself had suffered, or to have asked others to do the same. “If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most pitiable” (1 Cor. 15:19). But had he practiced a deception, he could not have suc- cessfully carried it out. Men sometimes act capriciously. Sup- pose that Paul “just did it” without any motive that can be imagined; then he must have ignominiously failed in his at- tempt to perpetuate such a fraud. How could he, e. g., have become such an adept in the mysteries and secrets of the new religion as to be an authority and an apostle of it, if he had to depend for his special knowledge on information received from men who knew well by bitter experience that he was their capital enemy? I t must have come in another way, and his own account makes it plain. “For neither did I receive it [the Gospel] from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:12). Had he fabricated the story of his conversion he would certainly have located it in a place so remote or hidden that there could be no witnesses to refute. [Joe Smith, e. g., and the golden plates of the Book of Mormon.] Instead of that the miracle of Paul’s conversion, with its great light from heaven exceed- ing the brightness of the sun, is placed in the public highway
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