Hechos 26:24

24. Loud voice Filling the audience room with its imperious tones.

Mad Become a monomaniac by poring over old manuscripts. The words for much learning are many writings, and often, by implication, much erudition. Plainly what suggests to Festus the idea of Paul’s half-crazed condition was his having a vision of a man who had risen from the dead, and thence having asserted a resurrection. And what suggested to Festus the cause of this monomania, namely, many manuscripts, was the fact that Paul drew the authority for both his vision and his doctrines from the Old Testament records. To say, as some do, that he saw Paul reading old parchments is not proved, yet may have been additionally true. To say with Dr. Hackett that Festus had heard that Paul was a scholar is to go still farther for a hypothetical solution when we have a clear one on the face of the record before us. Festus could not but know, at least, that Moses was held the lawgiver of the Jews, not only more ancient than Solon or Romulus, but a thousand years earlier than Homer himself. He knew that the prophets were the body of old Jewish literature. He saw that Paul had deeply read these musty records, and was deducing the risen Jesus from their pages. What, then, did he infer but that Paul had pored over the old archives until their conceptions had shaped themselves in his brain to a monomaniac day-dream about a dead man’s living and appearing in celestial splendour before his eyes? It was a most natural thought to a secular military Roman after the model of Pilate and Festus.