This familiar account of the conversion of the Philippian jailer begins with Paul and Silas curing the madness of a young woman of the city whose insanity had been used by some unscrupulous men for their own personal gain. There was the belief in those days that insanity was a strangely special gift from the gods, a tool they used to convey their messages to mere mortals; it was based on the idea that since the insane girl had no mind of her own, the gods could put their own divine thoughts out on earth through her. Thus, she was thought to have a gift for soothsaying or fortune-telling, a most marketable commodity in that era and indeed in any era. Obviously, since she was insane, she was not the one to do the marketing, nor was she the one to profit from it. So when she was healed, those…