Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/139

Rh A C T A C T 123 reign of Queen Mary and the early part of the reign of James VI. ; but the logomachy of subsequent legislation is intolerable to the consulter. Irish Acts may be said to commence A.D. 1310, in the reign of Edward II., and to close with the union with the British Parlia ment in 1801. From the former date, however, there is a break till 1429. In 1495 Poyning s Law provided that no bill should be introduced into the Irish Parliament which has not pre viously received the royal assent in England; and till 1782 the Parliament of Ireland remained in tutelage to that of England. Since 1801 it has been incorporated with the Parliament of Great Britain. ACT OF SEDERUNT, in Scotch Laio, an ordinance for regulating the forms of procedure before the Court of Session, passed by the judges in virtue of a power con ferred by an Act of the Scotch Parliament, 1540, c. 93. In former times this power was in several instances clearly exceeded, and such Acts of Sederunt required to be rati fied by the Scotch Parliament; but for more than a century and a half Acts of Sederunt have been almost exclusively confined to matters relating to the regulation of judicial procedure. Many recent statutes contain a clause empower ing the court to make the necessary Acts of Sederunt. A quorum of nine judges is reqxiired to pass an Act of Sederunt. ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, the fifth among the canonical books of the New Testament. What has to be said on this book will naturally fall under the following heads: The state of the text; the authorship; the object of the work ; the date and the place of its composition. The State of the Text. The Acts is found in two MSS. generally assigned to the 4th century, the Codex Sinai- twis, in St Petersburg, and the Codex Vaticanus, in Rome; in one MS. assigned to the 5th century, the Codex Alex andrians, in the British Museum ; in two MSS. belonging to the 6th century, the Codex Bezce, in Cambridge, and the Codex Lcntdianus, in Oxford ; and in one of the 9th century, the Codex Palimpsestus Porfirianus, in St Peters burg, with the exception of chapter first and eight verses of chapter second. Large fragments are contained in a MS. of the 5th century, the Codex Ephrcemi, in Paris. Fragments are contained in five other MSS., none of which is later than the 9th century. These are all the uncial MSS. containing the Acts or portions of it. The MSS. in Oxford and Cambridge differ widely from the others. This is especially the case with the Cambridge MS., the Codex Bezce, which is said to contain no less than six hundred interpolations. Scrivener, who has edited this MS. with great care, says, &quot; While the general course of the history and the spirit of the work remain the same as in our commonly received text, we perpetually encounter long passages in Codex Bezce which resemble that text only as a loose and explanatory paraphrase recalls the original form from which it sprung; save that there is no difference in the language in this instance, it is hardly an exaggeration of the facts to assert that Codex D [i.e., Codex Bezce] reproduces the textus receptm of the Acts much in the same way that one of the best Chaldee Targums does the Hebrew of the Old Testament, so wide are the variations in the diction, so constant and inveterate the practice of expanding the narrative by means of inter polations.&quot; Scrivener here assumes that the additions of the Codsx Bezce are interpolations, and this is the opinion of nearly all critics. There is one, however, Bornemann, who thinks that the Codex Bezce contains the original text, and that the others are mutilated. But even sup posing that we were quite sure that the additions were interpolations, the Codex Bezce makes it more difficult to determine what the real text was. Scrivener, with good reason, supposes that the Codex Bezce is derived from an original which would most likely belong to the third cen tury at the latest. Authorship of the Work. In treating this subject we begin with the external evidence. The first mention of the authorship of the Acts in a well- authenticated book occurs in the treatise of Irenseus against heresies, written between the years 182 and 188 A.D. Irenseus names St Luke as the author, as if the fact were well known and undoubted. He attributes the third Gospel to him, and calls him &quot; a follower and disciple of apostles &quot; (//. iii. 10, 1). He states that &quot;he was inseparable from Paul, and was his fellow- worker in the gospel&quot; (//. iii. 14, 1). The next mention occurs in the Stromata of Clemens Alexandrinus, written about 195 A.D., where part of St Paul s speech to the Athenians is quoted with the words, &quot; Even as Luke also, in the Acts of the Apostles, records Paul as saying&quot; (Strom, v. xii. 82, p. 696, Pott). The Acts of the Apostles is quoted by Tertullian as Scripture, and assigned to St Luke (Adv. Mar. v. 2 and 3). Origen speaks of &quot; Luke who wrote the Gospel and the Acts &quot; (Eus. II. E. vi. 25) ; and Eusebius includes the Acts of the Apostles in his summary of the books of the New Testament (Hist. Eccl. iii. 25). The Muratorian canon, generally assigned to the end of the second or beginning of the third century, includes the Acts of the Apostles, assigns it to St Luke, and says that he was an eye-witness of the facts recorded. There is thus unanimous testimony up to the time of Eusebius that St Luke was the author of the Acts. This unanimity is not disturbed by the circum stance that some heretics rejected the work, for they did not deny the authorship of the book, but refused to acknowledge it as a source of dogmatic truth. After the time of Eusebius we find statements to the effect that the Acts was little known. &quot; The existence of this book,&quot; Chrysostom says, &quot; is not known to many, nor the person who wrote and composed it.&quot; And Photius. in the ninth century, says, &quot; Some maintain that it was Clement of Rome that was the writer of the Acts, others that it was Barnabas, and others that it was Luke the Evangelist.&quot; Irenseus makes such copious quotations from the Acts that we can feel sure that he had before him substantially our Acts. We cannot go further back than Irenasus with certainty. If, as we shall see, the writer of the Acts was also the writer of the third Gospel, we have Justin Martyr s testimony (about 150 A.D.) for the existence of the third Gospel in his day, and therefore a likelihood that the Acts existed also. But we have no satisfactory evidence that Justin used the Acts, and there is nothing in the Apostolic Fathers, nor in any work anterior to the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, written probably soon after 177 A.D., to prove the existence of the Acts. The weight of external evidence therefore goes entirely for St Luke as the author of the Acts. But it has to be noticed, that the earliest testimony is more than a hundred years later than the events described in the Acts. We have also to take into account that Irenseus was not critical. We find him calling the Pastor of Hermas Scrip ture; Clemens Alexandrinus also calls the Pastor inspired; and Origen not merely attributes inspiration to the work, but makes the author of it the Hermas mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans. All scholars reject the testimony of Irenseus, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Origen in this matter. The question arises, How far are we to trust them in others of a similar nature ] We turn to the internal evidence. And in the very commencement we find the author giving himself out as the person who wrote the third Gospel. This claim has been almost universally acknowledged. There is a remark able similarity of style in both. The same peculiar modes of expression continually occur in both; and throughout both there exist continual references backward and for-