Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/142

Rh 126 ACTS OF THE APOSTLES robe. The people called out, &quot; The voice of a god, and not of a man.&quot; &quot; Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him because he gave not God the glory, and becoming worm- eaten, he died&quot; (xii 21-23). Both accounts agree in representing Herod as suddenly struck with disease be cause he did not check the impiety of his flatterers, but they agree in almost nothing else; and it is difficult to conceive that the one writer knew the account of the other. Which account is most to be trusted, depends upon the answer given to the question which is the more credible his torian. The second case relates to the Egyptian mentioned in the question of the tribune to St Paul, in Acts xxi. 38, &quot; You are not then the Egyptian who, some time ago, made a disturbance, and led into the wilderness the four thousand of the sicarii]&quot; Josephus mentions this Egyptian, both in his Antiquities (xx. 8, 6) and in the Jewish War (ii. 13, 5). In the Jewish War (ii. 13, 3), Josephus describes the sicarii, and then passes on, after a short section, to the Egyptian. He states that he collected thirty thousand people, led them out of the wilderness &quot; to the mount called the Mount of Olives, which,&quot; he says (Ant. xx. 8, 6) in words similar to those in Acts i. 12, &quot;lies opposite to the city five furlongs distant.&quot; On this Felix attacked him, killed some, cap tured others, and scattered the band. The Egyptian, however, escaped with some followers. Hence the question in the Acts. There are some striking resemblances between the words used by both writers. The numbers differ; but St Luke gives the numbers of the sicarii, Josephus the numbers of the entire multitude led astray. The third case is the one which has attracted most attention. In the speech which Gamaliel delivers, in Acts v. 35-39, it is said, &quot; Some time before this, Theudas rose up, saying that he was some one, to whom a number of about four hundred men attached themselves, who was cut off, and all who followed him were broken up and came to nought. After him rose up Judas the Galilean, in the days of the registration, and he took away people after him; and he also perished, and all that followed him were scat tered.&quot; On turning to Josephus we find that both Theudas and Judas the Galilean are mentioned. The circumstances related of both are the same as in the Acts, but the dates are different. According to Josephus, Theudas gave himself out as a prophet, in the reign of Claudius, more than ten years after the speech of Gamaliel had been delivered, while Judas appeared at the period of the registration, and therefore a considerable time before Theudas. To explain this difficulty, some have supposed that there may have been another Theudas not men tioned by Josephus, or that Josephus is wrong in his chronology. Others suppose that St Luke made a mis take in regard to Theudas, and is right in regard to Judas. Keini maintains that St Luke has made the mis take, and suggests that possibly it may be based upon the passage of Josephus; and Holtzmann has gone more minutely into this argument. Holtzmann draws attention to the nature of the sections of Josephus which contain the references to Theudas and Judas (Ant. xx. 5, 1, 2). He says that nearly all the principal statements made in these short sections emerge somewhere in the Acts : the census of Quirinus, the great famine, Alexander as a member of a noble Jewish family, and Ananias as high priest. More over, St Luke has preserved the order of Josephus in men tioning Theudas and Judas; but Josephus says &quot; the sons of Judas,&quot; whereas St Luke says &quot; Judas.&quot; &quot; Is it not likely,&quot; Holtzmann argues, &quot; that St Luke had before his mind this passage of Josephus, but forgot that it was the sons of Judas that were after Theudas, and not the father 1 ?&quot; He adds also, that in the short passage in the Acts there are .five peculiar expressions, identical or nearly identical with the expressions used by Josephus, and comes to the conclusion that St Luke knew the works of Josephus. He finds further traces of this knowledge in the circumstance that, in Acts xiii. 20-21, St Luke agrees in his statements with Josephus where both differ from the Old Testament. He also adduces certain Greek words niiich he supposes St Luke derived from his reading of Josephus. Max Krenkel, in making an addition to this argument, tries to show, from a comparison of passages, that St Luke had Josephus before his mind in the narrative of the childhood of Christ; and he supposes that the expedient attributed to the apostle Paul, of setting the Pharisees against the Sadducees (Acts xxiii. 6), is based upon a similar narrative given in Josephus (Bell. Jud. ii. 21, 3, and Vita, 26 ff.). The importance of this investigation is great; for if Holtz mann and Krenkel were to prove their point, a likelihood would be established that the Acts of the Apostles, or at least a portion of it, was written after 93 A.D., the year in which the Antiquities of Josephus was published, accord ing to a passage occurring in the work itself. Meanwhile, the fact that important portions of the narrative must have been written by an eye-witness of the events recorded, combined with the unity of style and purpose in the book, are cogent arguments on the other side. The speeches in the Acts deserve special notice. The question occurs here, Did St Luke follow the plan adopted by all historians of his age, or is he a singular exception] The historians of his age claimed the liberty of working up, in their own language, the speeches recorded by them. They did not dream of verbal accuracy ; even when they had the exact words of the speakers before them, they preferred to mould the thoughts of the speakers into their own methods of presentation. Besides this, historians do not hesitate to give to the characters of their history speeches which they never uttered. The method of direct speech is useful in producing a vivid idea of what was supposed to pass through the mind of the speaker, and therefore is used continually to make the narrative lively. Now it is generally believed that St Luke has followed the practice of his contemporaries. There are some of his speeches that are evidently the summaries of thoughts that passed through the minds of individuals or of multitudes. Others unquestionably claim to be reports of speeches really delivered. But all these speeches have, to a large extent, the same style as that, of the narrative. They have passed to a large extent through the writer s mind, and are given in his words. They are, moreover, all of them the merest abstracts. The speech of St Paul at Athens, as given by St Luke, would not occupy more than a minute and a half in delivery. The longest speech in the Acts, that of the martyr Stephen, would not take more than ten minutes to deliver. It is not likely that either speech lasted so short a time. But this circumstance, while destroying their verbal accuracy, does not destroy their authenticity; and it must strike all that, in most of the speeches, there is a singular appropriateness, there is an exact fitting-in of the thoughts to the character, and there are occasionally allusions of an obscure nature, which point very clearly to their authenticity. The one strong objection urged against this inference, is that the speeches of St Peter and St Paul show no doctrinal differences, such as are said to appear in the Epistles; but the argument has no force, unless it be proved that St Paul s doctrine of justification is different from the creed of St Peter or St James. Not the least important of the questions which influence critics in determining the authorship of the Acts is that of miracles. Most of those who think that miracles are im possible, come to the conclusion that the narratives con taining them are legendary, and accordingly they maintain that the first portion of the Acts, relating to the early