Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/143

Rh ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 127 church in Jerusalem and to St Peter, is in the highest degree untrustworthy. The writer, it is maintained, had no personal knowledge of those early days, and received the stories after they had gone through a long process of transmutation. They appeal, for instance, to the account of the Pentecost, where the miracle of speaking with tongues is described. They say that it is plain, on a comparison of the Epistle to the Corinthians with the Acts, that St Paul meant one thing by the gift of tongues, and the writer of the Acts another. And the inference is at hand that, if the writer had known St Paul, he would have known what the gift of tongues was; and the possibility of such a mistake, it is said, implies a considerable distance from the time of the apostles and the primitive church. They point also to the curious parallelism between the miracles of St Peter and those of St Paul. St Peter begins his series of miracles by healing a lame man (iii. 2); so does St Paul (xiv. 8). St Peter exorcises evil spirits (v. 16; viii. 7); so does St Paul (xix. 15; xvi. 18). If St Peter deals with the magician Simon, St Paul encounters Elymas. If St Peter punishes with death (v. Iff.), St Paul punishes with blindness (xiii. 6ff.). If St Peter works miracles by his shadow (v. 15), not less powerful are the aprons and nap kins of St Paul (xix. 12). And, finally, if St Peter can raise Tabitha from the dead (ix. 36), St Paul is equally successful in the case of Eutychus (xx. 9). It is easy to see, also, that since there is no contemporary history with which to compare the statements in the Acts, and since many of the statements are of a summary nature, and very few dates are given, a critic who believes the narratives legendary will have no difficulty in finding many elements in the narratives confirmatory of his belief. But to those who believe in miracles the rest of the narrative seems plain and unvarnished. The parallelism between the miracles of St Peter and St Paul is accounted for by the fact that they acted in similar circumstances, and that actual events were at hand on which to base the paral lelism. At the same time, some who believe in the possi bility of miracles think that the Acts presents peculiar difficulties in this matter. They say that the healing by means of shadows and aprons is of a magical nature; that the death of Ananias and Sapphira, and the other destruc tive miracles, are out of harmony with the rest of the miracles of the New Testament ; and that the earthquakes that release St Peter and St Paul seem purposeless. The difficulties on this head, though real, are not however of great importance, nor do they tell very seriously against the received opinion that St Luke is the author of the work. We have thus given a general summary of the questions which come up in investigating the authorship of the Acts, and of the arguments used in settling this point. The conclusions based upon this evidence are very different. Some join the traditional opinion of the church to the modern idea of inspiration, and maintain that St Luke was the author of the &quot;work, that every discrepancy is merely apparent, and that every speech contains the real and genuine words of the speaker. Others maintain that St Luke is the writer, and that the book is justly placed in the canon; that the narrative is, on the whole, thoroughly trustworthy, and that neither its canonicity nor credibility is affected by the existence of real discrepancies in the narrative. Others hold that St Luke is the author, but that we have got in the book an ordinary narrative, with portions credible and portions incredible; that for the early portions of the work he had to trust mainly to his memory, dulled by distance from the scene of action and by lapse of time, and that he has given what he knew with the uncritical indifference to minute accuracy in time, circumstance, and word, which characterises all his con temporaries. Others maintain that St Luke is the author, but that, being a credulous and unscientific Christian, he recorded indeed in honesty all that he knew, but that he was deluded in his belief of miracles, and is often inaccu rate in his statement of facts. Others think that St Luke was not the author of the work. He may have been the original author of the diary of the Apostle Paul s travels in which the &quot;we &quot;.occurs; but the author of the Acts did not write the diary, but inserted it into his narrative after altering it for a special purpose, and the narrative was written long after St Paul and St Luke were dead. Others think that in the Acts we have the work of Timothy or of Silas, or of some one else. A considerable number imagine that St Luke had different written documents before him while composing, and a very few think that the work is the work of more than one writer. But as we have intimated, the weight of testimony is in favour of St Luke s authorship. Purpose. We have seen that the Acts of the Apostles is the work of one author possessed of no inconsiderable skill. This author evidently omits many things that he knew; he gives a short account of others of which he could have supplied accurate details, and, as in the case of St Paul, he has brought forward one side of the character prominently, and thrown the other into the shade. What motive could have led him to act thus ] What object had he in inserting what he has inserted, and omitting what he has omitted ( Most of the answers given to these questions have no important bearing on the question of the author ship of the Acts. But the case is different with the answer of the Tubingen school. The Tubingen school maintains that St Paul taught that the law was of no avail to Jew and Gentile, and that, therefore, the observance of it was unnecessary ; that St Peter and the other apostles taught that the observance of the law was necessary, and that they separated from St Paul on this point ; and that the early Christians were divided into two great classes those who held with St Paul, or the Gentile Christians, and those who held with St Peter, or the Jewish Christians. They further maintain that there prevailed a violent icon- troversy between these two parties in the church, until, a fusion took place towards the middle of the second half of the second century, and the Catholic Church arose. At what stage of this controversy was the Acts written 1 is the ques tion they put. St Peter, we have seen, is represented in the Acts as opening the church to the Gentiles. St Peter, and the rest of the apostles at Jerusalem admit the Gentiles on certain gentle conditions of refraining from things offered to idols, from animals suffocated, from blood, and from fornication. What could be the object of v such statements but to convince the Jewish Christians that they were wrong in pertinaciously adhering to their entire exclusion of the Gentiles, or insisting on their observance of the entire law 1 But St Paul is represented as observ ing the law, as sent forth by St Peter and the other apostles, as going continually to the Jews first, and as appearing in the temple and coming up with collections for the Jerusalem church. Was not this also intended to reconcile the Jewish Christians to St Paul? Then the great doctrines of St Paul all but vanish free grace, justi fication by faith alone, redemption through the blood of Christ, all that is characteristic of St Paul disappears, except his universalism, and that is modified by the decree of the apostles, the circumcision of Timothy, and St Paul s observ ance of the law. The object of all this, they affirm, must be to reconcile the Jewish party by concessions. But there is said to be also another object, of minor importance indeed, but still quite evident and falling in with the other. Throughout the Acts St Paul is often accused of turning the world upside down and causing disturbances. The Jewish Christians may have thought that St Paul was to