Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/200

 a casual perusal of Josephus by St. Luke is highly improbable for the following reasons:—

(1) St. Luke gives the number of the followers of Theudas as "about four hundred"; Josephus writes "most of the common people." Clearly St. Luke had access to some source other than Josephus.

(2) The carelessness attributed to St. Luke in the supposed use of Josephus is not what we should expect from the professions of the writer of the prologue to the third Gospel and from the handling of his sources in the earlier work.

(3) If there has been error, it is older than St. Luke and goes back to his authority. Torrey in the above-*mentioned work seems to have proved conclusively that Acts i-xv is based on an Aramaic source, to which St. Luke was "singularly faithful." "He disliked to alter, even slightly, the document in his hands, even where he believed its statements to be mistaken, and where he found himself obliged to contradict them" (p. 40). On the alleged use of Josephus in Acts v., after referring to the horror which must have been aroused in Judæa by the crucifixion of the sons of the insurgent Judas, he adds: "Any history dealing with this period would have been pretty certain to mention Theudas and Judas at this point, and in this order, although the revolt under Judas really happened much earlier. From some history of the kind, in which the facts were not clearly stated, the author of Luke's Aramaic source obtained his wrong impression of the order of events" (p. 71).

V. Note on § (45).

This incident is of interest to the N.T. student because of the suggestion, made long ago and recently revived by Wellhausen, to identify the Zacharias of