Concerning Paul the same writer says (op. cit., art, “Paul”) that Acts gives us
a variety of narratives concerning him, differing in their dates, and also in respect of the influences under which they were written …. With regard to Paul’s journeys, we can in strictness speak with reasonable certainty and with some detail only of one great journey, which he undertook towards the end of his life. ([Acts xvi, 10–17]; [ xx, 5–15]; [ xxi, 1–18]; [ xxvii, 1]–[xxviii, 16].)
Evidence of the we sections of Acts It is upon Acts, then, that Van Manen bases his estimate, which we just now cited, of Paul’s relations with the other disciples. He refuses, and rightly, “to assume that Acts must take a subordinate place in comparison with the principal epistles of Paul.” In effect, his assault on the Pauline Epistles rests on the assumption that the record of Paul’s activity presented in Acts is the more trustworthy wherever it appears to conflict with the Pauline Epistles, and in particular with Galatians. In accepting Van Manen’s conclusion, Mr. Robertson implicitly accepts his premises, one of which is the superior reliability of Acts in general, and in particular of the four sections enumerated above, and characterized by the use of the word “we.” For the moment, therefore, let us confine ourselves to the ninety-seven verses of these “we” sections, which are obviously from the pen of a fellow-traveller of Paul. We find it recorded in them that Paul was moved by a vision to go and preach the Gospel[3] in Macedonia; that at Philippi a certain woman named Lydia, who already worshipped God—i.e., was a heathen converted to Jewish monotheism—had opened her heart in consequence to give heed to the things spoken by Paul. We infer that Paul’s Gospel supplemented in some way her monotheism. She and her household became something more than mere worshippers of God, and were baptized. We learn that Paul and his companion reckoned time by the Jewish feasts and fasts—e.g., by the days of unleavened bread—but at the same time were in the habit of meeting together with the rest of the faithful on the first day of the week, in order to break bread and discourse about the faith. At Tyre, as at Troas, they found “disciples” who, like Paul, arranged future events, or were warned of them through the Spirit. At Cæsarea, of Palestine, they stayed with Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven, and had four daughters—virgins who did prophesy. They also met there a certain prophet Agabus, who was a mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost, and as such foretold that the Jews at Jerusalem, of whose plots against Paul we elsewhere hear in these sections, would deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. Paul, in his turn, declares his readiness to be bound and die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. they stay with an early disciple from Cyprus, Mnason, and, on reaching Jerusalem, the brethren received them gladly. And the day following Paul went in with us unto James; and all the elders (of the Church) were present. Paul relates to them the facts of his ministry among the Gentiles. In the course of the final voyage to Rome, when all the crew have despaired of their lives, because of the violence of the storm and of the ship leaking, Paul comes to the rescue, and informs them that the angel of the God whom he served, and whose he was, had stood by him in the night, saying: “Fear not, Paul; thou must stand before Cæsar.” He therefore could not perish by shipwreck, nor they either. In Melita the trivial circumstance that the bite of a viper, promptly shaken off by him into the fire, did not cause Paul to swell up (i.e., his hand to be inflamed), or die, caused the barbarians to acclaim him as a god; and in the sequel the sick in the island flock to him, and are healed. At Puteoli Paul and his companion find brethren, as they had found them at Jerusalem and elsewhere; and presently they enter Rome.
In these sections, then, we have glimpses of a brotherhood disseminated all about the Mediterranean whose members were Monotheists of the Jewish type, but something besides, in so far as they accepted a gospel which Paul also preached, about a Lord Jesus Christ; these brethren solemnly broke bread on the first day of the week. In these sections we breathe the same atmosphere of personal visions, of angels, of prophecy, of direct inspiration of individuals by the Holy Ghost, of the cult of virginity, which we breathe in the rest of Acts and throughout the Pauline Epistles. Philip one of the sevenWe meet also with a Philip, an evangelist, and one of the seven. Who were the seven? We turn to an earlier chapter of Acts,[4] and read that in the earliest days of the religion at Jerusalem, in order to satisfy the claims of the widows of Greek Jews who were neglected in the daily ministration, the twelve apostles had called together the multitude of the faithful, and chosen seven men of good report, full of the Spirit and of wisdom to serve the tables, because they, the Twelve, were too busy preaching the word to attend to the catering of the new Messianic society. The first on the list of these seven deacons was Stephen, the second Philip. When, therefore, in the later passage the fellow-traveller of Paul refers to Philip as one of the seven, he assumes that we know who the seven were; and he can only expect us to know it because we have read the earlier chapter which narrates their appointment. The fellow-traveller of Paul, therefore, was aware of the appointment of the seven deacons, and testifies thereto. Here we have irrefragable evidence of the historicity of verses 1–6 of chapter vi of Acts, and at the same time a strong presumption that the fellow-traveller of Paul was himself the redactor, if not the author, of the earlier chapters (i–xv) of Acts, as he is obviously of the last half (ch. xvi to end); for that last half coheres inseparably with the contiguous we sections.
Literary unity of Acts Have we, then, any way of testing this presumption that the fellow-traveller who penned these we sections also penned the rest of Acts? We have, though it is one which can only appeal to trained philologists, and I doubt if Messrs. Drews and Robertson are likely to give to such an argument its due weight. The linguistic evidence of the we sections has been sifted and tested by Sir John Hawkins in his Horæ Synopticæ. The statistic of words and phrases cannot lie. It proves that the writer of Acts, and consequently of the Third Gospel, “was from time to time a companion of Paul in his travels, and that he simply and naturally wrote in the first person when narrating events at which he had been present.”
This is the best hypothesis which a study of the language of Acts and of the Third Gospel permits us to accept. I do not say it is the only possible one, and I expect Mr. Robertson and his pupil, Dr. Drews, to reject it with scorn, for their philology is of the sort which recognizes in Maria the same name as Moira and Myrrha. The only other explanations of the presence of we in these sections are, either that a compiler who used the diary of the fellow-traveller left it standing in the document when he embodied it in his narrative, through carelessness and by accident, or else that he left it of set design, and because he wished his readers to identify him with the older reporter, and so to pass for a companion of Paul. The first of these explanations is very improbable; the second not only much too subtle, but out of keeping with the babbling, but credulous, honesty which everywhere shows itself in Acts.
Van Manen’s system of dating Luke and Acts would postpone all ancient literature to the Middle Ages It is true that Van Manen assumes a priori, and without a shadow of proof, that Luke and Acts were written as late as the period 125–150. His only argument is that Marcion already had the former in his hands as early as 140; and he is prone to make the childish assumption that the date of composition of any book in the New Testament is exactly that of its earliest ascertainable use by a later author. Such a mode of reasoning is utterly false and uncritical, and would, if applied in other fields, prove that the great mass of ancient literature was not ancient at all, but composed in the tenth or later centuries to which our earliest MSS. belong; for we have no citations either in contemporary or in nearly contemporary writers of nine-tenths of the whole volume of the old Greek and Latin literatures. Most of it, if we applied Van Manen’s canons of evidence (which, of course, are accepted and improved upon by the three writers I am criticizing), would turn out to have been written as late as the renaissance of European learning. It is a fallacious test, and Van Manen would have shrunk from the paradox of enforcing it in regard to any other literature than the New Testament. It would appear as if the orthodox traditionalists, by insisting that the Bible must not be judged and criticized like other books, have prejudiced not merely their own cause—that would not matter—but the cause of sober history. They have invested it with such an atmosphere of mystery and falsetto, with what I may call a Sunday-school atmosphere, that a certain class of inquirers rush to an opposite extreme, and insist on canons of evidence and authenticity which would, if consistently used, eliminate all ancient literature and history. One form of error provokes the other.
Ephrem’s commentary on Acts We have examined for their evidence as regards the Early Church those sections which directly evidence the hand of a companion of Paul, who was probably Luke the physician, seeing that tradition was unanimous in ascribing the Third Gospel and Acts to him. Some scholars have observed that the old Syriac version cited by Ephrem the Syrian in his commentary[5] on Acts read in [ Acts xx, 13], as follows: “But I, Lucas, and those with me, going before to the ship, set sail for Assos,” where the conventional text reads: “But we, going before.” The pronoun we in this passage cannot include, as it usually does, Paul, who had taken another route and had left directions that they should call for him; this may have led Ephrem to substitute the paraphrase I, Lucas, and those with me. Anyhow, without further evidence, we can hardly use Ephrem’s citation as a proof of the Lucan authorship of Acts. Evidence of those parts of Acts which cohere with the we sectionsBut we must anyhow consider the evidence as to Paul’s beliefs which is to be gathered from the sections of Acts which immediately cohere with the travel document, and which clearly depended for their information on a source closely allied to them and of the same age and provenance. Firstly, then, it is noticeable that all this last part of Acts is relatively free from the fabulous details which mar the earlier part descriptive of the exploits of Peter. Next we note that Paul, on entering a city, goes straight to the Jewish Synagogue, and that the gospel with which he undertakes to supplement their monotheism consisted not of tidings about an ancient Palestinian Sun-god named Joshua, or Dionysus or Krishna, or Osiris, or Æsculapius, or Mithras, nor about a vegetation or harvest demon of any kind, nor about any of the other members of the Christian pandemonium invented by Mr. Robertson and adopted by Dr. Drews. No; on the contrary, at Thessalonica Paul spent three sabbaths trying to convince the Jews in their synagogue that Jesus must have been the Jewish Messiah promised in the Jewish scriptures, because in accordance with prophecy he had suffered and risen from the dead. That he taught them, further, that Jesus, qua Christ or Messiah, was also the Jewish king whose advent they looked for, is obvious from the fact that he was accused on this occasion, as on others, of teaching, “contrary to the decrees of Cæsar, that there was another king, one Jesus.” At Corinth Paul found he was wasting time in trying to persuade the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah whose advent they expected; and he declared to them that thenceforth he would devote himself to spreading his good news among the Gentiles. None the less he persisted, wherever he afterwards went, in going first to the synagogue, so as to give his compatriots a prior chance of accepting his spiritual wares, according to the principle enunciated in his epistles, that the promises were for the Jews first and only after them for the Gentiles. In [ Acts xxv, 19], Festus lays before King Agrippa the case against Paul as he had learned it from the Jewish priests and elders at Jerusalem. It amounted to this, that Paul affirmed that “one Jesus, who was dead, was really alive.” We learn in an earlier passage that Paul was a Jew of Tarsus, an adherent of the Pharisaic sect which believed in a general resurrection of good Jews, that nevertheless he had persecuted the adherents of Jesus of Nazareth and connived at the murder of Stephen. He has some difficulty in convincing the Roman governor of Judæa that he is not a leader of the Jewish sicarii, or sect of assassins, who were ever anxious to range themselves on the side of any Messiah ready to show fight against the Roman Legions. The impression made on Festus, the Roman Governor, by Paul’s prophetic arguments about a Messiah who had suffered and then risen from the dead was ([Acts xxvi, 24]) that “much learning had made him mad.” We can discern all through this last half of Acts that attitude of Paul to Jesus which confronts us in his epistles. Nothing interests him except his death on the cross and his resurrection. Of the rest of his career we learn nothing. In one passage, ch. xiii, 26 foll., we have a slightly more detailed account of the staple of Paul’s teaching, as delivered to the Jews when he encountered them in their synagogues. He informed them of how “they that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers” had condemned Jesus; “though they found no cause of death in him, yet asked they of Pilate that he should be slain.” They afterwards “took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead: and he was seen for many days of them that came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses unto the people.”
There is not much of a vegetation-god story about the above concise narrative, which, however, is strikingly independent of the Gospel legends concerning the burial and resurrection of Jesus; for, according to them, it was the friends and adherents of Jesus, and not the rulers, who condemned him, that were careful to bury him; and his post-resurrectional appearances are here confined to his Galilean followers, who, by virtue of their longer association and intimacy with him, would be more likely than others to see him after death in dreams and visions.
Six independent and early documents involve a real Jesus I have now reviewed the historical books of the New Testament. We have in them at least six monuments—to wit, Mark, the non-Marcan document, the parts of the First and Third Gospels peculiar to their authors, the Fourth Gospel, and the history of Paul and his mission given in chapters xiii to xxviii of Acts. Perhaps I ought to add the first twelve chapters of Acts, of which the information, according to Van Manen, was derived from an early and lost document, the Acts of Peter. That would make seven monuments. Unless all philological analysis is false, the Third Gospel and Acts are from the pen of a companion of Paul, and cannot be set later than about 90 A.D. Mark, which he used, must be indefinitely earlier, and I have pointed out that there are good reasons for setting its date before the year 70. The non-Marcan document, which critics have agreed to call Q (Quelle), cannot be later than Mark, and is probably much earlier, judging from the fact that it as yet reported no miracles of Jesus, nor hints of his death and resurrection. Now all these documents are independent of one another in style and contents, yet they all have a common interest—namely, the memory of a historical man Jesus; and such data as they isolatedly afford about Jesus agree on the whole as closely as any profane documents ever agreed which, being written independently and from very different standpoints, yet refer to one and the same person. If we see a number of convergent rays of light streaming down under clouds across a widely extended landscape, we infer a central sun behind the clouds by which they are all emitted. Similarly, we have here several traditions and documents which converge on a single man, and are all and severally meaningless, and their genesis impossible of explanation unless we assume that he lived. It is sufficiently incredible that one tradition should (to take the hypothesis of non-historicity in its most rational form—that, namely, of Professor W. B. Smith) allegorize the myth of a Saviour God as the career of a man, and that man a Galilean teacher, in whose humanity the Church believed from the first. That six or seven parallel traditions should all have hit on the same form of deception and allegory is, as I said before, as incredible as that several roulette tables at Monte Carlo should independently and at one and the same time throw up an identical series of numbers. Credat Judæus Apella, These writers who develop the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus because miracles came to be attributed to him—how could they not in that age and social medium?—ask us to believe in a miracle which far outweighs any which any religionists ever reported of their founder; they themselves have fallen into fathomless depths of credulity.