The Books of the New Testament

by Leighton Pullan

[6] He changes the good into better (ii. 9); saves the dying (iv. 50); gives power (v. 8); gives food (vi. 11); gives sight (ix. 7); is Lord over death (xi. 44); blesses the work done in faith (xxi. 11). It should be noticed that St. John never mentions that our Lord cured any one possessed with a devil, which according to the Synoptists was a common kind of miracle. But St. John does not therefore contradict the other evangelists. He recognizes that there are visible works of the devil (viii. 41; cf. 1 John iii. 8), and mentions "the prince of this world" as causing the trials of our Lord.

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CHAPTER VII

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

[Sidenote: The Author.]

The Christian Church has never attributed the Book of Acts to any other writer than St. Luke. The external proofs of the primitive date of the book are important, and point to the apostolic age as the date of its composition. St. Clement of Rome, about A.D. 95, in referring to Ps. lxxxviii. 20, quotes it in words which are almost certainly based on Acts xiii. 22. There are two apparent quotations from Acts in the letters of St. Ignatius and one in the letter of St. Polycarp. It is also quoted in the works of Justin Martyr, Tatian, and Athenagoras, and in the letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons written in A.D. 177. It was evidently read throughout the 2nd century, and it is definitely assigned to St. Luke by Irenaeus, the Muratorian Fragment, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria.

In opposition to this tradition, a persistent effort has been made to prove that the book belongs to the early part of the and century. There are certain passages in which the writer uses the first person plural, implying that he was personally present on the occasions described. The sections of the book in which that peculiarity is found are ordinarily called the "we sections," and it has been asserted that though the "we sections" are primitive they have been worked into the narrative of a later writer.[1] Furthermore it is asserted that {103} the book was deliberately intended to be a fictitious account of the primitive Church, and that its special purpose was to balance the story of St. Peter with that of St. Paul in such a manner as to completely disguise the fundamental antagonism of the two apostles.

The force of this argument has been weakened by the general admission of non-Christian writers that the differences of opinion between the two apostles were grossly exaggerated by the critics of fifty years ago. It is therefore granted that there was less necessity for the forgery than there was said to be by the critics in question. It is also very obvious that we cannot fairly charge a historian with dishonesty because he wishes to balance one great character with another. No one would assert that a modern writer was a partisan or a liar because he devoted in the same book twenty appreciative pages to the Evangelical Revival and twenty appreciative pages to the Oxford Movement. In spite of this fact, the trustworthy character of the book is still vigorously assailed. It is said that no statement in the book deserves ready belief except the "we sections," that those sections were written by an unknown companion of St. Paul, and impudently "appropriated" by a Christian who wrote between A.D. 105 and A.D. 130.

This argument about the "we sections" can be completely overthrown by a consideration of the linguistic evidence of Acts. If language implies anything, the peculiarities of Acts imply that the author of the "we sections," who was a companion of St. Paul, was the author of the whole book. And they also show that the author of the whole book was the person who wrote the third Gospel. There are many words and phrases found only in the "we sections" and in the rest of Acts. There is, too, a large number of words and phrases in the "we sections" which are rarely used in those books of the New Testament which are not attributed to St. Luke, and occur frequently in the rest of Acts and in St. Luke's Gospel. If {104} we compare Acts with St. Luke's Gospel, we find that Acts contains 108 out of 140 which are characteristic of this Gospel, whereas it contains only about a half of those which are characteristic of Matt. and Mark. There are 58 Greek words which are found in both Acts and Luke and nowhere else in the New Testament.[2] Among the terms which serve as connecting links between St. Luke's Gospel and Acts, including the "we sections," occur various medical phrases. It is becoming more and more widely recognized that these phrases imply that the writer was a physician, such as we know St. Luke to have been (Col. iv. 14). It is all the more remarkable that many of the words peculiar to Acts are found in St. Luke's contemporary, the physician Dioscorides.

It is true that the sections taken from Mark show numerous "Lucan" characteristics as they appear in our third Gospel, but these characteristics are due to the third evangelist, and not to St. Mark. So, it can be urged, the "Lucan" characteristics in the "we sections" are due not to the author, but to an expert editor of a later time. In reply, we can answer that the cases are not strictly parallel. For if the "we sections" are not by the writer of Acts, he must have almost entirely rewritten them, and, at the same time, have been guilty of a gross fraud, which he stupidly dropped in passages where it could have been effectively used.