The Books of the New Testament

by Leighton Pullan

[Sidenote: Character and Contents.]

The general plan of the book may easily be seen by a glance at the Analysis printed below. We may describe it by saying that the ruling ideas are the progress and the continuity of the Church. That is to say, St. Luke shows how the Church, the divinely organized society which promotes the kingdom of God, lives and develops through various stages and crises. It spreads from one upper room in Jerusalem to Rome, the world's mightiest city. From the election of Matthias, the new apostle, until the decision reached by the Council at Jerusalem twenty years afterwards, and recorded in ch. xv., we behold a slow but sure progress. The secret of this progress is dependence upon the risen Christ. We cannot conceive how the apostles could ever have come out of the perplexity and dismay caused by the death of their Lord, and laboured with such enthusiasm, unless they were certain that the Lord was indeed risen. Without the resurrection, the Church would have collapsed at once. Knowing that it could not be possibly disproved, the apostles appeal to it as their reason for advancing out of Judaism. Two points with regard to the doctrine implied in chs. i.-xv. deserve special attention.

(1) The doctrine of Christ's Person. The doctrine is of the simplest kind, but the facts asserted by the apostles imply that He is divine. He is the Messiah, anointed by God, and the Holy One, and He is in a special sense the Holy Servant or Child of God (iii. 14; iv. 27). He is seated at the right hand of God (v. 31), He is Prince and Saviour. He fulfils divine functions. It is He who has poured out the Holy Spirit (ii. 33). He is the object of man's faith, and His name or revealed personality is declared to have just restored a lame man to soundness (iii. 16); signs and wonders are expected to be done through Him (iv. 30). There is "salvation" in none other (iv. 12), and He is to be "the Judge of quick and dead" {110} (x. 42). St. Stephen in dying prays to Him. He is perpetually called Lord, and the fact that the same name is applied to Jehovah in the Septuagint makes it impossible to suppose that Christ is not regarded as possessed of divine attributes.

(2) The doctrine of the salvation of the world. Rationalist critics have asserted that the first apostles had no idea that the gospel was meant for the world, and that they limited its light to the children of Abraham. The unfairness of this assertion is shown by the consistent manner in which the same doctrine of the salvation of all men is interwoven in different parts of Acts, including the early chapters, which are generally acknowledged to be derived from an early Jewish Christian source. The doctrine is that salvation is offered to the Jews first (iii. 26), but "all that are afar off" may share in it (ii. 39; iii. 25). This is exactly the doctrine expressed by St. Paul in Rom. i. 16. And the conversion of Gentiles of different classes, as recorded in Acts, testifies that the apostles acted up to the doctrine. They did not doubt that the Gentiles had a right to the gospel. The point which did agitate them was, how much of the Jewish ceremonial ought the Gentiles to be required to observe. When the Gentile converts became numerous the question became acute, being sharpened by the demand of certain Jewish Christians that all converts should be circumcised.

St. Peter and St. James set their faces against this demand, and it was determined on their advice that the Gentiles should only be required to abstain from "meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication" (xv. 29). The rule was primarily meant for Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia. It prohibits complicity in idolatry, and in the immorality with which Syrian idolatry had been historically associated. And it prohibits the eating of blood and things strangled, a practice which might cause friction in the presence of Jewish communities. Nothing is said about circumcision or the sabbath. It is impossible to reconcile Acts xv. with the {111} theory that the original apostles were merely Jewish Unitarians who detested St. Paul. And the Rationalists who have propagated this theory gain no help either from Galatians or from Acts xxi. For St. Paul, in writing to the Galatians, asserts the two central facts which we find in Acts xv., viz. (i.) that his policy of an open gospel was opposed by a party which appealed to the original apostles, (ii.) that the original apostles gave him the hand of fellowship and repudiated the Judaizers. In Acts xxi. 24 we find St. Paul himself performing a Jewish ceremonial act at the request of St. James. The request was made in order to counteract the falsehood that he had been trying to make the Hebrew converts desert the old Jewish customs. It cannot be interpreted as a proof of the supposed blind Judaism of St. James. For St. Paul voluntarily performed a similar act at Cenchreae, and we have no ground for believing that he always claimed for himself that entire freedom from Jewish usages which he always claimed for his Gentile converts. His own words contradict such a notion emphatically (1 Cor. ix. 20).

The truth is that it is only by doing violence to all the evidence which we possess, that anything can be done to support either the theory of Baur and his school that the apostles of the Church were divided with regard to the Law, or the more recent theory of Harnack and others that they were divided with regard to the Person of Christ. All the apostles believed that the gospel was for all men on equal terms, and that Christ was the divine Lord of all.

In addition to these points, it is necessary to say a few words about the ministry of the Church which is described in Acts. It is asserted by such writers as Martineau, Sabatier, and Schmiedel, that the state of the Church and the ministry in Acts betrays the fact that the author did not write in the apostolic age. It is said that "hierarchical ideas" or "hierarchical pretensions" can be detected in such passages as i. 17, 20; viii. 14-17; xv. 28; xx. 28, and that such ideas {112} could not have been entertained by the apostles. It is not possible to give a full discussion of such a theory in this book.[4] We must be content with noting that, in order to give it any appearance of validity, it is necessary to reject every part of the New Testament which does not happen to agree with it. Schmiedel, who places Acts between A.D. 110 and 130, says that "Acts xx. 18-35 has many ideas in common with those of the Pastoral Epistles," but that "the author has not yet reached the stage in the development of Church government which characterizes the First Epistle to Timothy." [5] He says this simply because that Epistle, which he regards as a late forgery, shows a form of Church government practically identical with Episcopacy, while he thinks that Acts xx. shows a form of government intermediate between the genuine apostolic form and Episcopacy. To this we may make two answers; (a) that the Church government in Acts and 1 Timothy is practically the same, the work of the apostle being in r Timothy partly delegated to an apostolic vicar; (b) as there is excellent evidence for regarding 1 Timothy as a genuine writing of St. Paul, it gives us an additional cause for believing that the description of Church government in Acts is not fictitious.

ANALYSIS

The outline of the book is laid down in the words of our Lord quoted in i. 8, "Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth."

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