author such as is here indicated, which could have led him to suppress or distort facts,(1) and whilst some of them advance very varied and fanciful theories as to the historical plan upon which the writer proceeds, and in accordance with which the peculiarities of his narrative are explained, they generally accept the work as the genuine history of the Acts of the Apostles so far as the author possessed certain information. The design most generally ascribed to the writer of the Acts may, with many minor variations, be said to be apologetic and conciliatory: an attempt to reconcile the two parties in the early church by representing the difference between the views of Peter and Paul as slight and unimportant, Pauline sentiments being freely placed in the mouth of Peter, and the Apostle of the Gentiles being represented as an orthodox adherent of the church of Jerusalem, with scarcely such advanced views of christian universality as Peter; or else, an effort of Gentile Christianity to bring itself into closer union with the primitive church, surrendering, in so doing, all its distinctive features and its Pauline origin, and representing the universalism by which it exists, as a principle adopted and promulgated from the very first by Peter and the Twelve. It is not necessary, however, for us to enter upon any minute discussion of this point, nor is it requisite, for the purposes of our inquiry, to determine whether the peculiar character
of the writing which we are examining is the result of a perfectly definite purpose controlling the whole narrative and modifying every detail, or naturally arises from the fact that it is the work of a pious member of the Church writing long after the events related, and imbuing his materials, whether of legend or ecclesiastical tradition, with his own thoroughly orthodox views: history freely composed for Christian edification. We shall not endeavour to construct any theory to account for the phenomena before us, nor to discover the secret motives or intentions of the writer, but taking them as they are, we shall simply examine some of the more important portions of the narrative, with a view to determine whether the work can in any serious sense be regarded as credible history.
No one can examine the contents of the Acts without perceiving that some secret motive or influence did certainly govern the writer's mind, and guide him in the selection of topics, and this is betrayed by many peculiarities in his narrative. Quite apart from any attempt to discover precisely what that motive was, it is desirable that we should briefly point out some of these peculiarities. It is evident that every man who writes a history must commence with a distinct plan, and that the choice of subjects to be introduced or omitted must proceed upon a certain principle. This is of course an invariable rule wherever there is order and arrangement. No one has ever questioned that in the Acts of the Apostles both order and arrangement have been deliberately adopted and the question naturally arises: What was the plan ol the Author? and upon what principle did he select, from the mass of facts which might have been related regarding the Church in the Apostolic ages, precisely those
which he has inserted, to the exclusion of the rest?(1) What title will adequately represent the contents of the book? for it is admitted by almost all critics that the actual name which the book bears neither was given to it by its author nor properly describes its intention and subject.(2) The extreme difficulty which has been felt in answering these questions, and in constructing any hypothesis which may fairly correspond with the actual contents of the Acts, constitutes one of the most striking commentaries on the work, and although we cannot here detail the extremely varied views of critics upon the subject, they are well worthy of study.(3) No one now advances the theory which was anciently current that the Author simply narrated that of which he was an eye-witness.(4) Its present title [———] would lead us to expect an account of the doings of the Apostles in general, but we have nothing like this in the book. Peter and Paul occupy the principal parts of the narrative, and the other Apostles are scarcely mentioned.
James is introduced as an actor in the famous Council, and represented as head of the Church in Jerusalem, but it is much disputed that he was either an Apostle, or one of the Twelve. The death of James the brother of John is just mentioned. John is represented on several occasions during the earlier part of the narrative as the companion of Peter, without, however, being prominently brought forward; and the rest of the Twelve are left in complete obscurity. It is not a history of the labours of Peter and Paul, for not only is considerable importance given to the episodes of Stephen and Philip the Evangelist, but the account of the two great Apostles is singularly fragmentary. After a brief chronicle of the labours of Peter, he suddenly disappears from the scene, and we hear of him no more. Paul then becomes the prominent figure in the drama; but we have already pointed out how defective is the information given regarding him, and he is also abandoned as soon as he is brought to Rome: of his subsequent career and martyrdom, nothing whatever is said. The work is not, as Luther suggested, a gloss on the Epistles of Paul and the inculcation of his doctrine of righteousness through faith, for the narrative of the Acts, so far as we can compare it with the Epistles, which are nowhere named in it, is generally in contradiction to them, and the doctrine of justification by faith is conspicuous by its absence. It is not a history of the first Christian missions, for it ignores entirely the labours of most of the Apostles, omits all mention of some of the most interesting missionary journeys, and does not even give a report of the introduction of Christianity into Rome. It is not in any sense a Paulinian history of the Church, for if, on the one side, it describes the Apostles of the Circumcision as
