perils and persecutions to which the Apostle Paul refers in support of his protest, that he had laboured and suffered more than all the rest.(1) If Paul was called by a vision to the ministry of the Gentiles,(2) so Peter is represented as having been equally directed by a vision to baptize the Gentile Cornelius;(3) the double vision of Peter and Cornelius has its parallel in the double vision of Paul and Ananias. It is impossible to deny the measured equality thus preserved between the two Apostles, or to ignore the fact that parallelism like this is the result of premeditation, and cannot claim the character of impartial history.
The speeches form an important element in the Acts of the Apostles, and we shall now briefly examine them, reserving, however, for future consideration their dogmatic aspect. Few, if any writers, however apologetic, maintain that these discourses can possibly have been spoken exactly as they are recorded in the Acts. The utmost that is asserted is that they are substantially historical, and fairly represent the original speeches.(4) They were derived, it is alleged, either from written sources, or oral
tradition, and many, especially in the second part, are supposed to have been delivered in the presence of the Author of the work. This view is held, of course, with a greater or less degree of assurance as to the closeness of the relation which our record bears to the original addresses; but, without here very closely scrutinizing hesitation or reticence, our statement fairly renders the apologetic position. A large body of able critics, however, deny the historical character of these speeches,(1) and consider them mere free compositions by the Author of the Acts, at the best being on a par with the speeches which many ancient writers place in the mouths of their historical personages, and giving only what the writer supposed that the speaker would say under the circumstances. That the writer may have made use of such materials as were within his reach, or endeavoured to embody the ideas which tradition may broadly have preserved, may possibly be admitted, but that these discourses can seriously be accepted as conveying a correct report of anything actually spoken by the persons in whose mouths they are put is, of course, denied. It is,
obviously, extremely improbable that any of these speeches could have been written down at the time.(1) Taking even the supposed case that the Author of the Acts was Luke, and was present when some of the speeches of Paul were delivered, it is difficult to imagine that he immediately recorded his recollection of them, and more than this he could not have done. He must continually have been in the habit of hearing the preaching of Paul, and therefore could not have had the inducement of novelty to make him write down what he heard. The idea of recording them for posterity could not have occurred to such a person, with the belief in the approaching end of all things then prevalent. The Author of the Acts was not the companion of Paul, however, and the contents of the speeches, as we shall presently see, are not of a character to make it in the least degree likely that they could have been written down for separate circulation. Many of the speeches in the Acts, moreover, were delivered under circumstances which render it specially unlikely that they could have
been reported with any accuracy. At no time an easy task correctly to record a discourse of any length, it is doubly difficult when those speeches, like many in Acts, were spoken under circumstances of great danger or excitement. The experience of modern times, before the application of systems of short-hand, may show how imperfectly speeches were taken down, even where there was deliberate preparation and set purpose to do so, and if it be suggested that some celebrated orations of the last century have so been preserved, it is undeniable that what has been handed down to us not only does not represent the original, but is really almost a subsequent composition, preserving little more than some faint echoes of the true utterance. The probability that a correct record of speeches made, under such circumstances, in the middle of the first century could have been kept, seems exceedingly small. Even, if it could be shown that the Author of the Acts took these speeches substantially from earlier documents, it would not materially tend to establish their authenticity; for the question would still remain perfectly open as to the closeness of those documents to the original discourses; but in the absence of all evidence, whether as to the existence or origin of any such sources, the conjecture of their possible existence can have no weight. We have nothing but internal testimony to examine, and that, we shall see, is totally opposed to the claim to historical value made for those discourses.
Apologists scarcely maintain that we have in the Acts a record of the original discourses in their completeness, but in claiming substantial accuracy most of them include the supposition at least of condensation.(1) The longest