This is the last word in the New Testament history respecting the Apostle Paul. Now it is evident that this writer was Paul's friend and traveling companion. It is true that he keeps himself out of sight in the history. We only know when he joined Paul by the fact that the narrative changes from the third person singular to the first person plural; he ceases to say "he," and begins to say "we." Thus we are made aware that he joined Paul at Troas on his second missionary journey, and went with him as far as Philippi; rejoined him at the same place on his third missionary tour, and accompanied him to Jerusalem; was his fellow-voyager on that memorable journey to Rome, and there abode with him for two years. The Epistle to the Colossians and the Epistle to Philemon were written during this imprisonment at Rome, and in both of these Epistles Paul speaks of the fact that Luke is near him. In the second letter to Timothy, which is supposed to have been written during the second imprisonment at Rome, and near the close of his life, he says again, "Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him unto me, for he is useful to me for ministering." If the common opinion concerning the date of this letter is correct, then Luke must have remained with Paul at Rome until the close of his life. But the narrative in Luke does not give any account of the closing years of Paul's life. It breaks off abruptly at the end of his two years' residence in Rome. Why is this? Evidently because there is no more to tell at this time. The writer continues the history up to the date of his writing and stops there. If he had been writing after the death of Paul, he would certainly have told us of the circumstances of his death. There is no rational explanation of this abrupt ending, except that the book was written at about the time when the story closes. This was certainly about 63 A. D. And if the Book of Acts was written as early as this, the Gospel of Luke, the "former treatise" by the same author, must have been written earlier than this. Thus the Book of Acts not only furnishes strong evidence of its own early date, but helps to establish the early date of the third Gospel.
These conclusions, to my own mind, are irresistible. No theory which consists with the common honesty of the writer can bring these books down to a later date. And I cannot doubt the honesty of the writer. His writings prove him to be a careful, painstaking, veracious historian. In many slight matters this accuracy appears. The political structure of the Roman Empire at this time was somewhat complicated. The provinces were divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those heads of provinces who were directly responsible to the Emperor and the military authorities were called proprætors; those who were under the jurisdiction of the Senate were called proconsuls. In mentioning these officers Luke never makes a mistake; he gets the precise title every time. Once, indeed, the critics thought they had caught him in an error. Sergius Paulus, the Roman ruler of Cyprus, he calls proconsul. "Wrong!" said the critics, "Cyprus was an imperial province; the title of this officer must have been proprætor." But when the critics studied a little more, they found out that Augustus put this province back under the Senate, so that Luke's title is exactly right. And to clinch the matter, old coins of this very date have been found in Cyprus, giving to the chief magistrate of the island the title of proconsul. Such evidences of the accuracy of the writer are not wanting. It is needless to insist that he never makes a mistake; doubtless he does, in some small matters, and we have learned to take such a view of the inspiration of the Scriptures that the discovery of some small error does not trouble us in the least; but the admission that he is not infallible is perfectly consistent with the belief that he is an honest, competent, faithful witness. This is all that he claims for himself, this is all that we claim for him, but this we do claim. We do not believe that he was a conscienceless impostor. We do not believe that the man who told the story of Ananias and Sapphira was himself a monumental liar. We believe that he meant to tell the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Therefore, we believe that he lived in the times of the apostles, and received from them, as he says that he did, the facts that he recorded in his Gospel; that he was the traveling companion and missionary helper of Paul, as he intimates that he was, and that he has given us a true account of the life and work of that great apostle.
The constant and undesigned coincidences between the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul--the many ways in which the personal and historical references of the latter support the statements of the former--are also strong evidence of the genuineness of the Acts. Putting all these indirect and incidental proofs together the historical verity of the Acts seems to me very firmly established. That there are critical difficulties may be admitted; some passages of this ancient writing are not easily explained; there are discrepancies, for example, between the story of the resurrection and ascension of Christ as told in Luke and the same story as related in the Acts; possibly the writer obtained fuller information in the interval between the publication of these two books by which he corrected the earlier narrative. In the different accounts of the conversion of Paul there are also disagreements which we cannot reconcile; nevertheless, in the words of Dr. Donaldson, "Even these very accounts contain evidence in them that they were written by the same writer, and they do not destroy the force of the rest of the evidence." [Footnote: Encyc. Brit., i. 124. ]
The theory of Baur that this book was written in the last part of the second century by a disciple of St. Paul, and that it is mainly a work of fiction, intended to bring about a reconciliation between two bitterly hostile parties in the church, the Pauline and the Petrine sects, need not detain us long. Baur contends that the church in the first two centuries was split in twain, the followers of Peter insisting that no man could become a Christian without first becoming a Jew, the followers of Paul maintaining that the Jewish ritual was abolished, and that the Gentiles ought to have immediate access to the Christian fellowship. Their antagonism was so radical and far-reaching that at the end of the apostolic age the two parties had no dealings with each other. "Then," in the words of Professor Fisher, who is here summarizing the theory of Baur, "followed attempts to reconcile the difference, and to bridge the gulf that separated Gentile from Jewish, Pauline from Petrine Christianity. To this end various irenical and compromising books were written in the name of the apostles and their helpers. The most important monument of this pacifying effort is the Book of Acts, written in the earlier part of the second century by a Pauline Christian who, by making Paul something of a Judaizer, and then representing Peter as agreeing with him in the recognition of the rights of the Gentiles, hoped, not in vain, to produce a mutual friendliness between the respective partisans of the rival apostles. The Acts is a fiction founded on facts, and written for a specific doctrinal purpose. The narrative of the council or conference of the Apostles, for example (Acts xx.), is pronounced a pure invention of the writer, and such a representation of the condition of things as is inconsistent with Paul's own statements, and for this and other reasons plainly false. The same ground is taken in respect to the conversion of Cornelius, and the vision of Peter concerning it." [Footnote: The Supernatural Origin of Christianity, pp. 211,212.]
For this theory there is, of course, some slight historical basis. It is true, as we have seen, that Peter and Paul did have a sharp disagreement on this very question at Antioch. It is also true that both these great apostles behaved quite inconsistently, Peter at Antioch, and Paul afterwards at Jerusalem, when he consented to the propositions of the Judaizers, and burdened himself with certain Jewish observances in a vain attempt to conciliate some of the weaker brethren. That the story of the Acts unflinchingly shows us the weaknesses and errors of the great apostles is good evidence of its veracity. But the notion that it is a work of fiction fabricated for such purposes as are outlined above is utterly incredible. Those Epistles of Paul which Baur admits to be genuine contain abundant disproof of his theory. There never was any such schism as he fancies. Paul spends a good part of his time in his last missionary journey in collecting funds for the relief of those poor "saints," for so he calls them, at Jerusalem; and every reference that he makes to them is of the most affectionate character. Paul recognizes in the most emphatic way the authority of the other apostles, and the fellowship of labor and suffering by which he is united to them. All this and much more of the same import we find in those epistles which Baur admits to be the genuine writings of Paul. In short, it may be said that after the thorough discussion to which his theory has been subjected for the last twenty-five years, it has scarcely a sound leg left to stand on. It may be admitted to be one of the most brilliant works of the historical imagination which the century has produced. It is supported by vast learning, and it has thrown much light on certain movements of the early church; but, taken as a whole it is unscientific and contradictory; it raises two difficulties, where it disposes of one, and it ignores more facts than it includes.
We return from this excursion through the fields of destructive criticism with a strong conviction that this narrative of the Acts of the Apostles was written by Luke the Evangelist, the companion and fellow-worker of Paul, and that it gives us a veracious history of the earliest years of the Christian church.
The last of the New Testament books does not belong chronologically at the end of the collection. There was a tradition, to which Irenæus gives currency, that it was written during the reign of Domitian, about 97 or 98 A. D. But this tradition is now almost universally discredited. Critics of all classes date the book as early as 75-79 A. D., while the best authorities put it nearly ten years earlier, in the autumn of 68 or the spring of 69. As Archdeacon Farrar suggests, it would be vastly better if these books of the New Testament were arranged in true chronological order; they could be more easily understood. The fact that this weird production stands at the end of the collection has made upon many minds a wrong impression as to its meaning, and has given it a kind of significance to which it is not entitled.
The authorship of the book is quite generally ascribed to John the son of Zebedee, brother of James, and one of the apostles of our Lord. Even the destructive critics agree to this; some among them say that there is less doubt about the date and the authorship of this book than about almost any other New Testament writing. In making this concession they intend, however, to discredit the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. The more certain we are that John wrote the Revelation, they argue, the more certain are we that he did not write the Gospel which bears his name; for the style of the two writings is so glaringly contrasted that it is simply impossible that both could have come from the same writer. This does not seem nearly so clear to me as it does to some of these learned and perspicacious critics. A great contrast there is, indeed, between the style of the Revelation and that of the Gospel; but this contrast may be explained. It is said, in the first place, that the Greek of the Apocalypse is very bad Greek, full of ungrammatical sentences, abounding in Hebraisms, while that of the Gospel is good Greek, accurate and rhetorical in its structure. But this is by no means an unaccountable phenomenon. The first book was written by the apostle very soon, probably, after his removal to Ephesus. He had never, I suppose, been accustomed to use the Greek familiarly in his own country; had never written in it at all, and it is not strange that he should express himself awkwardly when he first began to write Greek; that the Aramaic idioms should constantly reproduce themselves in his Greek sentences. After he had been living for twenty-five years in the cultivated Greek city of Ephesus, using the Greek language continually, it is probable that he would write it more elegantly.
But it is said that the rhetorical style of the one book differs radically from that of the other. Doubtless. The one book is an apocalypse, the other is a biography. John may not have been a practiced litterateur, but he certainly had literary sense and feeling enough to know how to put a very different color and atmosphere into an apocalyptical writing from that which he would employ in a report of the life and words of Jesus. Without any reflection, indeed, he would instinctively use the apocalyptic imagery; his pages would flare and resound with the lurid symbolism peculiar to the apocalypses. How definite a type of literature this was we shall presently see; no writer, while using it, would clearly manifest his own personality. And if through all this disguise we do discern symptoms of a temper more fervid and a spirit more Judaic than that which finds expression in the Fourth Gospel, let us remember that the ripened wisdom of the old man speaks in the latter, and the intense enthusiasm of conscious strength in the former. This John, let us not forget, was not in his youth a paragon of mildness; it was he and his brother James who earned the sobriquet of Boanerges, "Sons of thunder;" it was they who wanted to call down fire from heaven to consume an inhospitable Samaritan village. Moreover, we shall see as we go on that the times in which this apocalypse was written were times in which the mildest, mannered men would be apt to forget their decorum, and speak with unwonted intensity. A man with any blood in him, who undertook to write in the year 68 of the themes with which the soul of this apostle was then on fire, would be likely to show, no matter in what vehicle of speech his thought might be conveyed, some sign of the tumult then raging within him.
All these circumstances, taken together, enable me to explain the difference between the literary form of the Revelation and that of the Gospel. But when we come to look a little more deeply into the meaning of the two books, we shall find that beneath all this dissimilarity there are some remarkable points of agreement. Quite a number of the leading ideas and conceptions of the one book reappear in the other; the idea of Christ as the Word or Logos of God, the representation of Christ as the Lamb, as the Good Shepherd, as the Light, are peculiar to John; we find them emphasized in the Gospel and in the Revelation. The unity of the two books in fundamental conceptions has been admirably brought out by Dr. Sears, in his volume entitled "The Heart of Christ." And after weighing the evidence, I find neither historical nor psychological reasons sufficient to overthrow my belief that the Fourth Gospel, as well as the Revelation, was written by John the Apostle.