The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights

by William Hallock Johnson

Students of Ephesians, moreover, are coming to hear in it more and more clearly, if we mistake not, the voice of the Apostle and the expression of his mature Christian experience, and of that doctrine of the church in which Royce sees the essence of Paulinism. A. C. Headlam says that it is the careful study of a book that will often solve the question of its origin, and remarks: "To me Ephesians is Pauline through and through, and more even than Romans represents the deepest thought of the Apostle."[260] The important fact is that, when all the disputed epistles are excluded, the progress of criticism has placed beyond reasonable doubt the great body of the Apostle's teaching and the bulk of his writings. The practical question now at issue, as Ramsay has observed, is not, "What did Paul write?" but "What did Paul teach?"[261]

In Paul's acknowledged writings we have a solid basis in fact from which to estimate the Gospel narratives and the Acts. The epistles of Paul carry us back into the circle of the earlier apostles and of the Jerusalem church, and throw light upon various events and aspects of the life, character, words, death, and resurrection of Christ.

II. The Acts of the Apostles

The book of Acts, while secondary in interest to the Gospels, occupies a central place in New Testament criticism. It is the bridge between the Ascension and the time thirty years later when Nero persecuted "a great multitude called Christians at Rome." It covers the period in which doctrinal evolution took place. Through its authorship it bridges the gap between the Gospels and the Pauline church among the Gentiles.

The course of the history in the early chapters of Acts is so different from that which the imagination of a later age would have pictured, that it bears upon its face the marks of early origin and of trustworthiness. To a later writer, without contact with the actors, and writing after the destruction of the Temple and the final breach of the Christians with the Jews and the assured success of the Gentile mission, it would seem exceedingly improbable (1) that the apostolic company should have continued to worship in the Temple; (2) that they should at first have found favour with the people; and (3) that they should have remained in Jerusalem with no apparent intention of leaving until scattered by persecution; and perhaps (4) that the Sadducees should have been the first to start the persecution. The recorded history, improbable to a later age, bears upon its face the stamp of truth. The imagination of a post-Pauline writer would have given us, we may be sure, a very different picture of church history. It would scarcely have conceived of the primitive Christology of Peter's speeches, the use of the term, "child," or "servant" of God (παῖς [pais]) in place of the Pauline term, "Son of God" (υἱός [huios]), yet with the same attitude, shared by Christians of earlier and later time, of adoration, worship and love.

The presumption in favour of credibility is strengthened by the author's full and detailed treatment of persons and places. "A man who would venture to introduce ninety-five persons and a hundred and three places into a history of his own times must have been pretty sure of his ground. The majority of these persons were still living when he wrote; into every one of these places his volume shortly penetrated.... The correctness of his geography upholds the truth of his history."[262]

A great many of the statements of the Acts can be checked by comparison with Paul's epistles, as has been shown by Paley's "Horæ Paulinæ," and more recently, for the first part of the Acts, by Harnack. In case of apparent conflict, it has been said, "we are confronted by the task of reconciling the differences between two first-century documents, each of which has, admittedly, very powerful claims."[263] More than half of the Acts is taken up with the labours of the Apostle Paul, and yet the Acts does not mention or show knowledge of his epistles. This fact, used by some to throw doubt upon the genuineness of the epistles, may be an indication of the early date of the Acts, and of so close a relationship between the author and the Apostle that the evidence of letters would be unnecessary.

Important alike in its bearing upon the questions of credibility and authorship, is the evidence of the so-called "we-sections." A prima facie case is made out that the author of the Acts was an eye-witness of some of the scenes it records, and a companion in travel of the Apostle Paul. This evidence has of late been greatly strengthened by linguistic investigation. While critical attempts are still made to divide the Acts into documents, the "we-sections" (xvi. 10-17; xx. 5-15; xxi. 1-18; xxvii. 1-xxviii. 16), as Sir J. Hawkins says, show an "immense balance of internal and linguistic evidence in favour of the view that the original writer of these sections was the same person as the main author of the Acts and of the Third Gospel."[264]

No living writers have done more to stimulate interest in the book of Acts than have Sir W. M. Ramsay and Harnack, and the writings of both have materially strengthened the case alike for its Lukan authorship, and, in the main, for its historical accuracy. Ramsay, starting, as he says, from the standpoint of the Tübingen school, "with the confident assumption that the book was fabricated in the middle of the second century, and studying it to see what light it could throw on the state of society in Asia Minor, was gradually driven to the conclusion that it must have been written in the first century and with admirable knowledge."[265]