[1] 1. TRUSTWORTHINESS. The aim of our work is to treat its subject as a department of history and of literature. Christianity was not merely a religion, but also, a system of life and action; and its introduction by Paul amid the society of the Roman Empire produced changes of momentous consequence, which the historian must study. What does the student of Roman history find in the subject of our investigation? How would an observant, educated, and unprejudiced citizen of the Roman Empire have regarded that new social force, that new philosophical system, if he had studied it with the eyes and the temper of a nineteenth century investigator?

As a preliminary the historian of Rome must make up his mind about the trustworthiness of the authorities. Those which we shall use are:(1) a work of history commonly entitled the Acts of the Apostles (the title does not originate from the author), (2) certain Epistles purporting to be written by Paul. Of the latter we make only slight and incidental use; and probably even those who dispute their authenticity would admit that the facts we use are trustworthy, as being the settled belief of the Church at a very early period. It is, therefore, unnecessary to touch on the authenticity of the Epistles; but the question as to the date, the composition, and the author of the Acts must be [2] discussed. If the main position of this book is admitted, it will furnish a secure basis for the Epistles to rest on.

Works that profess to be historical are of various kinds and trustworthy in varying degrees. (1) There is the historical romance, which in a framework of history interweaves an invented tale. Some of the Apocryphal tales of the Apostles are of this class, springing apparently from a desire to provide Christian substitutes for the popular romances of the period. (2) There is the legend, in which popular fancy, working for generations, has surrounded a real person and real events with such a mass of extraneous matter that the historical kernel is hardly discernible. Certain of the Apocryphal tales of the Apostles may belong to this class, and many of the Acta of martyrs and saints certainly do. (3) There is the history of the second or third rate, in which the writer, either using good authorities carelessly and without judgment, or not possessing sufficiently detailed and correct authorities, gives a narrative of past events which is to a certain degree trustworthy, but contains errors in facts and in the grouping and proportions, and tinges the narrative of the past with the colour of his own time. In using works of this class the modern student has to exercise his historical tact, comparing the narrative with any other evidence that can be obtained from any source, and judging whether the action attributed to individuals is compatible with the possibilities of human nature. (4) There is, finally, the historical work of the highest order, in which a writer commands excellent means of knowledge either through personal acquaintance or through access to original authorities. and brings to the treatment of his subject [3] genius, literary skill, and sympathetic historical insight into human character and the movement of events. Such an author seizes the critical events, concentrates the reader's attention on them by giving them fuller treatment, touches more lightly and briefly on the less important events, omits entirely a mass of unimportant details, and makes his work an artistic and idealised picture of the progressive tendency of the period.

Great historians are the rarest of writers. By general consent the typical example of the highest class of historians is Thucydides, and it is doubtful whether any other writer would be by general consent ranked along with him. But all historians, from Thucydides downwards, must be subjected to free criticism. The fire which consumes the second-rate historian only leaves the real master brighter and stronger and more evidently supreme. The keenest criticism will do him the best service in the long run. But the critic in his turn requires high qualities; he must be able to distinguish the true from the false; he must be candid and unbiased and open-minded. There are many critics who have at great length stated their preference of the false before the true; and it may safely be said that there is no class of literary productions in our century in which there is such an enormous preponderance of error and bad judgment as in that of historical criticism. To some of our critics Herodotus is the Father of History, to others he is an inaccurate reproducer of uneducated gossip: one writer at portentous length shows up the weakness of Thucydides, another can see no fault in him.

But, while recognising the risk, and the probable condemnation that awaits the rash attempt, I will venture to add one to the number of the critics, by stating in the [4] following chapters reasons for placing the author of Acts among the historians of the first rank.

The first and the essential quality of the great historian is truth. What he says must be trustworthy. Now historical truth implies not merely truth in each detail, but also truth in the general effect, and that kind of truth cannot be attained without selection, grouping, and idealisation.

So far as one may judge from books, the opinion of scholars seems to have, on the whole, settled down to the conclusion that the author of Acts belongs either to the second- or the third-rate historians. Among those who assign him to the third rate we may rank all those who consider that the author clipped up older documents and patched together the fragments in a more or less intelligent way, making a certain number of errors in the process. Theories of this kind are quite compatible with assigning a high degree of trustworthiness to many statements in the book; but this trustworthiness belongs not to the author of the work, but to the older documents which he glued together. Such theories usually assign varying degrees of accuracy to the different older documents: all statements which suit the critic's own views on early Church history are taken from an original document of the highest character; those which he likes less belong to a less trustworthy document; and those which are absolutely inconsistent with his views are the work of the ignorant botcher who constructed the book. But this way of judging, common as it is, assumes the truth of the critic's own theory, and decides on the authenticity of ancient documents according to their agreement with that theory; and the strangest part of this medley of uncritical method is that other writers, who dispute the first critic's theory of [5] early Church history, yet attach some value to his opinion upon the spuriousness of .documents which he has condemned solely on the ground that they disagree with his theory.

The most important group among those who assign the author to the second rank of historians, consists of them that accept his facts as true, although his selection of what he should say and what he should omit seems to them strangely capricious. They recognise many of the signs of extraordinary accuracy in his statements; and these signs are so numerous that'they feel bound to infer that the facts as a whole are stated with great accuracy by a personal friend of St. Paul. But when they compare the Acts with such documents as the Epistles of Paul, and when they study the history as a whole, they are strongly impressed with the inequalities of treatment, and the unexpected and puzzling gaps; events of great importance seem to be dismissed in a brief and unsatisfactory way; and, sometimes, when one of the actors (such as Paul) has left an account of an event described in Acts, they find difficulty in recognising the two accounts as descriptions of the same event. Bishop Lightfoot's comparison of Gal. II 1-10 with Acts XV may be quoted as a single specimen out of many: the elaborate process whereby he explains away the seeming discrepancies would alone be sufficient, if it were right, to prove that Acts was a second-rate work of history. We never feel on firm historical ground, when discrepancies are cleverly explained away: we need agreements to stand upon. Witnesses in a law court may give discrepant accounts of the same event; but they are half-educated, confused, unable to rise to historical truth. But when a historian [6] is compared with the reminiscences of an able and highly educated actor in the same scenes, and when the comparison consists chiefly in a laboured proof that the discrepancies do not amount to positive contradiction, the conclusion is very near, that, if the reminiscences are strictly honest, the historian's picture is not of the highest rank.

But there is a further difficulty. How does it come that a writer, who shows himself distinctly second-rate in his historical perception of the comparative importance of events, is able to attain such remarkable accuracy in describing many of them? The power of accurate description implies in itself a power of reconstructing the past, which involves the most delicate selection and grouping of details according to their truth and reality, i.e., according to their comparative importance. Acts, as Lightfoot pictures it, is to me an inconceivable phenomenon; such a mixture of strength and weakness, of historical insight and historical incapacity, would be unique and incredible. If the choice for an intelligible theory of Acts lay between Lightfoot's view and that which is presented in different forms by Clemen, Spitta, and other scholars, I could only adopt the same point of view as these critics. Lightfoot, with all his genius, has here led English scholarship into a cul de sac: we can make no progress, unless we retrace our steps and try a new path. But my belief is, that all the difficulties in which Lightfoot was involved spring from the attempt to identify the wrong events. In this attempt he naturally found discrepancies;but by a liberal allowance of gaps in the narrative of Acts, and the supposition of different points of view and of deficient information on Luke's [7] part, it was possible to show why the eye-witness saw one set of incidents, while Acts described quite a different set.

The historian who is to give a brief history of a great period need not reproduce on a reduced uniform scale all the facts which he would mention in a long history, like a picture reduced by a photographic process. If a brief history is to be a work of true art, it must omit a great deal, and concentrate the reader's attention on a certain number of critical points in the development of events, elaborating these sufficiently to present them in life-like and clearly intelligible form. True historical genius lies in selecting the great crises, the great agents, and the great movements, inmaking these clear to the reader in their real nature, in passing over with the lightest and slightest touch numerous events and many persons, but always keeping clear before the reader the plan of composition. The historian may dismiss years with a word, and devote considerable space to a single incident. In such a work, the omission of an event does not constitute a gap, but is merely a proof that the event had not sufficient importance to enter into the plan. A gap is some omission that offends our reason and our sense of harmony and propriety; and where something is omitted that bears on the author's plan, or where the plan as conceived by the author does not correspond to the march of events, but only to some fanciful and subjective view, there the work fails short of the level of history.

I may fairly claim to have entered on this investigation without any prejudice in favour of the conclusion which I shall now attempt to justify to the reader. On the con- [8] trary, I began with a mind unfavourable to it, for the ingenuity and apparent completeness of the Tubingen theory had at one time quite convinced me. It did not lie then in my line of life to investigate the subject minutely; but more recently I found myself often brought in contact with the book of Acts as an authority for the topography, antiquities, and society of Asia Minor. It was gradually borne in upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvellous truth. In fact, beginning with the fixed idea that the work was essentially a second-century composition, and never relying on its evidence as trustworthy for first-century conditions,. I gradually came to find it a useful ally in some obscure and difficult investigations. But there remained still one serious objection to accepting it as entirely a first-century work. According to the almost universally accepted view, this history led Paul along a path and through surroundings which seemed to me historically and topographically self-contradictory. It was not possible to bring Paul's work in Asia Minor into accordance with the facts of history on the supposition that an important part of that work was devoted to a district in the northern part of the peninsula, called Galatia. It may appear at first sight a mere topographical subtlety whether Paul travelled through North Galatia or through Lycaonia; but, when you consider that any details given of his journeys must be false to the one side just in proportion as they are true to the other, you will perceive that, if you try to apply the narrative to the wrong side of the country, it will not suit the scene, and if it does not suit, then it must appear to be written by a person ignorant of what he pretends to know. The case might be illustrated from our own experience. Suppose [9] that an unknown person came to Auburn from New York, and you wished to find out whether he was an impostor or not. In our country we are exposed to frequent attempts at imposition, which can often be detected by a few questions; and you would probably ask him about his experiences on his journey from New York to Auburn. Now suppose you had been informed that he had come not along the direct road, but by a long detour through Boston, Montreal, and Toronto, and had thus arrived at Auburn; and suppose that you by questioning elicited from him various facts which suited only a route through Schenectady and Utica, you would condemn the man as an impostor, because he did not know the road which he pretended to have travelled. But suppose further that it was pointed out by some third party that this stranger had really travelled along the direct road, and that you had been misinformed when you supposed him to have come by the-round-about way, your opinion as to the stranger's truthfulness would be instantly affected. Precisely similar is the case of Acts as a record of travel; generations and centuries have been attempting to apply it to the wrong countries. I must speak on this point confidently and uncompromisingly, for the facts stand out so clear and bold and simple that to affect to hesitate or to profess any doubt as to one's judgment would be a betrayal of truth.

I know the difficulties of this attempt to understand rightly a book so difficult, so familiar, and so much misunderstood as Acts. It is probable that I have missed the right turn or not grasped the full meaning in some cases. I am well aware that I leave some difficulties unexplained, sometimes from inability, sometimes from mere omission. [10] But I am sustained by the firm belief that I am on the right path, and by the hope that enough of difficulties have been cleared away to justify a dispassionate historical criticism in placing this great writer on the high pedestal that belongs to him.