[14] 3. WORKING HYPOTHESIS OF THE INVESTIGATION. Our hypothesis is that Acts was written by a great historian, a writer who set himself to record the facts as they occurred, a strong partisan, indeed, but raised above partiality by his perfect confidence that he had only to describe the facts as they occurred, in order to make the truth of Christianity and the honour of Paul apparent. To a Gentile Christian, as the author of Acts was, the refusal of the Jews to listen to Paul, and their natural hatred of him as untrue to their pride of birth, must appear due to pure malignity; and the growing estrangement must seem to him the fault of the Jews alone. It is not my object to assume or to prove that there was no prejudice in the mind of Luke, no fault on the part of Paul; but only to examine whether the facts stated are trustworthy, and leave them to speak for themselves (as. the author does). I shall argue that the book was composed by a personal friend and disciple of Paul, and if this be once established there will be no hesitation in accepting the primitive tradition that Luke was the author.

We must face the facts boldly. If Luke wrote Acts, his narrative must agree in a striking and convincing way with Paul's: they must confirm, explain and complete one another. This is not a case of two common- [15] place, imperfectly educated, and not very observant witnesses who give divergent accounts of certain incidents which they saw without paying much attention to them. We have here two men of high education,one writing a formal history, the other speaking under every obligation of honour and conscience to be careful in his words: the subjects they speak of were of the most overpowering interest to both: their points of view must be very similar, for they were personal friends, and one was the teacher of the other, and naturally had moulded to some extent his mind during long companionship. If ever there was a case in which striking agreement was demanded by historical criticism between two classes of documents, it is between the writings of Paul and of Luke.

There is one subject in particular in which criticism demands absolute agreement. The difference of position and object between the two writers, one composing a formal history, the other writing letters or making speeches, may justifiably be invoked to account for some difference in the selection of details. But in regard to the influence of the Divine will on human affairs they ought to agree. Both firmly believed that God often guided the conduct of His Church by clear and open revelation of His will; and we should be slow to believe that one of them attributed to human volition what the other believed to be ordered by direct manifestation of God (p. 140). We shall try to prove that there is a remarkable agreement between them in regard to the actions which they attribute to direct revelation.

Further, we cannot admit readily that peculiarities of Luke's narrative are to be accounted for by want of [16]information: in his case this explanation really amounts to an accusation of culpable neglect of a historian's first duty, for full information was within Luke's reach, if he had taken the trouble to seek it. We shall find no need of this supposition. Finally, it is hard to believe that Paul's letters were unknown to Luke; he was in Paul's company when some of them were written; he must have known about the rest, and could readily learn their contents in the intimate intercommunication that bound together the early Churches. We shall try to show that Luke had in mind the idea of explaining and elucidating the letters.

In maintaining our hypothesis it is not necessary either to show that the author made no mistake, or to solve every difficulty. From them that start with a different view more may be demanded; but here we are making a historical and literary investigation. The greatest historians of other periods are not above error; and we may admit the possibility that a first-century historian has made errors. We shall not make much use of this proviso; but still the conditions of the investigation must be clearly laid down.

Again, in almost every ancient writer of any value there remain unsolved problems by the score. Where would our philological scholars be, if every question were satisfactorily disposed of? The plan and the date of Horace's longest work, the Art of Poetry, are unsolved and apparently insoluble; every theory involves serious difficulties; yes that does not make its authenticity doubtful. That there remain some difficulties not explained satisfactorily in Acts does not disprove its first-century origin.

Further, it is necessary to study every historian's method, and not to judge him according to whether or not he uses [17] our methods. For example, Thucydides makes a practice of putting into the mouths of his character speeches which they never delivered; no modern historian would do this: the speeches of Thucydides, however, are the greatest and most instructive part of his history. They might be truly called unhistorical; but the critic who summed up their character in that epithet would only show his incapacity for historical criticism. Similarly the critic must study Luke's method, and not judge him according to whether he writes exactly as the critic considers a history ought to be written.

Luke's style is compressed to the highest degree; and he expects a great deal from the reader. He does not , attempt to sketch the surroundings and set the whole scene like a picture before the reader; he states the bare facts that seem to him important, and leaves the reader to imagine the situation. But there are many cases in which, to catch his meaning properly, you must imagine yourself standing with Paul on the deck of the ship, or before the Roman official; and unless you reproduce the scene in imagination, you miss the sense. Hence, though his style is simple and clear, yet it. often becomes obscure from its brevity; and the meaning is lost, because the reader has an incomplete, or a positively false idea of the situation. It is always hard to recreate the remote past; knowledge, imagination, and, above all, sympathy and love are all needed. But Asia Minor, in which the scene is often laid, was not merely little known, but positively wrongly known.

I know of no person except Bishop Lightfoot who has seriously attempted to test or revise or improve the traditional statements (often, the traditional blunders) about Asian antiquities as bearing on Acts; but the [18] materials were not at his disposal for doing this uccessfully. But it is bad method to found theories of its composition on wrong interpretations of its meaning: the stock misconceptions should first be cleared away, and the book studied in relation to the localities and the antiquities.

Luke was deficient in the sense for time; and hence his chronology is bad. It would be quite impossible from Acts alone to get a true idea of the lapse of time. That is the fault of his age; Tacitus, writing the biography of Agricola (about 98 A.D.), makes no chronological statement, until in the last paragraph he gives a series of statistics. Luke had studied the sequence of events carefully, and observes it in his arrangement minutely, but he often has to carry forward one thread of his narrative, and then goes back in time to take up another thread; and these transitions are sometimes rather harsh. Yet, in respect of chronology, he was, perhaps, less careless than would appear: see p. 23.

His plan leads him to concentrate attention on the critical steps. Hence he often passes lightly over a long period of gradual development marked by no striking incident; and from his bad chronological sense he gives no measure of the lapse of time implied in a sentence, a clause, or even a word. He dismisses ten years in a breathe and devotes a chapter to a single incident. His character as an historian, therefore, depends on his selection of topics. Does he show the true historian's power of seizing the great facts, and marking dearly the stages in the development of his subject? Now, what impresses me is the sense of proportion in Acts, and the skill with which a complex and difficult subject is grouped to bring out the historical development from the primitive Church (ch. I-V) through the successive steps associated with four great names, Stephen, Philip, [19] Peter, Paul. Where the author passes rapidly over a period or a journey, we shall find reason to believe that it was marked by no striking feature and no new foundation. The axiom from which we start must be that which is assumed in all literary investigations-preference is to be given to the interpretation which restores order, lucidity, and sanity to the work. All that we ask in this place is the admission of that axiom, and a patient hearing,and especially that the reader, before condemning our first steps as not in harmony with other incidents, will wait to see how we can interpret those incidents.

The dominant interpretation rests avowedly on the principle that Acts is full of gaps, and that "nothing is more striking than the want of proportion". Those unfortunate words of Bishop Lightfoot are worked out by some of his successors with that "illogical consistency"which often leads the weaker disciples of a great teacher to choose his errors for loving imitation and emphasis. With such a theory no historical absurdity is too gross to be imputed to Luke. But our hypothesis is that Luke's silence about an incident or person should always be investigated as a piece of evidence, on the principlethat he had some reason for his silence; and in the course of this study we shall in several cases find that omission is a distinct element in the effect of his narrative.

There is a contrast between the early chapters of Acts and the later. In the later chapters there are few sentences that do not afford some test of their accuracy by mentioning external facts of life, history, and antiquities. But the earlier chapters contain comparatively few such details; the subject in them is handled in a vaguer way, with a less vigorous and nervous grasp; the facts are [20] rarely given in their local and historical surroundings, and sometimes seem to float in air rather than to stand on solid ground.

This fundamental difference in handling must be acknowledged; but it can be fairly attributed to difference of information and of local knowledge. The writer shows himself in his later narrative to be a stranger to the Levant and familiar with the Aegean; he could not stand with the same confidence on the soil of Syria and Palestine, as on that of Asia Minor or Greece. Moreover, he was dealing with an earlier period; and he had not the advantage of formal historical narratives, such as he mentions for the period described in his First Book (the Gospel). Luke was dependent on various informants in the earlier chapters of Acts (among them Paul and Philip); and he put together their information, in many cases reproducing it almost verbatim. Sometimes the form of his record gives a clue to the circumstances in which he learned it. That line of investigation is liable to become subjective and fanciful; but modern historical investigation always tries to get behind the actual record and to investigate the ultimate sources of statements.