4. Bearing upon Authorship

Or does the pretended circumstance that the Gospel contains vague recollections or statements in conflict with certified fact compel one to suppose that the author or editor of sources lived at a later period? It may be admitted that in this or that one may think of legendary recasting or adornment. Such material many find in the Gospel of the Infancy in other details. But these are practitally paralleled in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, which are rightly regarded as belonging to apostolic times, and failure has met the attempts to set the point at which these elements enter. So far as disagreement with other reports is concerned, it has first to be discovered which reports are correct, whether indeed reconciliation is not possible. Here is to be noted the relationship of Luke's history of the glorification of Jesus to I Cor. xv. 5 sqq., since the narrative of Luke has so little in common with the enumeration of Paul, though even here there are points which agree, and explanation of Lucas omissions is easy. On the whole, the Gospel would thus occupy an excellent position were it not that the Acts of the Apostles seems, under the methods of criticism, to draw it into the vortex of unreliability.

5. Character of the Acts of the Apostles

The Acts of the Apostles appears as a continuation of the Gospel. The occasion calling it forth moat have been something different from that which educed the Gospel, whether Theophiius had become a Christian or not. Christian- ity might have seemed to some an unjustified break with the past, an filly ordered revolutionary movement destined to fail. The Acts sets forth the development of the later from the primitive apostolic Christianity, its extension into the world of the heathen, especially by the instru mentality of Paul, whose figure in noon introduced into the picture. The purpose of the book seems to agree with that expressed in the preface to the Gospel. The old view that there is a paralleling of the fortunes of Peter and Paul, and the other ex position that the purposes of these two are harmo nized, are no longer maintained. That Paul could in his epistles speak otherwise than he does in the speeches of the Acts goes without saying, whether the speeches reported in the Acts be actual reports or assumed addresses made up after the pattern of Greek historiography. There is no a priori. rea- son why Peter should not early have found the way toward universalism, and it would be difficult to show that Paul could not have made use is the synagogues of the privileges of a born Jew (I Cor. ix. 19 sqq.).