Summary. — The general result of a consideration of these divergences between Acts and the Epistles suggests that the author was sometimes inaccurate, and not always well informed, but it is hard to see that he makes mistakes which would be im- possible to one who had, indeed, been with St. Paul at times but not during the greater part of his career, and had collected information from the Apostle and others as opportunity had served. On the other hand, the argument from literary affini- ties between the ' we-clauses ' and the rest of Acts remains at present unshaken ; and, until some further analysis succeeds in showing why it should be thought that the ' we-clauses ' have been taken from a source not written by the redactor himself, the traditional view that Luke, the companion of St. Paul, was the editor of the whole book is the most reasonable one.
III. Date of Acts and Reception in the Canon. — The evidence for the date is very meagre. If the Lucan authorship be accepted, any date after the last events chronicled, i.e. a short time before A.D. 60 to c. A.D. 100, is possible. The arguments which have been used for fixing on a more definite point are : ( 1 ) the date of the Lucan Gospel, which by the evidence of Ac 1^ is earlier ; (2) the abrupt termination of Acts ; (3) tiie possibility that the writer knew the Antiquities of Josephus, which cannot be earlier than A.D. 90.
1. The date of the Lucan Gospel. — It has usually been assumed that this must be posterior to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, but it is doubtful whether there are really any satisfactory proofs that this was the case. The only argument of importance is that in the apocalyptic section of Mark (ch. 13) expressions which might be supposed to refer to the fall of Jerusalem have been altered to correspond with the real facts of the siege. Actually, however, the most striking change is merely that the vague Marcan reference to Daniel's ' abominat ion of desolation ' has been replaced by a description of Jerusalem surrounded by armies. Of course, if we knew that Luke was later than the fall of Jerusalem, it would be a rational assumption to think that the change was due to the influence of the facts on the writer ; but the force of the argument is not so great if we reverse the proposition, for to explain ' the abomination of desolation ' as a prophecy of a siege is not specially difficult. The most, tiierefore, that can })e said is that this argument raises a slight presumption in favour of a date later than A.D. 70.
2. The abrupt termination of Acts. — Acts ends
apparently in the middle of the trial of St. Paul : he has been sent to Lome, and has spent two years in some sort of modified imprisonment, but no verdict has been passed. From this Harnack has argued {Neiie Vntcrnuchungen zur Apostel- geschichfe, p. 6511.) that the Acts must have been written before the end of the trial was known.
This argument would be important if it were the only explanation of the facts. But two other possibilities have to be considered. In the lirst place, it is possible, though perhaps not very probable, that Luke wrote, or intended to write, a third book beginning with the account of St. Paul's trial in Rome. In the second place, it is possible that the end of Acts was not so abrupt to the ears of contemporaries as it is to us, for the two years may be the recognized period during which a trial must be heard, and after which, if the prosecution failed to appear, the case collapsed. The case of St. Paul had been originally a prosecution by the Jews, and probably it still kept this character, even though the venue was changed to Rome. But the Jews, as Luke says in Ac 28-\ did not put in an appearance, and therefore the case must have collapsed for lack of a prosecution, after a statutory period of waiting. What this period was we do not know, but a passage in Philo's in Flaccum points to the probability that it was two years. According to this, a certain Lambon was accused of treason in Alexandria, and the Roman judge, knowing that he was dangerous, but that the evidence was insufficient to justify a condem- nation, kept him in prison for two years (Steriav), Avhich Philo describes as the ' longest period ' (t6v fjLrjKiaTov xp^vov). If this be so, Luke's termination of Acts is not really so abrupt as it seems, but implies that St. Paul was released after the end of the two years, because no Jews came forward to prosecute ; it is easy to understand that, as this was not a definite acquittal, Luke had no interest in emphasizing the fact.
3. The knowledge of Josephus shown in Acts.— The evidence for this is found in the case of Theudas. The facts are as follows. In Ac 5^^ Gamaliel is made to refer to two revolts which failed— first, that of Theudas, and after him that of Judas the Galilsean in the days of the Census (i.e. A.D. 6). Both these revolts are well known, and are described by Josephus ; but the difficulty is that Judas really preceded Theudas, whose re- volt took place in the procuratorship of Fadus (c. A.D. 43-47).