On comparing the Gospel with the Acts, it is found that the style of the latter is more pure and free from Hebrew idioms, and the st3'le of the later portion of the Acts is more pure than that of the former. Where Luke used the materials he derived from others, oral or writ- ten, or both, his style reflects the Hebrew idioms of them ; but when he comes to scenes of which he was an eye-witness, and describes entirely in his own words, these disappear.
VL Quotations /rom the 0. T.—lt is a striking con- firmation of the view propounded above of the charac- ter of Luke's Gospel, and the object of its composition, that the references to the O. T., the authority of which with any except the .Jews would be but small, are so few — only twenty-four in the one against sixty-five in the other — when compared with their abundance in Mat- thew. Only eight out of the whole number are pecul- iar to our evangelist (marked with an asterisk iu the annexed list), which occur in the portions where he ap- pears to have followed more or less completely a Trapa- OoaiQ of his own ; the historj^ of the birth and childhood of our Lord, the visit to Nazareth (ch. iv), and that of the passion. The rest are found iu the common synop- tical sections. We may also remark that, with the most trifling exceptions, Luke never quotes the O. T. himself, nor speaks on his own authority of events occurring in fulfilment of prophecy, and that his citations are only found in the saj'ings of our Lord and others. The fol- lowing list is tolerably complete, exclusive of the hymns, which are little more than a cento of phrases from the O.T.
* i, IT, Mai. iv, 6.
* 25, Gen. xxx, 23.
* ii, 23, Exod. xiii, 2.
* 24, Lev. V, 11. iii, 4-6, Isa. xl, 3-5.
iv, 4, Deut. viii,3. 8, Deut. vi, 13. 10-11, Psa. xc, 11-12. 12, Deut. vi, 16.
* 18-19, l8a. Ixi, 1-2.
Isa. Iviil, C. vii, 27, Mai. iii, 1. viii,10, Isa. vi, 9.
X, 27, Deut. vi, 5. Lev. xix, 18. xiii, 27, Psa. vi, 8.
35, Psa. cxvii, 26. xviii, 20, Exod. xx, 13-15. xix, 46, Isa. Ivi, 7. XX, 17, Psa. cxvii. 28, Deut. XXV, 5. 37, Exod. iii, 6. 42-43, Psa. cix, 1. ' xxii, 37, Isa. liii, 12. 'xxiii, 30, Hos. x, 8. 46, Psa. xxx, 5.
VIL Time und Place of Composition. — In the com- plete silence of Scripture, our only means for deter- mining the above points are tradition and internal evi- dence. The statements of the former, though sufficient- ly definite, are inconsistent and untrustworthy, Jerome {Prcff. ill Matthew) asserts that it was composed " in Achaia and the regions of Boeotia," an opinion which appears to have been generally received in the 4th cen- tury (Gregory Na/.ianzen, '!•> 'Axain^i)) <i"tl has been accepted by Lardner {Credibility), who fixes its date A.D. 63 or 64, after the release of Paul. An Arabic ver- sion, published by Erpenius, places its composition " in a city of Macedonia, twenty-two years after the ascen- sion," A.D. 51 ; a view to which Ililgenfeld and Words- worth {Cr. Test, i, 170) give in their adherence. A still earlier date, thirteen years after the ascension, is as- signed by the subscription in some ancient MSS. Oth- er statements as to the place are Alexandria Troas, Al- exandria in EgjT^t (the Peshiio and Persian versions, Abulfeda, accepted by Mill,(irabe, and Wetstein), Rome (Ewald, vi, 40 ; Olshausen), and C;esarca (Bertholdt, Schott. Thiersch, Alford, Abp. Thomson).
Amid this uncertainty, it will be well to see if there is any internal evidence which will help us in deter- mining these points. We are here met at the outset by those who are determined to see in everj' clear prophecy a vaticinium post eventum, and who find in the predic- tions of the overthrow of Jerusalem (xiii, 34, 35; xix, 43, 44; xxi, 20-24), and the persecutions of our Lord's followers (xii, 52, 53 ; xxi, 12), and the nearness of the irapovaia (xxi, 25-33), a clear proof that the Gospel was composed after A.D. 70. This has come to be regarded as a settled point by a certain school of criticism (Ew- ald, v, 134 ; De Wette, Einleit. p. 298 ; Credner, Einleit. ; Keuss, Gesch. de Ileil. Schr. p. 195; Meyer; Kenan, Vie de Jesus, xvi ; Nicolas, Etudes, N. T., etc.), though there is no small diversity among its representatives as to the time and place of its publication of the Gospel and the sources from which it was derived. Those, on the other hand, who, brouglit up in a sounder and more reverent school, see no a priori impossibility in a future event being foretold by the Son of God, wiU be led by the same data to a very different conclusion, and will dis- cover sufficient grounds for dating the Gospel not later than A.U. 58. It is certain that the Gospel was written before the Acts of the Apostles (Acts i, 1). This latter could not have been composed before A.D. 58, when the writer leaves Paul '• in his own hired house" at Kome ; nor probably long after, since otherwise the issue of the apostle's imprisonment and appeal to Cfesar must naturally have been recorded by him. How long the composition of the Gospel preceded that of the Acts it is impossible to determine, but we may remark that the different tradition followed in the reports of the ascen- sion in the two books renders it probable that the inter- val was not very small, or, at an}' rate, that the two were not contemporaneous. If we follow the old tradi- tion given above, we may find reason for supposing that the interval between Luke's being left at Philippi (Acts xvi, 12 ; xvii, 1) and his joining the apostle there again (xx, 5) was employed in writing and publishing his gospel. This view is accepted by Alford, Proleg. p. 47, and is ably maintained by Dr. Wordsworth, Or. Test, i, 168-170, though he weakens his argument by referring tvayy'iXiov (2 Cor. viii, 18) to a icritten gospel, a later sense never fomid in the New Test. Ajiother and more plausible view, adopted by Thiersch, which has found very wide acceptance, is that the Gospel was written under the guidance and superintendence of Paul during his imprisonment at Cresarea, A.D. 55 ; but, as this im- prisonment did not last for two years, as usually held, there is here no room for the composition. Olshausen, among others, places it a little later, during Paul's cap- tivity at Rome, where he may have made the acquaint- ance of Theophilus, if, as Ewald (vi, 40) maintains, the latter was a native of Kome. This view, which places the writing of the Gospel in the early part of Paul's first imprisonment at Kome, A.D. 56, is supported by Luke's leisure at the time, and the fact that the Acts followed not very long after as a sequel.