Sec. i. Trustworthiness.
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 unbiassed 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 con- demnation that awaits the rash attempt, I will venture to add one to the number of the critics, by stating in the
4 The Acts of the Apostles. Chap. I.
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
Sec. x. Trustworthiness.
early Church history, yet attach some value to his opinion upon the spuriousness of documents which he has con- demned 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 import- ance 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 com- parison of Gal. II i- 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