Further, we cannot admit readily that peculiarities of Luke's narrative are to be accounted for by want of
1 6 The Acts of the Apostles. Chap. I.
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 be- lieve 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 idtfa 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 possi- bility that a first-century historian has made errors. We shall not make much use of ttsxs proviso ; but still the condi- tions 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 ; yet 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
Sec. 3- Working Hypothesis of the Investigation, i1}
our methods. For example, Thucydides makes a practice of putting into the mouths of his characters 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, im- agination, 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
1 8 The Acts of the Apostles. Chap. I.
materials were not at his disposal for doing this successfully. But it is bad method to found theories of its composition on wrong interpretations of its meaning: the stock mis- conceptions should first be cleared away, and the book studied in relation to the localities and the annuities.