Paul feels.
1 Church in R. £.. Ch. XIII.
Sec. 4. The Author of Acts and his Hero. 23
The question must be fairly considered whether Luke had completed his history. There is one piece of evi- dence from his own hand that he had not completed it, but contemplated a third book at least. His work \s divided into two books, the Gospel and the Acts, but in the opening line of the A cts he refers to the Gospel as the First Discourse (7rpwTo? \oyo?). Had he not contemplated a third book, we expect the term Former Discourse (Trp6repo<i). In a marked position like the opening of a book, we must take the word first strictly (Note, p. 27).
We shall argue that the plan of Acts has been ob- scured by the want of the proper climax and conclusion, which would have made it clear, and also that the author did not live to put the final touches to his second book. Perhaps we may thus account for the failure of chrono- logical data. In Book I there are careful reckonings of dates (in one case by several different eras) at the great steps of the narrative. In Book II there are no such calculations (except the vague "under Claudius" in XI 28, in itself a striking contrast to "the fifteenth year of Tiberius," Luke III 1). Tacitus, as we saw, appends the dates to his Agricola : Luke incorporates his dates, but they have all the appearance of being put into an already finished narrative. If other reasons prove that Acts wants the finishing touches, we may reckon among the touches that would have been added certain calculations of synchronism, which would have furnished a chronological skeleton for the narrative.
If the work was left incomplete, the reason, perhaps, lay in the author's martyrdom under Domitian.
5. the TEXT of acts. It was my wish to take no notice here of differences of reading, but simply to
24 The Acts of tlu Apostles. Chap. I.
follow Westcott and Hort (except in two impossible cases, XI 20, XII 25). This, however, proved impracti- cable; for there are some cases in which overestimate of the two great MSS. (the Sinaitic and the Vatican) has led to the adoption of a reading that obscures history. In several places I have been driven back on the Received Text and the Authorised Version, and in others the Bezan Text either contains or gives the clue to the original text ; and wherever the Bezan Text is confirmed by old Versions and by certain Greek MSS., it seems to me to deserve very earnest consideration, as at least pointing in the direction of an original reading subjected to wide-spread corruption.
It is universally admitted that the text of Acts was exposed to very careless or free handling in the second century. This came about in various ways, for the most part unintentionally, but partly by deliberate action. At that time great interest was taken in gathering from trustworthy sources supplementary information, beyond what was contained in the Gospels and Acts. Eusebius, HI 39. quotes a passage from Papias describing his eager inquiries after such information from those who had come into personal relations with the Apostles, and another, V 20, from Irenaeus, describing how Poly- carp used to tell of his intercourse with John and the rest that had seen the Lord. Now there was a natural tendency to note on the margin of a MS. additional information obtained on good authority about incidents mentioned in the text ; and there is always a danger that such notes may be inserted in the text by a copyist, who takes them for parts accidentally omitted. There is also a certain probability that deliberate addi-
Sec 5. The Text of Acts. 25
tions might be made to the text (as deliberate excisions are said to have been made by Marcion). The balance of evidence is, on the whole, that Mark XVI 9-20 is a later composition, designed to complete a narrative that had all the appearance of being defective. Again, ex- planatory notes on the margin of a MS. are often added by a reader interested in the text ; there is no doubt that in some books such glosses have crept into the text through the errors of the copyist ; and there are on our view three such cases at least in the generally accepted text of Acts.