mann, 4. s., p. 395). See further Zahn, wu. s., pp. 351, 388, 425; Lightfoot, B.D.?, i., 32.
But if the author of these sections is to be found amongst the intimate companions of St. Paul, and amongst those who were with him in Rome, no one fulfils the conditions better than St. Luke. Even Jiilicher, who declines to decide positively which of the four companions, Silas, Timothy, Titus, Luke, was the author, considers . that, if it was St. Luke, we have in that fact the best explanation that his name remained attached to the Third Gospel and Acts alike, Einleitung, p. 269. The writer of Acts xxvii. 1-xxviii. 16 evidently accompanied St. Paul to Rome, and that St. Luke was with the Apostle at the time of his first captivity we learn on the authority of two Epistles which very few of the best critics would now care to dispute, Col. iv. 14, Philem. νετ. 24.
But the writer of Acts has not felt the need of using the Epistles of St. Paul as sources for his work, although they were the most weighty documents for the history which he professes to describe. There are numbers of undesigned coincidences between the letters and the history, and Paley, in his Hore Pauline, has done invalu- able service in drawing attention to them. But still Acts is written independently of the Epistles, and it cannot be said that any one letter in particular is employed by the writer. Yet this would be inconceivable if the former work was composed 100-120 a.p., especi- ally when we remember the knowledge of the Epistles displayed by the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas, by St. Ignatius or St. Poly- carp (Harnack, Chron., i., 249). Moreover the writer, whoever he was, was beyond all doubt intensely interested in St. Paul, and it is strange that he should not have made use of his letters, when we remember the impression which they made upon those contemporary with the great Apostle, cf. 2 Cor. x. 10, 2 Pet. iii. 15 (Zahn, w. s., p. 412).
But this relation between Acts and the Pauline Epistles not only shows that the former was written before the close of the first ‘century, but that the author stood sufficiently near to St. Paul to be able to write without enriching his knowledge by references to the Apostle’s letters. This, however, becomes natural enough on the supposition that the writer was a Timothy, or a Titus, or a Luke. If, however, the two former are excluded, probabilities again point to Luke (Zahn). (For recent writers who deny the acquaintance of the author of Acts with St. Paul’s Epistles we may refer to Wendt, Felten, McGiffert, Harnack, Zahn, Jiilicher, Rackham.) And we thus come into line with early Church tradition which referred the third