Nothing, it is true, is said in Acts of the beginnings of Christianity in Rome, or as to how the Church was first founded in that city ; but when we consider the importance that St. Paul plainly attached to his seeing for himself the metropolis of the world, cf. xix. 21, and when his Epistle addressed to the Roman Church indicates how clearly he foresaw the importance which that Church would have for Gentile Christianity in the future, it is quite conceivable that the universalist Luke would draw his second treatise to a fitting close by showing that blindness in part had happened to Israel that the fulness of the Gentiles might come in. “We are not told,” says Holtzmann, quoting Overbeck, “how the Gospel came to Rome, but how Paul came to Rome”: but this objection, which
Overbeck considered the greatest against the view that the con- tents of Acts were summed up in chap. i. 8, is obviated by the above considerations; St. Paul was to bear witness in Rome as he had at Jerusalem, but the result of his final witness in Jerusalem, xxiii. 1 ff., resulted in a division among the Jews, and a similar result followed his first testimony in Rome. The Gospel had come to Rome already, but those who accepted it were only a sect everywhere spoken against; now its foremost representative gains it a hearing from the Gentiles, and that too without interruption or prohibition.
But this recognition of the importance of St. Paul’s witness and work in Rome, and of their subsequent development, by no means excludes other purposes which may have been present to the mind of St. Luke. “Νο other N.T. writer,’ says Zahn, “mentions a Roman emperor by name,” and he proceeds to point out the sig- nificance of this fact in connection with the whole design of St. Luke to show that Christianity was an historical religion; how the edicts of Augustus, Luke Π. 1, and-of Claudius, Acts xviii. 2, had their influence on the new faith (cf. Luke iti. 1), how in comparison with the other Evangelists St. Luke constantly introduces the names of those who were connected indirectly as well as directly with political events (Einleitung, Π., p. 375, and cf. Ramsay, St Paul, p. 385, Friedrich, 1. s., p. 53 ff.). Not only would notices of this kind impress a reader of the type of Theophilus with a sense of the certainty of those things in which he had been instructed, but they are also of importance in that they indicate that a writer, who thus took pains to gain accurate information with regard to events in the Roman world, would naturally be interested in tracing care- fully the relations between the empire and the infant Church, and all the more so if it was important to show his readers that Christi- anity stood in no hostile relationship to the imperial government (cf. Zahn, u. s., p. 379).
But it is one thing to describe one of the objects of the book in this way, viz., as an attempt to reassure those who had been already instructed in the origines of the Christian Faith, and to emphasise its evident power and rectitude at the bar of the rulers of this world, and to maintain that all this was done with a political-apologetic aim, regardless of truthfulness to fact, and only concerned with representing Christianity in a favourable light before magistrates and kings. No doubt we are repeatedly told how St. Paul took shelter in an appeal to Roman law and Roman authority, and how much more justly and calmly the Roman authorities judged of his case than the fanatical and insensate Jews; ‘“ but,” says Wendt with