admirable candour (A postelgeschichte, p. 17), “there is no reason to doubt that this representation simply corresponded to historical truth” (see the whole paragraph in Wendt, 1899, and cf. Weiss, u. s., p. 569 as against Overbeck and Mangold, u.s., p. 427, following Schnecken- burger and Zeller). Moreover, when we remember that the writer of Acts deliberately enters upon a field of history ‘“‘ where perhaps beyond all others there was room for mistake and blunder, the administration of the Roman Empire and its provinces,” nothing is more surprising than the way in which his accuracy is confirmed by every fresh and searching investigation.!
But if there is no reason to attribute a political tendency (see further below) to the writer, still less is there room for the attribu- tion of a doctrinal tendency. The earlier representatives of this latter view of the book, Baur and Zeller, started with insisting upon the fundamental opposition which prevailea between the view of the relationship of St. Paul with the primitive Apostles as set forth in those Epistles which these critics accepted, and in the Acts: to St. Paul a Judaising tendency was ascribed in the latter which was not in harmony with his statements in his own writings, whilst, on the other hand, to St. Peter especially a liberal stand- point was ascribed, which was not to be expected in view of the utterances of St. Paul in his Epistles, a standpoint which would make Peter, not Paul, the originator of Gentile Christianity. On the whole the Acts represented an idealised and harmonising view of the relation of parties in the primitive Church, and its object as the work of a Pauline Christian was to reconcile the Jewish and Pauline parties. Schneckenburger had previously emphasised the supposed parallel in Acts between Peter and Paul (see further below), and had represented the book as written with the apologetic aim of defending Paul against the misrepresentation of the Juda- isers; but it must always be remembered that Schneckenburger, although emphasising the apologetic tendency of St. Luke, never denied
1Cf., e.g., the notes on xvii. 6, XXVili. 7, etc., the references to the invaluable and epoch-making works of Professor Ramsay, and Vogel, Zur Charakteristik des Lukas nach Sprache und Stil, p. 28, 1897, on the remarkable degree of confidence with which military, political, and judicial terms are employed in Acts. Professor Schmiedel in his review of Professor Ramsay’s St. Paul describes it as the work on the whole not of the historian or archeologist, but of the narrow apologist, Theolo- gische Literaturzeitung, 1897, No. 23, and more recently, Professor H. Holtzmann, characterises Professor Ramsay’s description and illustration of the scene, Acts xvi. 25-34, as “humbug”! Theologische Literaturzeitung, 1899, No. 7; such remarks are ill calculated to promote candid and respectful criticism.