his historical truthfulness, whilst Baur fastened upon Schnecken- burger’s view, and further developed his own previous attack on the historical character of Acts (Zahn, wu. s., p. 393, Lightfoot, B.D.?, i., 41). -But Baur’s theory in its extreme form could not maintain its ground, and various modifications of it took place within his own school. Certainly, to take an illustration, it must always remain a strange fact that, if Acts was written with the conciliatory tendency alluded to, only one indirect mention in it is found, xxiv. 17, of the collection for the poor Saints at Jerusalem, which played so promi- nent a part in St. Paul’s work and writings, and which was in itself such a palpable proof of the Apostle’s love for his Jewish brethren. The tendency view adopted by some of the writers succeeding Baur, e.g., Reuss, Keim, Weizsacker, regards the author of Acts as not intentionally departing from the historical relations between the two parties, but as forming his judgment of the relations between them from the standpoint of his own time. One of the most recent attempts to represent the conciliatory tendency of Acts as an apo- logy for the Christian religion before Gentiles, 7.e., before a heathen public, against the charges of the Jews, and to show how Judaism, through Christianity, broke up into its world-wide mission, is that of J. Weiss, Uber die Absicht und den literar. Charakter der A. G., 1897 (see further below) ; but whatever amount of correctness there may be in this view we may frankly adopt, without committing ourselves to the very precarious explanations and deductions of the writer; St. Luke’s own prologue, and the dedication of his two writings to the Gentile Theophilus, are in themselves sufficient to lead us to expect that the design accentuated by J. Weiss would not be alto- gether absent from his mind in composing his history (see the remarks of Zahn, 4. s., ii., p. 393).
But if there is no satisfaction in the more recent attempts to represent Acts as written mainly with a conciliatory “tendency,” still less can satisfaction be found in the view, older in its origin, of a supposed parallelism between St. Peter and St. Paul, drawn out by a writer who wished in this way to reconcile the Petrine and Pauline parties in the Church, by placing the leaders of each in a position of equal authority. That there are points of similarity in the life and work of the two Apostles may be readily admitted, but these likenesses are of the most general kind, and only such as we might expect in cases where two men work in the same calling at the same period and under the same conditions, cf. to this effect Clemen, Die Chronologie der Paulinischen Briefe, pp. 17, 18, and Feine, Eine vorkanonische Uberlieferung des Lukas, p. 314. The parallel can