It cannot be said that the recent and frequent attempts to multiply and differentiate sources in Acts, to assign them to various revisers or redactors, have met with any degree of real success. If Holtzmann and Wendt (see also a description of these attempts. in Theologische Rundschau, Feb., March, April, 1899) contend that they have done so, and that with regard to the first few chapters of Acts some consensus of opinion has been gained, we may set against such contentions not only the opinion of Zahn, Eznleitung, it., pp. 414, 424, who maintains that none of these repeated attempts
has attained any measure of probability (so too Zéckler, A postel- geschichte, p. 154, 2nd edit., and Knabenbauer, Actus Apostolorum, p. 9 ff., 1899), but also the opinion of Wendt, who, after a careful and on the whole sympathetic review, is obliged to confess that one must limit oneself in any attempt to discover the sources of the book to what is attainable and provable in the circumstances, and that the more complicated the hypothesis suggested, the more difficult it is to make it intelligible to others, Apostelgeschichte, p. 17, 1899. In his own examination of the problem he limits himself to one great source, p. 30, and plainly declares that it does not seem to be possible to discover others, although he enumerates various passages in which old and trustworthy traditions were combined; but whether these were derived from written documents or from one and the same source he declines to say, and he is evidently inclined to admit that in many cases oral tradition may also have been at work. Thus whilst iv. 1-22, v. 17-42, are regarded as parallel pieces of information of what was in reality the same event, or whilst again the liberation of St. Peter in chap. xii. is a parallel to the release of the Apostle in chap. v. 18-20, the work of St. Philip and the death of St. James rest upon good and trustworthy tradition. The source to which Wendt attaches such importance includes the “We” sections, and the whole of the book from xiii. onwards, with the exception of xv. 1-33, the source continuing with ver. 35, whilst it can be traced further back to xi. 19, 27, and to viii. 1-4. But this large source is full of traces of revision and redaction, which mark not only the narratives but also the addresses. Its interest centred chiefly in the person of St. Paul and in his work, and it gave no history of the ovigines of the Church or of the missionary journeys of the other Apostles, although it introduced its account of St. Paul by tracing the foundation of the Church in Antioch from the mother Church in Jerusalem as a result of the death of St. Stephen and the subsequent persecution, and by showing how that same Church of Antioch became the starting-point for St. Paul’s missionary labours.
This view of the sources adopted by Wendt contrasts favourably with some of the extraordinary and complicated theories which from time to time have been advocated in Germany, more especially during the last few years.
As early as 1845 Schleiermacher’s published lectures referred the authorship of the “We” sections not to Luke but to Timothy, and some two years before this E. M. Mayerhoff had suggested that the same hypothesis might be extended to all parts of Acts, not