however without the opposition of Bleek and Ulrich, the former of whom supported Schleiermacher. But Schleiermacher’s view of the part played by Timothy had already met with the strong opposition of Schneckenburger, 1841, and Swanbeck, 1847, attacked it by means of his own more complicated and more hazardous attempt to solve the sources of Acts. According to Swanbeck, the book is made up of a biography of Peter, a source containing the death of Stephen, a biography of Barnabas, the memoirs of Silas including the “We” sections. But the theory gained no acceptance, and most critics will probably agree with Lekebusch (A postelgeschichte, p. 188) that Swanbeck in his attempt to avoid the misleading theory as to Timothy involved himself in a still greater error by his advocacy of Silas.
For the Tiibingen school the question of sources occupied a less important place than the question of “tendency,” and more weight was attached to the imaginative power of the author than to the possibility of his possession of any reliable tradition; and consequently for a time the attempts to discriminate and estimate various sources sank into abeyance. It was, however, supposed by some critics that in the first part of Acts either a pentateuch source or an Hellenistic history of Stephen had been worked up (Zeller, Overbeck), or that some old πράξεις Παύλου formed a foundation for the narrative. Hilgenfeld (see also below) maintained the probable existence of this latter document, and Holsten thought that he could discover traces of a Judaistic source in the speeches of the first part of the book. B. Weiss, as long ago as 1854, had referred the speeches of St. Peter to a written source, but the speeches were closely connected with the historical episodes, and so in his Eznlei- tung, 2nd and 3rd editions, Weiss has attempted to trace throughout the whole first part of the book, {.ε., from i. 15-xv., a Jewish-Christian source, whilst Feine, 1891, has maintained that the Jewish-Christian source already employed in the third Gospel was also the source of the history of the Jerusalem Church in Acts i.-xii., and he gives, n. 5., p. 236 ff., many verbal likenesses between this source in St. Luke’s Gospel and in the earlier portion of Acts. Feine’s handling of the whole question is much more conservative than that of the other attempts to which allusion will be made, especially as he regards St. Luke as the author of the third Gospel and the Acts, and claims a high historical value for the episodes and speeches in the source.
But the interest in the hypothesis of a source or sources chiefly centres around the second rather than the first part of Acts. For here the “We” sections are concerned, and when the view was