But if on other grounds, 6.5., on account of the prologue to St. Luke’s Gospel (Harnack, 4. s., p. 248, Sanday, B.L., p. 278, Page, Acts, p. xviii.), we are asked to place that book after the destruction of Jerusalem, it is further maintained by Harnack that some consider- able interval must have elapsed after that event before Acts was written ; for if it had been composed immediately after the destruc- tion, the writer would have mentioned it as useful for his aim; and so the book must have been composed at a time, c. 80, when the overthrow of the Holy City no longer stood, as it were, in the fore- ground of events. But it may be doubted if this is a very convincing argument, for the Epistle of Barnabas, written, as Harnack holds, between the wide limits of 80 and 132 a.p., does refer to the destruction, and for the writer of this Epistle equally as for the writer of Acts the event would have been a fait accompli. It is doubtful whether, in fact, anything can be gained as to the fixture of date from this omission of any reference to the fate of the Holy City; if anything, the omission would point to the years before the destruction for the composition of the book, as Harnack himself allows, if we were not obliged, according to the same writer, by the date of the Gospel to place Acts also after the overthrow. Both in England and in Germany representative writers can be named in support of the earlier and of the later date, Dr. Salmon maintaining that Acts was written a little more than two years after St. Luke’s arrival in Rome (cf. also Rackham, Yournal of Theol. Studies, i., p. 77), whilst Dr. Sanday would apparently place Acts about 80 Α.Ρ., and the Gospel 75-80, B. L., p. 279, so too Dr. Plummer, St. Luke, p. xxxi., both being influenced to a great extent by the presumption that the Gospel followed the fall of Jerusalem. In this the English critics are in interesting agreement with Zahn in his recent volume, Eznleitung, ii., pp. 433, 434, so far as date is concerned, in that he too regards 80 Α.Ρ. as the terminus ad quem for both Gospel and Acts, assigning them probably to 75 a.p., but unable to find a place for them before the fall of Jerusalem.
1 Sir J. Hawkins in his valuable Hore Synoptice, p. 143, has recently drawn attention to the difference of vocabulary between the third Gospel and Acts, and whilst maintaining that it is quite insufficient 6 destroy the argument for the identity of authorship, he thinks that it points to a considerable lapse of time between the two works. But we are dealing with a versatile author acquainted apparently with many writers, Vogel, Zur Charakteristik des Lucas nach Sprache und Stil, pp. 15, 17, 38, and the differences in question cannot have weighed with Blass, inasmuch as he places the completion of Acts three years after the Gospel, and still less with Zahn, who still maintains that the two books were published