and Chron.,” Expositor, October, 1899, written too late for more than a brief mention here, as also Professor Bacon’s more recent contribution, Expositor, November, 1899).
But although there are so many points of contact between secular history and the Acts, it seems that we must still be content with what Harnack describes as a relative rather than an absolute Chronology. We cannot say, ¢.g., that we can fix precisely the date of the famine, or the edict of Claudius, or the proconsulship of Gallio, or the reign of Aretas, to take the four events mentioned by Lightfoot, “ Acts,” B.D.*,i., p. 4, as also by Harnack, Chron., i., p. 236, cf. Zahn, 1. 5., i.; Excursus Π. But in this respect no blame attaches to St. Luke as an historian. His object was to connect the history of the rise and progress of the Christian Faith with the course of general imperial history around him, and if his chronological sense seems deficient to modern judgment, it was a deficiency in which he was by no means peculiar, but which he shared with his contemporaries and his age, cf. Ramsay, St. Paul, pp. 18, 23, and Was Christ born at Bethlehem ? pp. 204, 256.
STATE OF THE TEXT. It isnot too much to say that during the last fifteen years chief interest has centred around the Western text and its relative importance (cf. Blass, Studien und Kritiken, p. 86 ff., 1994: Acta Apostolorum, 1895, and Acta A postolorum, 1896, also Evangelium secundum Lucam, 1897, both edited secundum formam que videtur Romanam ; see also Draseke, Zeitschrift fiir wissen- schaft. Theol., p. 192 ff., 1894).
Codex D, its most important representative, contains an un- usually large number of variations from the received text in Acts (see for the number Zéckler, A postelgeschichte, 2nd edit., p. 165; he reckons, ¢.g., some 410 additions or interpolations), and it is no wonder that attempts should have been made to account for this diversity. Bornemann’s endeavour some half-century ago (1848) to represent D as the original text, and the omissions in the common text as due to the negligence or ignorance of copyists, found no acceptance, and whilst in one sense Blass may be said to have returned to the position of Bornemann, he has nevertheless found his predecessor’s solution totally inadequate, Philology of the Gospels, p. 105. Joannes Clericus, Jean Leclerc, the Dutch philologist (born 1657), had already suggested that St. Luke had made two
1 The main division of MSS. of Acts into three groups, with references to W. H. and Blass, is well given in Old Latin Biblical Texts, iv., pp. xvii., xviii. (H. J. ‘White, Oxon., 1897).