ἀξ cannot be accounted for. A brief record would have been all that was necessary, and this would not have added unduly to the length of the book.
Salmon’s explanation (Introduction, p. 312) that “ why St. Luke has told us no more is, that he knew no more; and that he knew no more, because at the time nothing more had happened—in other words, that the book of the Acts was written a little more than two years after Paul’s arrival at Rome,” will not commend itself to many scholars. It seems more natural to suppose that both the Gospel and the Acts were published after St. Paul’s death. Literary men do not always succeed in completing their designs before they die ; and the later the date we assign to Acts, the greater is the probability that St. Luke died before he had reduced to literary form his memories -of the Apostle’s post-Roman-captivity history.
Passing now to an examination on this point of the third group of St. Paul’s Epistles, the evidence afforded by them is distinctly favourable to the supposition that St. Paul was released after the two years of Acts xxviii, 30. We must of course avoid the error into which some {α11, of imagining that every foreboding or declared intention recorded in a narrative, or preserved in a published letter, would have been suppressed by the editor if it had not been realised. And accordingly we can only infer from the tone of Philippians and Philemon that, in St. Paul’s judgment, when he wrote these letters, the prospect of his release was favourable. No other inference can | be drawn from “I know that I shall abide, yea, and abide with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith” (Phil. i. 25); “1 trust in the Lord that I myself also shall come shortly ” (11. 24); ‘‘ Prepare me also a lodging: for I hope that through your prayers I shall be granted unto you’”’ (Philem. 22). Contrast with these passages the tone of 2 Timothy, which is that of a man who knew that his days were numbered, and that the end was not far off.
What seems to be a natural conclusion from the internal evidence -of Acts xxviii. and of Philippians and Philemon is confirmed by the tradition of the early Church as it is expressed by Eusebius, Η. Ε., li, 22: ‘Paul is said (λόγος ἔχει), after having defended himself to have set forth again upon the ministry of preaching, and to have entered the same city a second time, and to have there ended his life by martyrdom. Whilst then a prisoner, he wrote the Second Epistle to Timothy, in which he both mentions his first defence, and his impending death.” It is to be noted that there is no contrary ‘tradition ; nor is it easy to see what end could have been served by ‘the invention of this one.