Of James the son of Zebedee we have no notice except of his execution by Herod, while much more space is devoted to Stephen and Philip, who were not Apostles, than to him; and the same remark applies to the notices of Timothy and Silas. We may conclude then that the title, as we now have it, was a later addition. The author (Acts i. 1) calls the Gospel "a treatise" (óyos), a term the most general that could be used; and if that work were styled by him “the first treatise,” the Acts would most naturally receive the name of "the second treatise." Or it may be that the form of title given in the Cod. Sinaiticus was its first appellation. There the book is called simply "Acts," and for a while that designation may have been sufficient to distinguish it from other books. But it was not long before treatises came into circulation concerning the doings of individual Apostles and Bishops, and these were known by such titles as The Acts of Peter and Paul," "The Acts of Timothy," "The Acts of Paul and Thecla," &c. It would become necessary, as such literature increased and was circulated, to enlarge the title of this original volume of "Acts," and from such exigency we find in various MSS. different titles given to it, such as "Acts of the Apostles," "Acting of Apostles," "Acts of all the Apostles," "Acts of the Holy Apostles," with still longer additions in MSS. of later date.

III. THE AUTHOR.

All the traditions of the early Church ascribe the authorship of the Acts to the writer of the third Gospel, and Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. II. 11) says, “Luke, by race a native of Antioch and by profession a physician, having associated mainly with Paul and having companied with the rest of the Apostles less closely, has left us examples of that healing of souls which he acquired from them in two inspired books, the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles." Eusebius lived about 325 A.D. Before his time Tertullian, A.D. 200, speaks (De jejuniis, 10) of the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles and of Peter going up to the housetop to pray, as facts mentioned in the com

In

mentary of Luke. Also (De baptismo, 10) he says, "We find in the Acts of the Apostles that they who had received the baptism of John had not received the Holy Ghost, of which indeed they had not even heard." Similar quotations could be drawn from Clement of Alexandria, a little anterior to Tertullian, and also from Irenæus, who wrote about A.D. 190. The earliest clear quotation from the Acts is contained in a letter preserved in Eusebius (H. E. v. 2) sent by the Churches in the south of Gaul to the Christians of Asia and Phrygia and written A.D. 177, concerning the persecutions of the Church in Gaul. Alluding to some who had been martyred there, the writers say, "They prayed for those who arranged their torments as did Stephen, that perfect martyr, 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge."" still earlier writings there may be allusions to the Acts, but they are not sufficiently distinct to warrant their insertion as quotations. But in the scarcity of writings at this early period we need not be surprised if a century elapsed after the writing of the book before we can discover traces of its general circulation. It was probably completed, as we shall see, between A.D. 60-70, and if in a hundred years from that time the Christians of Europe can quote from it as a book well known to their brethren in Asia we may feel quite sure that it had been in circulation, and generally known among Christians, for a large portion of the intervening century. Modern critics have doubted the existence of the Acts at the date when this letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons was written, and have argued thus: "The tradition of St Stephen's martyrdom, and the memory of his noble sayings, may well have remained in the Church, or have been recorded in writings then current, from one of which indeed eminent critics conjecture that the author of Acts derived his materials1." As if it were easier to admit on conjecture the existence of writings for which no particle of evidence is forthcoming, than to allow, in agreement with most ancient tradition, that "the Acts" was composed at the date to which, on the face of his work, the writer lays claim.

In his book the author makes no mention of himself by 1 Supernatural Religion, III. 25.

name, though in the latter part of his narrative he very frequently employs the pronoun "we," intimating thereby that he was present at the events which in that portion of his work he is describing. The passages in which this pronoun is found (xvi. 10-17; xx. 5-38; xxi. 1—18; xxvii.; xxviii.) deserve special notice. The author of the Acts, by his allusion in the opening words to his "former treatise," leads us to the belief that in this second work he is about again to use material which he gathered from those who had been eyewitnesses and ministers in the scenes which he describes. Much of this material he has clearly cast into such a shape as fitted his purpose, and much which was no doubt at hand for him he did not use because of the special aim which in his treatise he had in view. It is very difficult to believe that an author who has in other parts systematically shaped other men's communications, many of which would naturally be made to him in the first person, into a strictly historical narrative, should in four places of his work have forgotten to do this, and have left standing the "we" of those persons from whom he received his information. It seems much more natural to infer that the passages in question are really the contributions of the writer himself and that, on the occasions to which they refer, he was himself a companion of St Paul. For whoever the writer may have been he was neither neglectful nor ignorant of the rules of literary composition, as may be seen by the opening words both of the Gospel and the Acts.

But it has been alleged that anyone who had been the companion of St Paul at those times, to which reference is made by the passages we are considering, would have had much more and greater things to tell us than the writer of the Acts has here set down. This would be quite true if the author had set out with the intention of writing a life of St Paul. But, as has been observed before, this is exactly what he did not do. His book is a description of the beginnings of Christianity. And with this in mind we can see that the matters on which he dwells are exactly those which we should expect him to notice. In the first passage (xvi. 10-17) he describes the events which were connected with the planting of the first Christian Church in

Europe at Philippi, and though the word "we" only occurs in the verses cited above, it would be ridiculous to suppose that he, who wrote those words implying a personal share in what was done, was not a witness of all that took place while Paul and Silas remained in Philippi. A like remark applies to the second passage (xx. 5-38). Here too the word "we" is not found after verse 15 where we read " we came to Miletus." But surely having been with St Paul up to this point, we have no reason to think that the writer was absent at the time of that earnest address which the Apostle gave to the Ephesian elders whom he summoned to Miletus to meet him; an address which is exactly in the style that we should, from his Epistles, expect St Paul to have used, and which we may therefore judge the writer of the Acts to have heard from the Apostle's lips, and in substance to have faithfully reported.

The next passage (xxi. 1—18) brings the voyagers to Jerusalem, and there the writer represents himself as one who went with St Paul to meet James and the Christian elders when the Apostle was about to give an account of his ministry among the Gentiles. But though after that the story falls again, as a history should, into the third person, have we any right to conclude from this that the writer who had come so far with his friend, left him after he had reached the Holy City? Surely it is more natural to suppose that he remained near at hand, and that we have in his further narrative the results of his personal observation and enquiry, especially as when the pronoun "we" again appears in the document it is (xxvii. 1) to say "it was determined that we should sail into Italy." The writer who had been the companion of St Paul to Jerusalem is at his side when he is to be sent to Rome. The events intervening had been such that there was no place for the historian to speak in his own person, but the moment when he is allowed again to become St Paul's companion in travel, the personal feature reappears, and the writer continues to be eyewitness of all that was done till Rome was reached, and perhaps even till the Apostle was set free, for he notes carefully the length of time that the imprisonment lasted.

That the writer of the Acts does not mention St Paul's Epistles is what we should expect. He was with St Paul, and not with any of those congregations to which the Epistles were addressed, while as we have said, the planting of the Church, and not the further edification thereof was what he set before him to be recorded in the Acts. Moreover we are not to look upon St Luke as with St Paul in the same capacity as Timothy, Silas, or Aristarchus. He was for the Apostle "the beloved physician"; a Christian brother it is true, but abiding with St Paul because of his physical needs rather than as a prominent sharer in his missionary labours.

The passages in question seem to give us one piece of definite information about their writer. They shew us that he accompanied St Paul from Troas as far as Philippi, and there they leave him. But they further shew that it was exactly in the same region that the Apostle, when returning to Asia for the last time, renewed the interrupted companionship, which from that time till St Paul's arrival in Rome seems only to have been interrupted while he was under the charge of the Roman authorities. If we suppose, as the title given to him warrants us in doing, that Theophilus was some official, perhaps in Roman employ; that he lived (and his name is Greek) in the region of Macedonia; then the third Gospel may very well have been written for his use by St Luke while he remained in Macedonia, and the Acts subsequently when St Paul had been set free. In this way addressing one who would know how the writer came to Macedonia with St Paul, and went away again as that Apostle's companion, the places in which the author has allowed "we" to stand in his narrative are exactly those in which the facts of the case would dictate its retention.

Nor is this personal portion of the writer's narrative so unimportant as has been alleged by some critics. The founding of the Church at Philippi may be called the recorded birthday of European Christendom. And for the writer of the Acts it was not unimportant to tell us that a Christian Church was established at Troas, when he had said in an earlier place that on a former visit they were forbidden of the Spirit to preach the