ch. xv. 23-29 (xxiii. 26—30), must have been of this kind: some of the discourses, as that of Peter ch. xi. 5-17, containing expressions unknown to Luke's style: more or less, the other speeches of Peter, containing many striking points of similarity to (both) his Epistles,— see reff. At the same time, from the similarity of ending of the earlier sections (compare ch. ii. 46, 47; iii. 32 ff.; iv. 42; ix. 31; xii. 24), from the occurrence of words and phrases peculiar to Luke in the midst of such speeches as those noted above, the inference must be (as in the last paragraph) that such documents were not adopted until their language had been revised, where thought necessary, by the author himself. The very minute and careful detail of ch. xii., evidently intended to give the highest authority to the narrative of Peter's miraculous deliverance, so that the house itself of Mary the mother of John Mark is specified, the name of the female servant who went to the door, her remarks and the answer made to her, are all given,-has apparently been the result of diligent enquiry on the spot, from the parties concerned. We can hardly resist the inference, that the very same persons who fifteen years before had been witnesses of the deliverance, now gave the details of an occurrence which they could never forget, and described their own feelings on it.

9. Whether Luke at this time can have fallen in with Peter personally, is very questionable. That Apostle certainly does not appear to have been at Jerusalem when Paul visited it: and from the omission of all mention of him after ch. xv., the natural inference is, that he was not there during any part of Paul's imprisonment. (See note on Gal. ii. 11, and Introduction to 1 Pet.)

10. But one very important section of the first part of the Acts is concerned with events which happened at Cæsarea, and derived from information obtained there. There dwelt Philip the Evangelist, one of the seven (ch. xxi. 8): a most important authority for the contents of ch. vi. and viii., if not also for some events previous to ch. vi. There too, we may well believe, still dwelt, if not Cornelius himself', yet some of the "many that were come together" of ch. x. 27,-the persons perhaps

• De Wette objects, that Philip could hardly have imparted ch. viii. 39 in its present form. At first sight, it seems so: but the next verse, "he evangelized all the cities, &c.," can on the other hand hardly have been imparted by any but Philip: and this leads us to think whether subsequent enquiry respecting the eunuch (who as he had before come to Jerusalem to worship at the feast, so would again) may not have enabled Philip to add this particular, "for he went his way rejoicing," over and above what he could know at the time.

7 It seems probable that the Roman forces never left Cæsarea during the whole period from Augustus to Vespasian. The territory during that time (see chronological table) was alternately part of the province of Syria, and a dependent kingdom; but the garrisons do not appear to have been changed in such cases.

who had gone to fetch Peter from Joppa,-at all events plenty who could narrate the occurrences of that memorable day, and the words which formed the great procem of the Gentile Gospel.

11. Connected with the Cæsarean part of our history, is one minute touch of truth and accuracy, which is interesting as pointing to careful research and information of the most trustworthy kind. The awful death of Herod Agrippa I. had happened on a great public occasion. It appears that the celebration of a festival in honour of Cæsar had also been selected as the time of audience for an embassy of the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon, and during this audience, after making an oration to the embassy, Herod was struck by the hand of God. Now of this latter particular, the Sidonian embassy, the Jewish historian knows nothing. (See the passage quoted on ch. xii. 21.) But Luke, who had made careful enquiries on the spot, who had spent a week at Tyre, ch. xxi. 4-7, and Paul, who had friends at Sidon, ch. xxvii. 3, were better acquainted with the facts of the occurrence than to overlook, as Josephus did, the minute details in the general character of the festival.

12. One or two sections in the former part of the Acts require separate consideration.

(a) The apology of Stephen, from its length and peculiar characteristics, naturally suggests an enquiry as to the source whence it may probably have been obtained by Luke. And here I should feel little hesitation in ascribing a principal share in the report to him who was so deeply implicated in Stephen's martyrdom,-who shews by his own reference (ch. xxii. 20) to the part taken by him on that occasion, how indelibly it was fixed in his memory,—and who in more than one place of his recorded speeches and writings, seems to reproduce the very thoughts and expressions of Stephen. At the same time, it would be improbable that the church at Jerusalem should have preserved no memorial of so important a speech as that of her first martyr before his judges. So that, however we may be inclined to attribute much of its particularity and copiousness to information derived from Paul, it must be classed, as to its general form, among those contributions to the history obtained by Luke at Jerusalem.

(b) The narrative of the conversion of Saul in ch. ix. can hardly fail to have been derived from himself. I have shewn in the notes that there are no discrepancies between this and the two other relations of the same event, but such as may easily be accounted for by the peculiar circumstances under which each is given, and the necessarily varying expressions of narratives which were afterwards not reduced into harmony with each other, but written faithfully down as delivered.

13. Agreeable with the above suppositions is the fact, that the former

8

part of the book presents more traces of Hebraistic idiom, not only in speeches, but in the form of the historical narrative.

14. I proceed now to an enquiry promised in par. 1 of this section: How far we have indications of the gaps in the author's personal testimony in the latter part having been filled in by that of Paul.

Perhaps one of the best sections for the purpose of this examination will be that from ch. xvii. 16-xviii. 5, which relates to a time when Paul was left alone. Do we discover in the narrative or speech the traces of an unusual hand, and if so, whose is it? That some unusual hand has been here employed, is evident: for in the six verses 16-21 inclusive, we have no fewer than eleven expressions foreign to Luke's style, or nowhere else occurring: and in the speech itself, no fewer than twenty. Now of these thirty-one expressions, five are either peculiar to, or employed principally by Paul; besides that we find the phrase "his spirit," so frequently used by him of his own mind or feelings. Here I think we can hardly fail to trace the hand of the Apostle by quite as many indications as we might expect to find. That Luke should, as in every other case, have wrought in the section into his work, and given it the general form of his own narrative, would only be natural, and we find it has been so.

15. It may be instructive to carry on the examination of this part of the history somewhat further. At ch. xviii. 5, Silas and Timotheus joined Paul at Corinth. One at least of these, Timotheus, was afterwards for a considerable time in the company of Luke in the journey from Philippi to Jerusalem. But on his arrival at Corinth, no alteration in the style of the narrative is perceptible. It still remains the mixed diction of Paul and Luke: the uncommon words are fewer, while we have some remarkable traces of Paul's hand. Again, in vv. 24-28 of the same chapter, we have a description of what took place with regard to Apollos at Ephesus, when Paul himself was absent. This portion it would be natural to suppose might have been furnished by Apollos himself, were it not for the laudatory description of ver. 24. If not by Apollos, then by Aquila and Priscilla to Paul on his return to Ephesus. And so it seems to have been. The general form is Luke's: the peculiarities are mostly Paul's.

16. The examination of these sections may serve to shew that the great Apostle appears to have borne a principal part in informing Luke with regard to such parts of his history: the traces of this his share in the work being visible by the occurrence of words and phrases peculiar to him in the midst of the ordinary narrative from Luke's own pen. These he preserved, casting the merely narrative matter into the form in which he usually wrote.

• See on this and the following paragraphs, the foot notes on this part of the Introduction in my Greek Test.

VOL. I.-83]

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17. It yet remains, before terminating this section, to say something of the speeches reported in the latter part of the Acts. Are they St. Paul's own words, or has Luke in this case also gone over the matter, and left the impression of his style on it?

These speeches are, (a) the discourse to the Ephesian elders in ch. xx. 18—35,—(b) the apology before the Jews, ch. xxii. 1—22,—(c) the apology before Felix, ch. xxiv. 10—21,—(d) the apology before Agrippa and Festus, ch. xxvi. 1-29.

(a) The discourse to the Ephesian elders is a rich storehouse of phrases and sentiments peculiar to Paul. These are so numerous, and so remarkable, that nothing short of a complete study of the passage, with the references, will put the reader in full possession of them. Very faint traces are found of the hand of Luke. Of those mentioned in the note, on this portion of the Introduction in my Greek Test., Vol. II., scarcely any are decisive, whereas hardly a line of the whole is without unmistakable evidences that we have here the words of Paul. In the Introduction to the Pastoral Epistles, I hope to shew the importance of this discourse, as bearing on the very difficult question of the diction and date of those precious and to my mind indubitable relics of the great Apostle.

(b) The apology before the Jews (ch. xxii. 1-32) was spoken in Hebrew (Syro-Chaldaic). Another interesting question is therefore here involved, Did Luke understand Hebrew? The answer to the two questions will be one and the same. We may find the diction of this translation either so completely Luke's, as to render it probable that he was the translator;-or it may bear traces, as usual, of Paul's own phraseology set down and worked up by Luke. In the former case, we may confidently infer that he must have understood Hebrew: in the latter, we may (but not with equal confidence, for Paul may by preference have given his own version of his own speech) conclude that that language was unknown to him. If again the speech is full of Hebraisms, it may lead us to infer that Paul himself was not the translator into Greek, but one who felt himself more strictly bound to a literal rendering than the speaker himself, who would be likely to give his own thoughts and meaning a freer and more Grecian dress.-Now we do find, (1) that the speech is full of Hebraisms: (2) that while it contains several expressions occurring nowhere but in the writings of Luke, not one is found in it peculiar to Paul, or even strikingly in his manner. Our inference then is that Luke himself has rendered this speech, from having heard it delivered, and consequently, that he was acquainted with Hebrew.

(c) The short apology before Felix (ch. xxiv. 10-21) contains some traces of Paul's manner, but still they are scanty, and the evidences of Luke's hand predominate, as may be seen from the reff. Its very com

pendious character makes it probable that it may have been drawn up by Luke from Paul's own report of the substance of what he said.

(d) The important apology before Agrippa and Festus (ch. xxvi. 1— 29) is full of St. Paul's peculiar expressions. It was spoken in Greek, and taken down very nearly as spoken. Some phrases however occur in it which seem to belong to Luke; just enough to shew the hand which has committed the speech to writing. We must remember however that several of these are expressive of meanings not elsewhere occurring in Paul's composition, which therefore he may well, in uttering, have thus expressed.

18. Our conclusion from this examination may be thus stated: (1) That in all cases the diction of the speeches was more or less modified by Luke's hand. (2) That they are not in any case (as some have supposed) composed by him for the speaker, but were really in substance, and for the most part in very words, uttered as written. (3) That the differences apparent in the greater or less amount of editorial diction in different speeches, remarkably correspond to the alleged occasions and modes of their delivery-where St. Paul spoke Hebrew, hardly any traces of his own style being discernible, as also where a short compendium only of his speech is given; while on the other hand speeches manifestly reported at length and which were spoken in Greek originally, are full of the characteristic peculiarities of Paul himself.

19. For many other interesting particulars connected with the sources of the narrative in the Acts, I refer the student to Dr. Davidson's Introduction to the N. T. vol. ii.

SECTION III.

FOR WHAT READERS AND WITH WHAT OBJECT IT WAS WRITTEN.

1. The Gospel of Luke commences with a preface in which he declares his object with sufficient precision. Dedicating it to his friend Theophilus, he describes it as a record of "that thou mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been been instructed,"-and asserts his purpose in writing it to be, "those things which are most surely believed among us." Now there can be little question that both these descriptions apply to the Acts also. That book is introduced without preface, as a second part following on the former treatise: a "second treatise" to the Gospel.

2. I have stated with regard to the Gospel, that we can hardly suppose Luke's design to have confined itself to Theophilus, but must believe that he followed the common practice of dedicating his work to