ART. VII. THE CREDIBILITY OF THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.

1. The Acts of the Apostles. An Exposition. By RICHARD BELWARD RACKHAM, M.A., of the Community of the Resurrection. (London: Methuen and Co., 1901.) 2. The Credibility of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Being the Hulsean Lectures for 1900-1901. By FREDERIC HENRY CHASE, D.D., President of Queens' College and Norrisian Professor of Divinity, Cambridge. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1902.)

3. St. Luke the Prophet. By EDWARD CARUS SELWYN D.D., Head Master of Uppingham School. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1991.)

4. Addresses on the Acts of the Apostles. By EDWARD WHITE BENSON, Sometime Archbishop of Canterbury. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1901.)

5. The new Volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica.' The first of the new volumes, being Vol. xxv. of the complete work, p. 57. 'Acts of the Apostles.' By J. VERNON BARTLET, Professor of Church History, Mansfield College, Oxford.

6. The Journal of Theological Studies, vol. i. p. 64. 'The Acts of the Apostles.' By the Rev. J. A. CROSS and the Rev. R. B. RACKHAM.

7. Criticism of the New Testament. St. Margaret's Lectures, 1902. 'The Historical Value of the Acts of the Apostles.' By J. H. BERNARD, D.D., Trinity College, Dublin, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

IN a previous article of the Church Quarterly Review we reviewed certain recent criticisms of the Acts of the Apostles, and discussed at some length the question of authorship.' We intimated at that time a desire to return to the subject and to discuss more fully the historical value of the book, and we expressed a hope that we might shortly have some assistance in the task. That assistance has come, and we

1 See Church Quarterly Review, vol. liii. No. 105, October 1901, p. 1.

are glad to express our obligations to it. The English reader can now have a sound and useful commentary in the book of Mr. Rackham; the whole question of credibility is ably discussed by Dr. Chase; the orthodox lover of ingenious and unsubstantial speculation can have it gratified by Mr. Selwyn, without having recourse to Dr. Cheyne or Professor Schmiedel; and the journalist who wants to get up the subject in a few minutes will have a sound résumé of recent work by Mr. Bartlet in the new volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

To take the least important first. It is of good augury for the treatment of religious topics in the new volumes of the Encyclopædia that we should find such a sane contribution as that of Mr. Bartlet. The fact that he comes from Mansfield College makes us all the more pleased to find that we are in substantial agreement with almost all his conclusions. He writes with full knowledge of recent literature, and is a safe guide to current opinions. Our chief criticism is that he has neglected to notice that recent chronological investigation does away with the main reasons for thinking that St. Paul's death occurred at the close of the two years mentioned in Acts xxviii. 30, 31. The same reasons do away with the necessity for accepting Mr. Bartlet's theory of the Pastoral Epistles, a theory for which he will hardly succeed in getting wide assent,1

Mr. Rackham's work is more ambitious and more important. It is written for English readers:

'The readers kept in view have been, in accordance with the general intention of the series, the educated English public, who are not, technically speaking, "scholars" or "students."

Unlike most commentaries written for the unlearned, it is written with full and ample learning, and is for its purpose an admirable work. It begins with an excellent introduction, and both there and in the commentary there are no modern sources of knowledge which are neglected. Mr. Rackham is, indeed, more up to date than Mr. Bartlet. The section of the introduction which we should be most inclined to criticize

p. 85.

See the article by Mr. Turner, Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xxvii.

is that on the theology. It would, we think, have been better for the purpose which Mr. Rackham has ultimately in view if he had treated the doctrine of the Acts from a more historical point of view. The signs of development within the period covered are among the most striking proofs of the credibility of the author, and to a reader who has caught the spirit of modern thought the representation of Christian doctrine in a formative condition will carry more conviction than the attempt (perfectly legitimate in itself) to fit it into a dogmatic form. What every reader will feel is the immense pains that Mr. Rackham has taken to make his readers understand quite adequately. To do so means very great labour. Mr. Rackham shows that he has a sufficient mastery of the subject to have written a book which would have taken a high place and added to our knowledge, yet he has with great self-abnegation contented himself with producing one which will enable the general reader to learn the results of scholarship without being bewildered by its technique.

Dr. Chase's Hulsean Lectures on the Credibility of the Acts of the Apostles is a very interesting book. He sets on one side the ordinary subjects of discussion and the ordinary line of defence-the question of Theudas and other small points in the archæological evidence and devotes his four lectures to an analysis of the narrative and of the speeches, asking the question how far they witness to their own trustworthiness. Does the narrative give a natural and credible account of the growth of Christianity, of the manner in which problems arose and were discussed and solved, of the means by which the Church passed from one stage to another, and the borders of Christianity were continually enlarged? Are the speeches of St. Peter and St. Paul of the character and type which might reasonably have been delivered at the time? Do they harmonize with the contemporary Jewish conceptions, out of which Christianity grew, with the early teaching of the Gospel and the other movements of primitive Christianity, or are they such as would be invented by a clever rhetorician who writes his history from the point of view of late doctrinal developments? All these questions are treated adequately and ably. We are less inclined to agree with

Dr. Chase's discussion of the events of the day of Pentecost. It seems to us to have the faults always incidental to explaining away a miraculous narrative. It may be possible that the events did not happen as they are described, that the narrative of St. Luke is exaggerated and 'mythical'; but if that be so we have no way of ascertaining what part is exactly true. There is no standard of comparison, no criterion. All rationalistic or semi-rationalistic reconstructions of early legends are more unsubstantial than the legends which they are intended to simplify and strengthen.

Dr. Selwyn's book on St. Luke the Prophet is a work of quite a different type. Dr. Selwyn writes like an amateur who has taken up the study of primitive Christianity, has found it very interesting, has discovered a good many things which he did not know before and therefore thinks were not known, and sets to work to ride them to death. He begins by stating that one object of his book is to combat a kind of Agnosticism. By this he means the habit of applying the formula, 'We do not know,' to details of the New Testament. Certainly anyone who accepts Dr. Selwyn as his guide need not be troubled with Agnosticism. But we very much doubt whether many scholars will prefer his wealth of information to the wise suspension of judgment and sober self-criticism which generations of scientific inquiry have taught us. We are not only asked to believe that St. Luke was a prophet, but that he was the same person as Silas or Silvanus, and that under that alias he wrote the two Epistles of St. Peter, and that under another alias, that of Tertius, he wrote the Epistle to the Romans. When St. Luke wanted to describe a missionary journey of St. Paul, he looked up the book of Joshua to see if he could not arrange the names of the places in such a way that their first letters might correspond to the first letters of places mentioned in the conquest of Canaan. All the prophets read the Book of Enoch with great care, so that if a word occurs in any of the New Testament books which is found in Enoch, it must have been taken from it. We have neither the time nor space to examine all the strange conjectures and speculations which Dr. Selwyn has managed to get together, and to distinguish the elements of truth

which he has so strangely perverted. We are content to split with him on his fundamental thesis, that the author of the Acts was in any valid sense of the term a 'prophet.' To us the Third Gospel and the Acts are the least prophetic and most Hellenic books of the New Testament. Their writer is clearly an historian in the best sense of the word. By his opinion on this point alone Dr. Selwyn would convince us that he had not the critical faculty requisite for the work that he has undertaken.

The Addresses on the Acts of the Apostles by the late Archbishop of Canterbury is a book of a very different character. It is not directly critical, and is not, perhaps, written with a very full knowledge of technical criticism; but the Archbishop was a scholar, and the incidental remarks that he makes are often of great interest. We are, however, very glad to mention these Addresses in this connexion, because, after all, the religious value of the Acts of the Apostles will always remain, for the mass of the people who read it, the incontestable proof of its value and authority. The Addresses themselves are full of interest, both for their actual religious value and for the reflection they give of a very thoughtful and cultivated mind.

Dr. Bernard's contribution in the St. Margaret's Lectures is necessarily very slight, but is a thoughtful and wise discussion of many of the points at issue.

We note with interest that all these writers agree in accepting the Lucan authorship, and we may pass on to further points. Wild confusion seems to prevail on the subject of the text in some writers' minds, but the judgment of Mr. Bartlet will be eventually held to be right:

'On the whole, then, the text of Acts, as printed by Westcott and Hort. . . seems as near the autograph as that in any other part of the New Testament; whereas the "Western Text," even in its earliest traceable forms, is secondary.'

On the date there is the usual variation of opinion. Mr. Bartlet gives a normal, and perhaps correct, opinion when he places its composition between the years 71 and 80; Mr. Rackham adheres to the period before 64. The only strong