Acts of the Apostles, The.

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

This book of the New Testament, which is sometimes called the second volume of Luke, purports to tell the history of the Church from the supposed Resurrection to the year 63. As some "physician" named Luke is mentioned in one of the Epistles (Col. iv, 14), the orthodox tradition is that this man was a companion of Paul and wrote the third Gospel and Acts. When criticism began it was noticed that, while the narrative is generally objective, large sections are written in the first person ("we"), and it was said that here at least the writer quotes some sort of diary of a companion of Paul. The fact that the authenticity of the Epistle to the Colossians itself is seriously disputed weakens the basis of this flimsy structure of reasoning, and liberal divines further discredit it. Kirsopp Lake (professor of divinity at Harvard) shows that, not only is there not the least suggestion that the author of the "we" section was a physician, but he gives an entirely different account of Paul's experience in the primitive Church (quarrels, etc.) from that conveyed by the Pauline Epistles (Introduction to the New Testament, 1937). He concludes that the "we" is "a purely literary device." Dr. B. W. Bacon (professor of New Testament Criticism at Yale) and others also stress these vital differences (The Making of the New Testament, 1912, Home Univ. Lib.). The author of Acts never mentions any letter written by Paul, and he mixes supernatural and natural events in the familiar Gospel manner. The book is of unknown date and authorship, includes myths of late date like the Resurrection, is inconsistent with the Pauline documents, and is not quoted by any early Christian writer. It is therefore, on the ordinary canons of history, not a document upon which we can rely for events of the first century.

 

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