from a desire to provide Christian substitutes for the popular romances of the period. (2) There is the legend, in which popular fancy, working for generations, has surrounded a real person and real events with such a mass of extraneous matter that the historical kernel is hardly discernible. Certain of the Apocryphal tales of the Apostles may belong to this class, and many of the Acta of martyrs and saints certainly do. (3) There is the history of the second or third rate, in which the writer, either using good authorities carelessly and without judgment, or not possessing sufficiently detailed and correct authorities, gives a narrative of past events which is to a certain degree trustworthy, but contains errors in facts and in the grouping and proportions, and tinges the narrative of the past with the colour of his own time. In using works of this class the modern student has to exercise his historical tact, comparing the narrative with any other evidence that can be obtained from any source, and judging whether the action attributed to individuals is compatible with the possibilities of human nature. (4) There is, finally, the historical work of the highest order, in which a writer commands excellent means of knowledge either through personal acquaintance or through access to original authorities, and brings to the treatment of his subject
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genius, literary skill, and sympathetic historical insight into human character and the movement of events. Such an author seizes the critical events, concentrates the reader’s attention on them by giving them fuller treatment, touches more lightly and briefly on the less important events, omits entirely a mass of unimportant details, and makes his work an artistic and idealised picture of the progressive tendency of the period.
Great historians are the rarest of writers. By general consent the typical example of the highest class of historians is Thucydides, and it is doubtful whether any other writer would be by general consent ranked along with him. But all historians, from Thucydides downwards, must be subjected to free criticism. The fire which consumes the second-rate historian only leaves the real master brighter and stronger and more evidently supreme. The keenest criticism will do him the best service in the long run. But the critic in his turn requires high qualities; he must be able to distinguish the true from the false; he must be candid and unbiased and open-minded. There are many critics who have at great length stated their preference of the false before the true; and it may safely be said that there is no class of literary productions in our century in which there is such an enormous preponderance of error and bad judgment as in that of historical criticism. To some of our critics Herodotus is the Father of History, to others he is an inaccurate reproducer of uneducated gossip: one writer at portentous length shows up the weakness of Thucydides, another can see no fault in him.
But, while recognising the risk, and the probable condemnation that awaits the rash attempt, I will venture to add one to the number of the critics, by stating in the
The Acts of the Apostles CHAP. I
following chapters reasons for placing the author of Acts among the historians of the first rank.
The first and the essential quality of the great historian is truth. What he says must be trustworthy. Now historical truth implies not merely truth in each detail, but also truth in the general effect, and that kind of truth cannot be attained without selection, grouping, and idealisation.
So far as one may judge from books, the opinion of scholars seems to have, on the whole, settled down to the conclusion that the author of Acts belongs either to the second- or the third-rate historians. Among those who assign him to the third rate we may rank all those who consider that the author clipped up older documents and patched together the fragments in a more or less intelligent way, making a certain number of errors in the process. Theories of this kind are quite compatible with assigning a high degree of trustworthiness to many statements in the book; but this trustworthiness belongs not to the author of the work, but to the older documents which he glued together. Such theories usually assign varying degrees of accuracy to the different older documents: all statements which suit the critic’s own views on early Church history are taken from an original document of the highest character; those which he likes less belong to a less trustworthy document; and those which are absolutely inconsistent with his views. are the work of the ignorant botcher who constructed the book. But this way of judging, common as it is, assumes the truth of the critic’s own theory, and decides on the authenticity of ancient documents according to their agreement with that theory; and the strangest part of this medley of uncritical method is that other writers, who dispute the first critic’s theory of
SEC 1. Trustworthiness
early Church history, yet attach some value to his opinion upon the spuriousness of documents which he has condemned solely on the ground that they disagree with his theory.
The most important group among those who assign the author to the second rank of historians, consists of them that accept his facts as true, although his selection of what he should say and what he should omit seems to them strangely capricious. They recognise many of the signs of extraordinary accuracy in his statements; and these signs are so numerous that they feel bound to infer that the facts as a whole are stated with great accuracy by a personal friend of St. Paul. But when they compare the Acts with such documents as the Epistles of Paul, and when they study the history as a whole, they are strongly impressed with the inequalities of treatment, and the unexpected and puzzling gaps; events of great importance seem to be dismissed in a brief and unsatisfactory way; and, sometimes, when one of the actors (such as Paul) has left an account of an event described in Acts, they find difficulty in recognising the two accounts as descriptions of the same event. Bishop Lightfoot’s comparison of Gal. II 1-10 with Acts XV may be quoted as a single specimen out of many: the elaborate process whereby he explains away the seeming discrepancies would alone be sufficient, if it were right, to prove that Acts was a second-rate work of history. We never feel on firm historical ground, when discrepancies are cleverly explained away: we need agreements to stand upon. Witnesses in a law court may give discrepant accounts of the same event; but they are half-educated, confused, unable to rise to historical truth. But when a historian
The Acts of the Apostles CHAP. I
is compared with the reminiscences of an able and highly educated actor in the same scenes, and when the comparison consists chiefly in a laboured proof that the discrepancies do not amount to positive contradiction, the conclusion is very near, that, if the reminiscences are strictly honest, the historian’s picture is not of the highest rank.
But there is a further difficulty. How does it come that a writer, who shows himself distinctly second-rate in his historical perception of the comparative importance of events, is able to attain such remarkable accuracy in describing many of them? The power of accurate description implies in itself a power of reconstructing the past, which involves the most delicate selection and grouping of details according to their truth and reality, i.e., according to their comparative importance. Acts, as Lightfoot pictures it, is to me an inconceivable phenomenon; such a mixture of strength and weakness, of historical insight and historical incapacity, would be unique and incredible. If the choice for an intelligible theory of Acts lay between Lightfoot’s view and that which is presented in different forms by Clemen, Spitta, and other scholars, I could only adopt the same point of view as these critics. Lightfoot, with all his genius, has here led English scholarship into a cul de sac: we can make no progress, unless we retrace our steps and try a new path. But my belief is, that all the difficulties in which Lightfoot was involved spring from the attempt to identify the wrong events. In this attempt he naturally found discrepancies; but by a liberal allowance of gaps in the narrative of Acts, and the supposition of different points of view and of deficient information on Luke’s
SEC 1. Trustworthiness
part, it was possible to show why the eye-witness saw one set of incidents, while Acts described quite a different set. The historian who is to give a brief history of a great period need not reproduce on a reduced uniform scale all the facts
