found in the Psalm (lxxxix. 20) quoted by each, can hardly be accidental. That is, Acts was probably current in Antioch and Smyrna not later than c. A.D. 115, and perhaps in Rome as early as c. A.D. 96.
With this view internal evidence agrees. In spite of some advocacy of a date prior to A.D. 70, the bulk of critical opinion is decidedly against it. The prologue to Luke’s Gospel itself implies the dying out of the generation of eye-witnesses as a class. A strong consensus of opinion supports a date about A.D. 80; some prefer 75 to 80; while a date between 70 and 75 seems no less possible. Of the reasons for a date in one of the earlier decades of the 2nd century, as argued by the Tübingen school and its heirs, several are now untenable. Among these are the supposed traces of 2nd-century Gnosticism and “hierarchical” ideas of organization; but especially the argument from the relation of the Roman state to the Christians, which Ramsay has reversed and turned into proof of an origin prior to Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan on the subject. Another fact, now generally admitted, renders a 2nd-century date yet more incredible; and that is the failure of a writer devoted to Paul’s memory to make palpable use of his Epistles. Instead of this he writes in a fashion that seems to traverse certain things recorded in them. If, indeed, it were proved that Acts uses the later works of Josephus, we should have to place the book about A.D. 100. But this is far from being the case.
Three points of contact with Josephus in particular are cited. (1) The circumstances attending the death of Herod Agrippa I. in A.D. 44. Here Acts xii. 21-23 is largely parallel to Jos. Antt. xix. 8. 2; but the latter adds an omen of coming doom, while Acts alone gives a circumstantial account of the occasion of Herod’s public appearance. Hence the parallel, when analysed, tells against dependence on Josephus. So also with (2) the cause of the Egyptian pseudo-prophet in Acts xxi. 37, f., Jos. Jewish War, ii. 13. 5, Antt. xx. 8. 6; for the numbers of his followers do not agree with either of Josephus’s rather divergent accounts, while Acts alone calls them Sicarii. With these instances in mind, it is natural to regard (3) the curious resemblance as to the (non-historical) order in which Theudas and Judas of Galilee are referred to in both as accidental, the more so that again there is difference as to numbers. Further, to make out a case for dependence at all, one must assume the mistaken order (as it may be) in Gamaliel’s speech as due to gross carelessness in the author of Acts—an hypothesis unlikely in itself. Such a mistake was far more likely to arise in oral transmission of the speech, before it reached Luke at all.
6 Place.—The place of composition is still an open question. For some time Rome and Antioch have been in favour; and Blass combined both views in his theory of two editions (see below, Text). But internal evidence points strongly to the Roman province of Asia, particularly the neighbourhood of Ephesus. Note the confident local allusion in xix. 9 to “the school of Tyrannus”—not “a certain Tyrannus,” as in the inferior text—and in xix. 33 to “Alexander”; also the very minute topography in xx. 13-15. At any rate affairs in that region, including the future of the church of Ephesus (xx. 28-30), are treated as though they would specially interest “Theophilus” and his circle; also an early tradition makes Luke die in the adjacent Bithynia. Finally it was in this region that there arose certain early glosses (e.g. on xix. 9, xx. 15), probably the earliest of those referred to below. How fully in correspondence with such an environment the work would be, as apologia for the Church against the Synagogue’s attempts to influence Roman policy to its harm, must be clear to all familiar with the strength of Judaism in “Asia” (cf. Rev. ii. 9, iii. 9, and see Sir W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches, ch. xii.).
7. Text.—The apparatus criticus of Acts has grown considerably of recent years; yet mainly in one direction, that of the so-called “Western text.” This term, which our growing knowledge, especially of the Syriac and other Eastern versions, is rendering more and more unsatisfactory, stands for a text which used to be connected almost exclusively with the “eccentric” Codex Bezae, and is comparable to a Targum on an Old Testament book. But it is now recognized to have been very widespread, in both east and west, for some 200 years or more from as early as the middle of the 2nd century. The process, however, of sifting out the readings of all our present witnesses—MSS., versions, Fathers—has not yet gone far enough to yield any sure or final result as to the history of this text, so as to show what in its extant forms is primary, secondary, and so on. Beginnings have been made towards grouping our authorities; but the work must go on much further before a solid basis for the reconstruction of its primitive form can be said to exist. The attempts made at such a reconstruction, as by Blass (1895, 1897) and Hilgenfeld (1899), are quite arbitrary. The like must be said even of the contribution to the problem made by August Pott,[1] though he has helped to define one condition of success—the classification of the strata in “Western” texts—and has taken some steps in the right direction, in connexion with the complex phenomena of one witness, the Harklean Syriac.
Assuming, however, that the original form of the “Western” text had been reached, the question of its historical value, i.e. its relation to the original text of Acts, would yet remain. On this point the highest claims have been made by Blass. Ever since 1894 he held that both the “Western” text of Acts (which he styles the β text) and its rival, the text of the great uncials (which he styles the α text), are due to the author’s own hand. Further, that the former (Roman) is the more original of the two, being related to the latter (Antiochene) as fuller first draft to severely pruned copy. But even in its later form, that “β stands nearer the Grundschrift than α, but yet is, like α, a copy from it,” the theory is really untenable. In sober contrast of Blass’s sweeping theory stand the views of Sir W. M. Ramsay. Already in The Church in the Roman Empire (1893) he held that the Codex Bezae rested on a recension made in Asia Minor (somewhere between Ephesus and S. Galatia), not later than about the middle of the 2nd century. Though “some at least of the alterations in Codex Bezae arose through a gradual process, and not through the action of an individual reviser,” the revision in question was the work of a single reviser, who in his changes and additions expressed the local interpretation put upon Acts in his own time. His aim, in suiting the text to the views of his day, was partly to make it more intelligible to the public, and partly to make it more complete. To this end he “added some touches where surviving tradition seemed to contain trustworthy additional particulars,” such as the statement that Paul taught in the lecture-room of Tyrannus “from the fifth to the tenth hour.” In his later work, on St Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (1895), Ramsay’s views gain both in precision and in breadth. The gain lies chiefly in seeing beyond the Bezan text to the “Western” text as a whole.
Generally speaking, then, the text of Acts as printed by Westcott and Hort, on the basis of the earliest MSS. (אB), seems as near the autograph as that of any other part of the New Testament; whereas the “Western” text, even in its earliest traceable forms, is secondary. This does not mean that it has no historical value of its own. It may well contain some true supplements to the original text, derived from local tradition or happy inference—a few perhaps from a written source used by Luke. Certain of these may even date from the end of the 1st century, and the larger part of them are probably not later than the middle of the 2nd. But its value lies mainly in the light cast on ecclesiastical thought in certain quarters during the epoch in question. The nature of the readings themselves, and the distribution of the witness for them, alike point to a process involving several stages and several originating centres of diffusion. The classification of groups of “Western” witnesses has already begun. When completed, it will cast light, not only on the origin and growth of this type of text, but also on the exact value of the remaining witnesses to the original text of Acts—and further on the early handling of New Testament writings generally. Acts, from its very scope, was least likely to be viewed as sacrosanct as regards its text. Indeed there are signs that its undogmatic nature caused it to be comparatively neglected at certain times and places, as, e.g., Chrysostom explicitly witnesses.
Literature.—An account of the extensive and varied literature that has gathered round Acts may be found in two representative
- ↑ Der abendländische Text der Apostelgeschichte u. die Wir-quelle (Leipzig, 1900). See a review in the Journal of Theol. Studies, ii. 439 ff.
