C URRENT LITERAT URE.
THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.
The Credibility of the Bock of the Acts of the Apostles By H. F. Chase. (Macmillan and Co. 6s.)—In these lectures Dr. Chase puts before his readers the two positions now taken by modern Biblical scholars towards the Book of Acts,—the critical and the traditional. On the one hand, the authorship of St. Luke is rejected, the book ascribed to the beginning of the second century, and assumed to contain at best but a genuine corn overgrown with legendary accretions. On the other, it is declared to have been written by St. Luke, the companion of St. Paul, and to give, not an absolutely perfect, but a substantially accurate history of the period which it covers. This latter view is maintained W Dr. Chase. St. Luke had, he thinks, "a direct personal knowledge of some part of his subject. As to another period he retained a vivid remembrance of a conversation with an eye-witness. In regard to a third he had a record roughly and hastily written down of what he learned from one of the ministers of the Word,— the outline or the substance of a speech, the account of some episode of danger or deliverance." Space forbids us to epitomise the evidence by which Dr. Chase supports his theory, but we have read it and found it convincing.
Previous page
