The life and work of St. Paul

THTBODTTOTOBT.
separate defence of the book against the assaults of modern critics, I will at
present only express my conviction that, even if we admit that it was " an
ancient Eirenicon," intended to check the strife of parties by showing that
there had been no irreconcilable opposition HHween the views and ordinances
of St. Peter and St. Paul ; even if we concede the obvious principle that
whenever there appears to be any contradiction between the Acts and the
Epistles, the authority of the latter must be considered paramount; nay,
even if we acknowledge that subjective and artificial considerations may have
had some influence in the form and construction of the book ; yet the Acts of
the Apostles is in all its main outlines a genuine and trustworthy history. Let
it be granted that in the Acts we have a picture of essential unity between the
followers of the Judaic and the Pauline schools of thought, which we might con-
lecture from the Epistles to have been less harmonious and less undisturbed;
let it be granted that in the Acts we more than once see Paul acting in a way
which from the Epistles we should d priori have deemed unlikely. Even
these concessions are fairly disputable; yet in granting them we only say
what is in itself sufficiently obvious, that both records are confessedly fragmentary.
They are fragmentary, of course, because neither of them even
professes to give us any continuous narrative of the Apostle's life. That life
is roughly speaking only known to us at intervals during its central and
later period, between the years A.~\ 36 and AJD. 66. It is like a manuscript
of which the beginning and the end are irrecoverably lost. It is like one of
those rivers which spring from unknown sources, and sink into the ground
before they have reached the sea. But more than this, how incomplete is our
of which these records and notices remain ! Of
knowledge even of that portion
this fact we can have no more overwhelming proof than we may derive from
reading that " Iliad of woes," the famous passage of the Second Epistle to the
Corinthians, where, driven against his will by the calumnies of his enemies to
an appearance of boastfnlness of which the very notion was abhorrent to him,
he is forced to write a summary sketch of what he had done and suffered.1
That enumeration is given long before the end of his career, and yet of the
specific outrages and dangers there mentioned no less than eleven are not once
alluded to in the Acts, though many others are there mentioned which were
subsequent to that sad enumeration. Not one, for instance, of the five scourg-
ings with Jewish thongs is referred to by St. Luke ; one only of the three
beatings with Roman rods ;
not one of the three shipwrecks, though a later one
is so elaborately detailed ; no allusion to the night and day in the deep ; two
only of what St. Clement tells us were seven imprisonments. 8 There are even
whole classes of perils to which the writer of the Acts, though he was certainly
at one time a companion of St. Paul, makes no allusion whatever as, for
instance, the perils of rivers, the perils of robbers, the perils in the wilderness,
the perils among false brethren, the hunger, the thirst, the fasting, the cold,
the nakedness. And these, which are thus passed over without notice in the
Oor. zL 2438, written about A.D. 57, nearly ten yean before hii death.
* fcrfett fc