h eye-witnesses; so far
from it, that the word translated in the English version 'delivered' is
literally 'handed down;' it is the verb which corresponds to the
technical expression for 'tradition;' and the words translated 'having
had perfect understanding of all things from the first,' might be
rendered more properly, 'having traced or followed up all things from
the beginning.' And again, as it is humanly speaking certain that in St.
Luke's Gospel there are passages, however they are to be explained,
which were embodied in it from some other source, so, though extremely
probable, it is not absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts
in which the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand as
the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere directly introduced
himself--if he had said plainly that he, the writer who was addressing
Theophilus, had personally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his
story was relating what he had seen and heard, there would be no room
for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no other instance in
literature of a change of person introduced abruptly without
explanation. The whole book is less a connected history than a series of
episodes and fragments of the proceedings of the apostles; and it is to
be noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as given in its
place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one material point
from the second account given later in the part which was unquestionably
the work of one of St. Paul's companions. There is a possibility--it
amounts to no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the
consideration of those who are better able than this writer to judge of
it--that in the Gospel and the Acts we have the work of a careful editor
of the second century. Towards the close of that century a prominent
actor in the great movement which gave their present authority to the
four Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; he it was who brought
them together, incorporated into a single work--_in unum opus_; and it
may be, after all, that in him we have the long-sought person to whom
St. Luke was writing; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled
at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the different
Churches; and that it formed a part of his scheme to supersede them by
an account more exhaustive, complete, and satisfactory.

To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if valid at all is
abso