had no other grounds for rejecting the account as unhistorical this miraculous vision, added as an after-thought, would have warranted our doing so. Passing on now to the second chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, we find that Paul writes:--"Then, after fourteen years, again I went up to Jerusalem..." [------]. He states the particulars of what took place upon the occasion of this second visit with a degree of minuteness which ought, one might have supposed, to have left no doubt of its identity, when compared with the same visit historically described elsewhere; but such are the discrepancies between the two accounts that, as we have already mentioned, the controversy upon the point has been long and active.(1) The Acts, it will be remembered, relate a second visit of Paul to Jerusalem, after that which we have discussed, upon which occasion it is stated (xi. 30) that he was sent with Barnabas to convey to the community, during a time of famine, the contributions of the Church of Antioch. The third visit of the Acts is that (xv.) when Paul and Barnabas are said to have been deputed to confer with the Apostles regarding the {217} conditions upon which Gentile converts should be admitted into the Christian brotherhood. The circumstances of this visit, more nearly than any other, correspond with those described by the Apostle himself in the Epistle (ii. 1 ff.), but there are grave difficulties in the way of identifying them. If this visit be identical with that described Acts xv., and if Paul, as he states, paid no intermediate visit to Jerusalem, what becomes of the visit interpolated in Acts xi. 30? The first point which we must endeavour to ascertain is exactly what the Apostle intends to say regarding the second visit which he mentions. The purpose of Paul is to declare his complete independence from those who were Apostles before him, and to maintain that his Gospel was not of man, but directly revealed to him by Jesus Christ. In order to prove his independence, therefore, he categorically states exactly what had been the extent of his intercourse with the elder Apostles. He protests that, after his conversion, he had neither conferred with flesh and blood nor sought those who had been Apostles before him, but, on the contrary, that he had immediately gone away to Arabia. It was not until three years had elapsed that he had gone up to Jerusalem, and then only to make the acquaintance of Peter, with whom he had remained only fifteen days, during which he had not seen other of the Apostles save James, the Lord's brother. Only after the lapse of fourteen years did he again go up to Jerusalem. It is argued(1) that when Paul says, "he went up again," [------], the word [------] has not the force of [------], and that, so far from excluding any intermediate journey, it merely signifies a {218}