Gospel might abide," but equally maintained in the face of the pillar Apostles, when he left them and returned to the Gentiles whilst they went back to the circumcision. Paul's idea of being "all things to all men" is illustrated by his rebuke to Peter,--once more to refer to the scene at Antioch. Peter apparently practised a little of that conciliation, which apologists, defending the unknown author of the Acts at the expense of Paul, consider to be the sense of the Apostle's words. Paul repudiated such an inference, by withstanding Peter to the face as condemned, and guilty of hypocrisy. Paul became all things to all men by considering their feelings, and exhibiting charity and forbearance, in matters indifferent He was careful not to make his liberty a stumbling block to the weak. "If food maketh my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh for ever lest I make my brother to offend."(1) Self-abnegation in the use of enlightened liberty, however, is a very different thing from the concession of a rite, which it was the purpose of his whole Gospel to discredit, and the labour of his life to resist. Once more we repeat that the narrative of the Acts regarding the circumcision of Timothy is contradictory to the character and teaching of Paul as ascertained from his Epistles, and like so many other portions of that work which we have already examined must, as it stands, be rejected as unhistorical. We have already tested the narrative of the author of the Acts by the statements of Paul in the first two chapters of the Galatians at such length that, although the subject is far from exhausted, we must not proceed further. We think that there can be no doubt that the role assigned to the Apostle Paul in Acts xv. is unhistorical,(2) {304}