The Author of the Acts has been charged with having written the work with a distinct design to which he subordinated historical truth, and in this view many critics have joined, who ultimately do not accuse him absolutely of falsifying history, but merely of making a deliberate selection of his materials with the view of placing events in the light most suitable for his purpose. Most of those, however, who make this charge maintain that, in carrying out the original purpose of the Acts, the writer so freely manipulated whatever materials he had before him, and so dealt with facts whether by omission, transformation or invention, that the historical value of his narrative has been destroyed or at least seriously affected by it.1 On the other hand, many apologetic writers altogether deny the existence of any design on the part of the {64} author such as is here indicated, which could have led him to suppress or distort facts,(1) and whilst some of them advance very varied and fanciful theories as to the historical plan upon which the writer proceeds, and in accordance with which the peculiarities of his narrative are explained, they generally accept the work as the genuine history of the Acts of the Apostles so far as the author possessed certain information. The design most generally ascribed to the writer of the Acts may, with many minor variations, be said to be apologetic and conciliatory: an attempt to reconcile the two parties in the early church by representing the difference between the views of Peter and Paul as slight and unimportant, Pauline sentiments being freely placed in the mouth of Peter, and the Apostle of the Gentiles being represented as an orthodox adherent of the church of Jerusalem, with scarcely such advanced views of christian universality as Peter; or else, an effort of Gentile Christianity to bring itself into closer union with the primitive church, surrendering, in so doing, all its distinctive features and its Pauline origin, and representing the universalism by which it exists, as a principle adopted and promulgated from the very first by Peter and the Twelve. It is not necessary, however, for us to enter upon any minute discussion of this point, nor is it requisite, for the purposes of our inquiry, to determine whether the peculiar character {65}