James is introduced as an actor in the famous Council, and represented as head of the Church in Jerusalem, but it is much disputed that he was either an Apostle, or one of the Twelve. The death of James the brother of John is just mentioned. John is represented on several occasions during the earlier part of the narrative as the companion of Peter, without, however, being prominently brought forward; and the rest of the Twelve are left in complete obscurity. It is not a history of the labours of Peter and Paul, for not only is considerable importance given to the episodes of Stephen and Philip the Evangelist, but the account of the two great Apostles is singularly fragmentary. After a brief chronicle of the labours of Peter, he suddenly disappears from the scene, and we hear of him no more. Paul then becomes the prominent figure in the drama; but we have already pointed out how defective is the information given regarding him, and he is also abandoned as soon as he is brought to Rome: of his subsequent career and martyrdom, nothing whatever is said. The work is not, as Luther suggested, a gloss on the Epistles of Paul and the inculcation of his doctrine of righteousness through faith, for the narrative of the Acts, so far as we can compare it with the Epistles, which are nowhere named in it, is generally in contradiction to them, and the doctrine of justification by faith is conspicuous by its absence. It is not a history of the first Christian missions, for it ignores entirely the labours of most of the Apostles, omits all mention of some of the most interesting missionary journeys, and does not even give a report of the introduction of Christianity into Rome. It is not in any sense a Paulinian history of the Church, for if, on the one side, it describes the Apostles of the Circumcision as {68} promulgating the universalism which Paul preached, it robs him of his originality, dwarfs his influence upon the development of Christianity, and is, on the other hand, too defective to represent Church history, whether from a Paulinian or any other standpoint. The favourite theory: that the writer designed to relate the story of the spread of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome, can scarcely be maintained, although it certainly has the advantage of a vagueness of proportions equally suitable to the largest and most limited treatment of history. But, in such a case, we have a drama with the main incident omitted; for the introduction of the Gospel into Rome is not described at all, and whilst the author could not consider the personal arrival at Rome of the Apostle Paul the climax of his history, he at once closes his account where the final episode ought to have commenced.