obviously, extremely improbable that any of these speeches could have been written down at the time.(1) Taking even the supposed case that the Author of the Acts was Luke, and was present when some of the speeches of Paul were delivered, it is difficult to imagine that he immediately recorded his recollection of them, and more than this he could not have done. He must continually have been in the habit of hearing the preaching of Paul, and therefore could not have had the inducement of novelty to make him write down what he heard. The idea of recording them for posterity could not have occurred to such a person, with the belief in the approaching end of all things then prevalent. The Author of the Acts was not the companion of Paul, however, and the contents of the speeches, as we shall presently see, are not of a character to make it in the least degree likely that they could have been written down for separate circulation. Many of the speeches in the Acts, moreover, were delivered under circumstances which render it specially unlikely that they could have {75} been reported with any accuracy. At no time an easy task correctly to record a discourse of any length, it is doubly difficult when those speeches, like many in Acts, were spoken under circumstances of great danger or excitement. The experience of modern times, before the application of systems of short-hand, may show how imperfectly speeches were taken down, even where there was deliberate preparation and set purpose to do so, and if it be suggested that some celebrated orations of the last century have so been preserved, it is undeniable that what has been handed down to us not only does not represent the original, but is really almost a subsequent composition, preserving little more than some faint echoes of the true utterance. The probability that a correct record of speeches made, under such circumstances, in the middle of the first century could have been kept, seems exceedingly small. Even, if it could be shown that the Author of the Acts took these speeches substantially from earlier documents, it would not materially tend to establish their authenticity; for the question would still remain perfectly open as to the closeness of those documents to the original discourses; but in the absence of all evidence, whether as to the existence or origin of any such sources, the conjecture of their possible existence can have no weight. We have nothing but internal testimony to examine, and that, we shall see, is totally opposed to the claim to historical value made for those discourses. Apologists scarcely maintain that we have in the Acts a record of the original discourses in their completeness, but in claiming substantial accuracy most of them include the supposition at least of condensation.(1) The longest {76}