Paul's address likewise hears close analogy with the speech of Stephen, vii. 2 ff., commencing with a historical survey of the earlier traditions of the people of Israel, and leading up to the same accusation that, as their fathers disregarded the prophets, so they had persecuted and slain the Christ. The whole treatment of the subject betrays the work of the same mind in both discourses. Bleek, who admits the similarity between these and other speeches in Acts, argues that: "it does not absolutely follow from this that these speeches are composed by one and the same person, and are altogether unhistorical;" for it is natural, he thinks, that in the apostolical circle, and in the first Christian Church, there should have existed a certain uniform type in the application of messianic passages of the Old Testament, and in quotations generally, to which different teachers might conform without being dependent on each other.1 He thinks also that, along with the close analogy, there is also much which is characteristic in the different speeches. Not only is this typical system of quotation, however, a mere conjecture to explain an actual difficulty, but it is totally inadequate to account for the phenomena. If we suppose, for instance, that Paul had adopted the totally unhistorical application of the sixteenth Psalm to the Messiah, is it not a very extraordinary thing that in all the arguments in his {89} Epistles, he does not once refer to it? Even if this be waived, and it be assumed that he had adopted this interpretation of the Psalm, it will scarcely be asserted that Paul, whose independence and originality of mind are so undeniable, and whose intercourse with the apostolical circle at any time, and most certainly up to the period when this speech was delivered, was very limited,(1) could so completely have caught the style and copied the manner of Peter that, on an important occasion like this, his address should be a mere reproduction of Peter's two speeches delivered so long before, and when Paul certainly was not present. The similarity of these discourses does not consist in the mere application of the same Psalm, but the whole argument, on each occasion, is repeated with merely sufficient transposition of its various parts to give a superficial appearance of variety. Words and expressions, rare or unknown elsewhere, are found in both, and the characteristic differences which Bleek finds exist only in his own apologetic imagination. Let it be remembered that the form of the speeches and the language are generally ascribed to the Author of the Acts. Can any unprejudiced critic deny that the ideas in the speeches we are considering are also substantially the same? Is there any appreciable trace of the originality of Paul in his discourses? There is no ground whatever, apart from the antecedent belief that the various speeches were actually delivered by the men to whom they are ascribed, for asserting that we