In opposition to this tradition, a persistent effort has been made to prove that the book belongs to the early part of the and century. There are certain passages in which the writer uses the _first person plural_, implying that he was personally present on the occasions described. The sections of the book in which that peculiarity is found are ordinarily called the "we sections," and it has been asserted that though the "we sections" are primitive they have been worked into the narrative of a later writer.[1] Furthermore it is asserted that {103} the book was deliberately intended to be a fictitious account of the primitive Church, and that its special purpose was to balance the story of St. Peter with that of St. Paul in such a manner as to completely disguise the fundamental antagonism of the two apostles. The force of this argument has been weakened by the general admission of non-Christian writers that the differences of opinion between the two apostles were grossly exaggerated by the critics of fifty years ago. It is therefore granted that there was less necessity for the forgery than there was said to be by the critics in question. It is also very obvious that we cannot fairly charge a historian with dishonesty because he wishes to balance one great character with another. No one would assert that a modern writer was a partisan or a liar because he devoted in the same book twenty appreciative pages to the Evangelical Revival and twenty appreciative pages to the Oxford Movement. In spite of this fact, the trustworthy character of the book is still vigorously assailed. It is said that no statement in the book deserves ready belief except the "we sections," that those sections were written by an unknown companion of St. Paul, and impudently "appropriated" by a Christian who wrote between A.D. 105 and A.D. 130.