The separation, which might have been healed or obliterated, had this been the sole cause of it, was widened by the subsequent breach between the christians themselves, which drew attention off from the previous issue. The position taken by Paul, that the mission of the Christ was extended to the Gentiles and comprehended them on precisely the same conditions with the Jews, was exceedingly disagreeable and even shocking to the conservatives, who held that the Christ was sent to Israel only, and especially to that portion of Israel that clung tenaciously to the traditions of the law. The necessary criticism of the Law which Paul's position required, the apparent disrespect shown to Moses and the prophets, the disregard of the ancestral claim set up by the "children of Abraham," the substitution of an interior principle--faith--which any heathen might adopt, for the old fashioned legal requirements to which none but orthodox Jews could conform, was hardly less than blasphemous in their regard; and a feud was begun, which in violence and rancor, excelled the quarrel between the orthodox christians and the Jews. The traces of this controversy, plainly marked in the writings of Paul, are visible on the literature of his own and of the succeeding period, and disappear only in the events of greater significance incident to the fall of Jerusalem, the complete dispersion of the Jews, and the blending of parties in the Western Empire. Ferdinand Christian Baur may have pushed too far in some directions, his theory that the entire gospel literature of the New Testament was determined as to its form by the exigencies of this controversy, the canonical books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the "Acts of the Apostles" all being written in the interest of reconciliation; but his fundamental position, as in the case of Strauss, has never been carried, or even shaken, by assault. The extreme points in controversy are fixed with a good deal of certainty. Paul's own statement in the second chapter of Galatians is fairly explicable only on the supposition of a violent collision, the nature of which is there defined, the bearings of which are indicated in that and in other undoubted writings of the apostle. Many passages therein are unintelligible on any other hypothesis. The Apocalypse and the Epistle of James, as clearly set forth the opposite view, in language and implication of the strongest kind, and in a spirit of decided antagonism. The "Acts of the Apostles" is, as elsewhere hinted, prepared with a view of making it appear that no controversy existed; that Peter carried the gospel to the Gentiles, and that Paul insisted on the validity of circumcision, the mark of initiation into the Jewish church. The narrative is so forced, the incidents so artificial, the aim so evident, the limitation of view so marked, that the book betrays its own character. To admit the genuineness of the "Acts" is to throw into confusion the little history that we certainly