It will be admitted that this is a stirring change from the run of New Testament criticism of the past seventy years. That criticism more or less unconsciously recognized the problem set up by the entire ignorance of gospel teaching revealed in the Pauline and other epistles. Dr. Petrie, following Professor Blass in an unhesitating acceptance of the narrative of the Acts, simply ignores the Pauline problem altogether. He boldly credits the Church with a Gospel before Paul's conversion, and, like other traditionalists, supplies Paul, the gospel-less, with a physician, Luke, who had collected from the scattered mass of logia more gospel than anybody else! Thus has the pendulum swung back to the furthest extreme from that at which men carried down the Gospel dates to accommodate the data. As to chronology, Dr. Petrie is practically at the orthodox standpoint of Professor Salmon. [100] An objective and ostensibly scientific method, involving no element of personal bias or preference, is employed to make a selection from the Gospels which shall present as it were mathematically or statistically the earliest elements in the synoptics. On that selection, however, there is brought to bear no further critical principle whatever. It is assumed that it must all come from the traditional founder, a mass of whose utterances must have been committed by auditors to writing as they were delivered (the power to write being held to be common in Galilee and Judea in the first century because it was common in Egypt in the third); and a nucleus collection of these separate documents must have been made soon after the crucifixion, and there and then wound up. At any rate, such a collection is yielded by selecting the groups or blocks of matter which occur in all three synoptics in the same order; and this must have been made about the year 30, because it is mainly occupied with the problems of the law, and very little with "the Gentile problems" which so soon began to come to the front. The history of the Acts is here taken as unassailable ground, like the main Gospel record. Two comments here at once suggest themselves. Dr. Petrie's line of construction might with perfect congruity be employed to yield evidence that the assumed original Teacher was mainly concerned with problems of the law; and (2) the inferred multitude of original floating dicta may with immense gain in plausibility be transmuted into a series of interpolations made by different hands long after the supposed Founder's death. For what critical right has Dr. Petrie to subsume a store of floating Jesuine dicta which supplied the Church, in its changing circumstances, for three or four decades, with suitable parables and teachings to meet every new problem? If you profess to seek a strictly impersonal principle of selection, why not apply a strictly impersonal principle of inference from the result?