reason for supposing that the account given in this book is essentially correct, and that the naturalistic reconstruction of the origin of Christianity must be abandoned. The second objection to the Lucan authorship of Acts is based upon the contradiction which is thought to exist between the Book of Acts and the Epistles of Paul.[15] The way to test the value of a historical work, it is said, is to compare it with some recognized authority. With regard to most of the narrative in Acts, no such comparison is possible, since there is no account parallel to Acts by which it may be tested. But in certain places the Book of Acts provides an account of events which are also narrated in the isolated biographical parts of the Pauline Epistles--notably in the first two chapters of Galatians. Here at last is found the long-sought opportunity for comparison. And the comparison, it is said, results unfavorably to the Book of Acts, which is found to contradict the Epistle to the Galatians, not merely in details, but in the whole account which it gives of the relation between Paul and the Jerusalem Church. But if the Book of Acts fails to approve itself in the one place where it can be tested by comparison with a recognized authority, the presumption is that it may be wrong elsewhere as well; in particular, it is quite impossible that a book which so completely misrepresents what happened at a most important crisis of Paul's life could have been written by a close friend of the apostle. [15] For what follows, compare "Jesus and Paul," in _Biblical and Theological Studies_ by the Members of the Faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, 1912, pp. 553f.; "Recent Criticism of the Book of Acts," in _Princeton Theological Review_, xvii, 1919, pp. 593-597.