The Acts of the Apostles

LANDS, NATIONS, CITIES, AND HOUSES 91
the painful scene of Gal. ii. 11 / The representation
given in the Acts fills a tremendous gap which has
been left by the Pauline epistles. Indeed, we could
not even suspect how great the gap is unless we pos-
sessed the accounts of St. Luke ! Yet in these
accounts there is nothing of that vivid distinctness
which is to be found in most of the descriptions of
the second half of the book ; moreover, the actual
amount of facts here recorded is not very great. The
narrative depends not upon the personal experience
and the eye-witness of the writer, but upon tradition.^
We can control this tradition scarcely at a single
point; 2 yet it contains nothing, so far as I can see,
which is untenable, and much on the other hand which
bears the stamp of trustworthiness. Abstract specu-
lations concerning what may possibly be incorrect, or
speculations which on a priori presuppositions would
eliminate details of the tradition, are worthless.
The extraordinary prominence given to Antioch in
the Acts may have been due to the actual importance
of that Church,' but the ancient record that St.
^ Even for this reason the " we " of codex D in xi. 28 is certainly
not original; vide Sitzungsber . der K. Preuss. Akad. d. WissenscJi.,
1899, April 6.
2 If one restricts the old controversy, concerning the relationship
of Gal. ii. to Acts xv. , to Gal. ii. 1-2, and Acts xv. 1-4—and it is
only with these verses that we are here concerned— we may declare
that the two passages do not exclude one another. More than this
cannot of course be said.
2 Only after a comprehensive investigation of the sources of the
first half of the book can it be ascertained how far the literary
purpose of the author has contributed to give more prominence to
Antioch than was given in his source. It is a priori possible that
St. Luke has brought important questions into relationship with
Antioch which really had no connection with that city.