The Acts of the Apostles

118 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
book he remains the hero, so that it is quite obvious
that the two chief personalities of the book, as it
were, reheve one another. In chap, xv., however, we
find them together. There is this difference in the
treatment of the two characters that St. Paul, in the
great discourse of chap. xx. at Miletus, is made to
look back upon his career and to give a searching
description of his character and his work—in the
style of the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Corinthians—
; this is never the case with St. Peter. On
the whole the book makes St. Paul stand out in ever
so much clearer light than St. Peter—at the conclu-
sion the reader possesses quite a distinct portrait of
the former apostle,^ while St. Peter as a personality is
of a shadowy, indeed a somewhat conventional type.*
Some have asserted, and with a certain plausibility
have attempted to demonstrate, that St. Luke purposed
a detailed parallelism in the history of the two
apostles. This, however, does not admit of proof.'
^ This is especially so because the three great speeches (in Pisi-
dian Antioch, Athens, and Miletus) describe his active ministry
according to its three principal phases—as missionary to the Jews,
as missionary to the Gentiles, and as a leader of the Church.
2 And yet the speeches contain some quite individual and characteristic
traits (in reference to St. Peter's doctrine) which ought
not to be overlooked.
' From the point of view of the space dedicated to St. Paul and
of the whole structure of the book itself, one cannot definitely prove
that St. Paul was not intended to be the sole hero of the Acts. We
must, however, remember, that not only are several very important,
indeed fundamentally important, discourses put into the mouth of
St. Peter, but that the story of Cornelius, in which he plays the
prominent part, also occupies a central position in the book, and
that with this story chap. xv. is most closely connected {vide xv.
7, 14).