The Acts of the Apostles

THE TREATMENT OF PERSONS 121
tion ? The key to the answer seems to me to lie in
xviii. 28. Here St. Luke emphatically states with
what energy and success Apollos demonstrated the
Messiahship of Jesus publicly before the Jews in Corinth
(nothing is said of his preaching to Gentiles).^ In
this statement the account concerning Apollos culmi-
nates. Though the main subject of the book is the
demonstration of the passage of the Gospel from the
Jews to the Greeks, still the conquest of the Jews by
this gifted apologist was so important to St. Luke
that he has included the ministry of Apollos as an
episode in his work. Thus the second half of the
Acts acquired—as a companion figure to St. Paul
—a personage of secondary rank, who in his teach-
ing formed to a certain extent a parallel to St.
Stephen. Seeing that St. Luke was personally ac-
quainted with Silas and Timothy, and yet does not
in his work give them special prominence as mission-
aries, it follows that Apollos must have appeared to
him a much more important personality than either
of them.^ This deduction, moreover, agrees excellently
with what we learn about Apollos from the First
Epistle to the Corinthians. Here also he stands in
the foreground beside St. Paul and St. Peter. Ac-
cordingly St. Luke's procedure in introducing Apollos
^ Not only eMvui but also STjfxoalg. are strongly emphasised in
the verse. This emphasis makes it improbable that St. Luke had
in his eye only the discourses of Apollos in synagogues ;
he must
have intended a ministry of wider publicity, wider than that of
St. Paul to the Jews.
2 May we not go a step further and conjecture that St. Luke
counted Apollos a more successful converter of Jews than St. Paul
himself, and therefore felt bound to mention him in his work.