The Acts of the Apostles

THE TREATMENT OF PERSONS 125
persecution is most strange. An apostle, St. James,
suffered martyrdom, other Christians of Jerusalem
became confessors, and yet the author, who describes
the history of Stephen in such detail and with such
enthusiasm, does not devote to this event a few sen-
tences of recognition ; indeed he tells us no details at
all ! This paradoxical fact can, in my opinion, only
be explained on the supposition that the author here
closely followed his source, and that he possessed no
other information concerning the Herodian persecu-
tion (while Clement of Alexandria, over a century
later, knew more). The source, however, did not con-
tain a history of the Apostolic epoch, but only stories
about St. Peter, and therefore mentioned this persecu-
tion only by way of an introduction. This circum-
stance is of high significance in view of the question
concerning the nature of the source (written or oral).
Besides these three classes of actors, who are
arranged in an order which displays an admirable
sense of proportion and relative importance, there
appear in the book about seventy other persons who
are for the most part mentioned by name.'^ They
are all of them introduced in subordination to those
who have been already described as the actors, and it
would serve no useful purpose to go through the list
and to discuss them one by one.—A few points are,
however, worthy of notice. In the first place, it is
strange that some persons who play an important
part in the plot of the narrative are not mentioned
by name. Why is the lame man of iii. 2 ff. not
1 We exclude references to characters of the Old Testament, to
Pilate, &c.