The Acts of the Apostles

xxiv INTRODUCTION
been already foretold by the Prophets ; now it was
being fulfilled, in that the Gentiles were being called.
Thus the seal is set to the legitimacy of Christianity,
the new religion is even thereby shown to be the
fulfilment of the Old Testament, and for the future
it seizes upon this book also as its own. This nega-
tive theme, which runs like a scarlet thread through
the whole book, is summarised once again with im-
pressive emphasis in the antepenultimate verse of the
Acts : " Be it known therefore unto you that this
salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles ; they will
also hear.""
The Jew is in a sense the villain in this dramatic
history, yet not—as in the Gospel of St. John and
the Apocalypse—the Jew in the abstract who has
almost become an incarnation of the evil principle,
but the real Jew without generalisation and exaggera-
tion in his manifold gradations of Pharisee, Sadducee,
aristocrat, Jew of Palestine or of the Dispersion.
Where St. Luke knows anything more favourable
concerning particular sections or persons among the
Jews he does not keep silence, and so sacrifice truth
to his theology of history. He tells us that very
many Jewish priests had entered the new community
he speaks of converted Pharisees ; he reports the
prudent counsel of Gamaliel ; he does not conceal
from us that the whole Jewish colony in Beroea
accepted the teaching of St. Paul with great goodwill,
and that even among the Jews of Rome some
were won over by the Apostle. This impartiality of
the narrative, in a point where there was such an
extraordinary temptation to partiality, is a valuable
;