The Acts of the Apostles

232 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
26, 31, 33-38 are interpolated. If this is really so,
then the whole account of the voyage contains no
reference to St. Paul and becomes an anonymous sea-
story, which St. Luke with great audacity has turned
into a story concerning St. Paul. Wellhausen has
not shrunk from drawing this conclusion, although
the sections in question are entirely Lukan in style,
and although the very questionable procedure thus
ascribed to St. Luke demands the strongest proof
before it can be accepted as probable. The indica-
tions which have led the critic to omit these passages
as interpolations made by a third person, may have
justice done to them without recourse to such an
hypothesis of dynamite. We may well suppose that
for the description of the facts the author followed
either his own memory or—as is more probable—the
brief notes of his own diary. His accounts of St.
Paul''s behaviour, and of what the Apostle said on
that occasion, would natui'ally be deduced from his
memory of the whole situation thus recalled to him,
with colouring from his own imagination, and would
necessarily have been inserted by him at suitable
points in the narrative which he composed from his
notes.
II. In reference to the second half of the book
(excluding the we-sections), I may say that the most
minute investigation has strengthened me afresh in
the conviction that on the whole, and in almost every
particular instance, it is most highly probable that
written sources were not used.^ It is possible to
^ The tradition here is certainly not homogeneous ; in the last
quarter it is quite possible that doublets exist.