The Acts of the Apostles

xxvi INTRODUCTION
Moreover, it is not only the regard paid to the
conduct of the Jews that brings the play of action
and reaction into the narrative of the Acts ; this is
also brought about in the first part of the Acts by
the open acknowledgment of the fact that at the
beginning not only was there no mission to the
Gentiles in existence, but that at first no one had
even thought of such a mission, and that it was only
through a slow process of development that this
mission was prepared for and established. Practic-
ally all that lies written in the Acts between the
sixth and the fifteenth chapters, thus more than a
third part of the book, is dedicated to the demonstration
of the historical problem, how it came
about that there was a mission to the Gentiles at all.
The longer I study the work of St. Luke the
more am I astonished that this fact has not forced
his critics to treat him with more respect than they
show him. but not a few of them treat their own
conceits in regard to the book with more respect
than the grand lines of the work, which they either
take as a matter of course, or criticise from the
standpoint of their own superior knowledge. Yet
it was by no means a matter of coarse that the
as the great pioneer missionary. As a theological thinker he came
out of another generation of long ago, and passed over into another
generation far in the future. He was and he remained a Jew, and
yet he anticipated, with his doctrine of freedom bound by Faith
alone, the development of a whole epoch. The great region lying
between these extreme points, with its gradual ascent, did not
exist for him. His contemporaries, however, only knew this
region. Like all natures of true genius, he lived in the past
and in the future.