The Acts of the Apostles

INTRODUCTION xxvii
author should have raised the question : « How is it
that within the Christian movement, originally
Jewish, there arose a mission to the Gentiles ? "—nor
that he should have at once treated it as a problem
of the first importance and have exerted himself
to give it an historical solution. Who else in the
early Church except St. Luke, whether of his
contemporaries or of a later generation, even pro-
posed this problem ? And when it was proposed,
who has treated it otherwise than dogmatically with
the worthless and absolutely fallacious explanation
that the mission to the Gentiles was already foretold
in the Old Testament, and had, moreover, been
expressly enjoined by our Lord ? What other idea
than this is given by the Apostolic Fathers and the
Apologists ? Or to say nothing of these—what else
do we learn from St. Matthew and St. Mark (chap,
xvi.) ? Thus, the very fact that St. Luke has raised
this question, and has made its consideration a chief
point of his historical work, shows an amount of
historical insight which claims the highest apprecia-
tion. It is, moreover, a proof that St. Luke himself
had in some way taken part in this great historical
development, or at least stood in some pretty close
relationship to it, for what in the wide world could
make a Greek of about the end of the first century
feel that he ought to explain how the Gospel came
to be preached to the Gentiles ; how could he have
even proposed to himself such a question whose
answer seemed given in the short and simple lan-
guage of accomplished fact—a question which was
indeed no longer a problem for consideration, but a