The Acts of the Apostles

WRITTEN OR ORAL SOURCES 247
perhaps the whole, was in writing makes itself felt
still more strongly than in the case of the source A.
If Silas was the authority for this body of tradition
—and considering the subject-matter and the relations
that existed between himself and St. Paul, what more
likely person could we imagine !—it follows that in
this case also we may suppose that oral information
was helped out by written notes. Such a solution of
the problem seems to answer best to the actual situa-
tion ; but I am far from holding it as certain. St.
Luke has—shall we say, unfortunately ?—understood
how to give his work such a stamp of homogeneity
that, with the exception of the vindication of the
we-sections for the author himself, of the discovery
of the doublets in A and B,^ and of the separation
from the rest of the book of a distinct collection of
narratives connected with both Jerusalem and Antioch,
there is nothing in the criticism of the sources of
1 But the following pretty little erperience of mine teaches how
careful one should be in assuming doublets. On a rainy day beside
the Walensee, I was turning over the leaves of the Jahrbuch des
Jlistorischen Vereins des Tcanton Glarus, 27. Heft (1S92). In an article
" If
on " St. Felix and Kegula in Spain " I read (pp. 6/.) as follows :
any one had anywhere read that in the third decade of this century a
pupil of the public school of Aarau, the son of one Triimpi, a pastor in
Schwanden [Canton Glarus], was drowned near Aarau when bath-
ing in the Aar, and had afterwards read somewhere else that in
1837 one Balthasar Leuzinger, son of M. Leuziuger, the pastor
in Schwanden, was drowned when bathing in the Aar close to
Aarau, if the reader were at all of a critical turn of mind he would
assuredly have drawn the conclusion that one and the same occur-
rence was evidently referred to in each case. . . . And yet it
actually happened that two young natives of Glarus, both of them
sons of a pastor of Schwanden, were drowned in the neighbourhood
of Aarau [thus a long way from Schwanden]."