The Acts of the Apostles

250 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
to it again in xxi. 25. It is possible to suppose that
a later annalist, who could no longer communicate
with eye-witnesses, might have made a mistake about
this Decree, or might have mixed up two different
decrees—but in the case of a companion of St. Paul
who met with the Apostle soon after the promulgation
of the Decree, such a supposition is quite inadmissible.
The same holds good of the person who formed his
authority.
Now it is well known that the Apostolic Decree is
handed down to us in a twofold form in the manu-
scripts and by the Fathers. Following in the steps
of other scholars, whose vision, however, had not been
keen enough, I have gone most thoroughly into the
question in an article published in the Sitzungsherkhte
d. K, Preuss. Jkad. d. Wiss., 2. Marz 1899. I here
arrived at the result—which is now, so far as I know,
widely accepted—that the Decree according to one
tradition prohibited certain foods (flesh offered to
idols, blood, things strangled) and fornication, and
that according to the other tradition it was a summary
of Jewish ethical catechetics (the abstaining
from flesh offered to idols—in the sense of sharing in
the idolatrous feasts, and in idolatry generally—from
murder and fornication, " and all which ye would not
that others should do to you, even so do it not to
them "). In this article I attempted to prove a
position which up to that time I had agreed with
almost every one in accepting, namely, that the first
of these two forms of the Decree (we may call it the
Eastern form and that of the Uncials) was the original,
and that the second form (we may call it that of the