The Acts of the Apostles

EXCURSUS V 295
proclamation of the great Final Catastrophe (xxi.
25 ff.), of convulsions of the heavenly bodies, and of
the Coming of the Son ofMan (xxi. 27, 28), and brings
all this to a conclusion with the words (xxi. 32) : a/xii/
Xiytjd vfXLv OTL 01) jmrj irapeXOn t] yevea avrrj eo)? av iravra
yevYirm ! Are we then to suppose that the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem, which had been followed by none
of these events, was for the author a thing of the past ?
The supposition is exceedingly difficult ! Again he
repeats the direction (xxi. 21) : Tore ol ev tij ''lovSaia.
(pevyeToocrav €ig to. optj— yet the Christians, as is
well known, did not flee to the mountains, but to
Pella, and so in later days a special command from
Heaven was invented in order to explain the discrepancy
of this conduct with the original command.
There is also much else in the great eschatological
discourse that is more easily intelligible if it were
written before the destruction of Jerusalem than on
the contrary assumption ; and the omission of 6 ava-
yiyvcocTKcov voelrw may be due to the circumstance that
St. Luke did not intend his work for public reading.
(5) The fact that no use is made of the Pauline
epistles in the Acts is easily intelligible about the
beginning of the seventh decade, it is not so about
A.D. 80, and the later the date the more unintelligible
it becomes.
(6) In his use of the word " Christ," St. Luke is
even more primitive than St.Paul ; in the Lukan writ-
ings it has not yet become a proper name, but every-
the name " Christians "
where means " the Messiah " ;
(otherwise than in the First Epistle of St. Peter, vide
sup'd) is not yet applied by Christians to themselves, and