The Composition And Date of Acts

, and shows no trace of the Aramaic idiom which is omnipresent in I Acts. Luke has been thought by many scholars to imitate deliberately the translation-idiom of the Greek Old Testament, especially in portions of his work where the relation to the scenes and ideas of Jewish holy writ was especially close. But in II Acts we see absolutely nothing of the sort. Even in 22, 1-21, where Paul is represented as addressing the Jews in Jerusalem " in the Hebrew language " (21, 40; 22, 2), at a time when he especially wished to show himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews, we find no Semitisms, no Biblical language, no allusion to the Scriptures. The passage 26, 16-18 is highly interesting as showing how our author wrote under circumstances almost uniquely fitted to make him recall the words and phrases of the Old Testament. He is here composing, with entire freedom,1 the charge given by the God of Israel to his apostle to the Gentiles on the occasion of his calling him to the great work. The writer's conception of the God whose words to Paul are here given is of course derived from the Jewish Scriptures, and the language in which the words were spoken (as we should know even if we were not expressly told in verse 14) is thought of as " Hebrew." 2 Since the Christian apostles were in a 1 This appears from comparison of the parallel passages, and was to be expected from the literary habit mentioned above, the writer being quite free to adorn his narrative ad libitum with su... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.