been discovered in the last twenty years. The
social life of the middle and lower classes in the Levant, their
religious beliefs and practices, and the language which they spoke, are
now partially known to us, as they never were before. The human interest
of the Pauline Epistles, and of the Acts, is largely increased by these
accessions to knowledge.

The Epistles are real letters, not treatises by a theological professor,
nor literary productions like the Epistles of Seneca. Each was written
with reference to a definite situation; they are messages which would
have been delivered orally had the Apostle been present. Several letters
have certainly been lost; and St. Paul would probably not have cared
much to preserve them. There is no evidence that he ever thought of
adding to the Canon of Scripture by his correspondence. The Author of
Acts seems not to have read any of the letters. This view of the
Epistles has rehabilitated some of them, which were regarded as spurious
by the Tuebingen school and their successors. The question which we now
ask when the authenticity of an Epistle is doubted is, Do we find the
same man? not, Do we find the same system? There is, properly speaking,
no system in St. Paul's theology, and there is a singularly rapid
development of thought. The 'Pastoral Epistles' are probably not
genuine, though the defence of them is not quite a desperate
undertaking. Of the rest, the weight of evidence is slightly against the
Pauline authorship of Ephesians, the vocabulary of which differs
considerably from that of the undoubted Epistles; and the short letter
called 2 Thessalonians is open to some suspicion. The genuineness of
Ephesians is not of great importance to the student of Pauline theology,
unless the closely allied Epistle to the Colossians is also rejected;
and there has been a remarkable return of confidence in the Pauline
authorship of this letter. All the other Epistles seem to be firmly
established.

The other source of information about St. Paul's life is the Acts of
the Apostles, the value of which as a historical document is very
variously estimated. The doubts refer mainly to the earlier chapters,
before St. Paul appears on the scene. Sane criticism can hardly dispute
that the 'we-passages,' in which the writer speaks of St. Paul and
himself in the first person plural, are the work of an eye-witness, and
that most of the important facts in the later chapters are from the same
source. T