ertion that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not by
the same person, and even that the Iliad itself was the work of several
hands.

At the beginning of the twentieth century we are quite as sure that both
the Iliad and Odyssey were written by the same person and that the
separatists were hurried into a contrary decision not a little by the
feeling of the sensation that such a contradiction of previously
accepted ideas would create. This is a determining factor in many a
supposed novel discovery, that it is hard always to discount
sufficiently. A thing may be right even though it is old, and most new
discoveries, it must not be forgotten, that is, most of those announced
with a great blare of trumpets, do not maintain themselves. The simple
argument that the separatists would have to find another poet equal to
Homer to write the other poem has done more than anything else to bring
their opinion into disrepute. It is much easier to explain certain
discrepancies, differences of style, and of treatment of subjects, as
well as other minor variants, than to supply another great poet. Most of
the works of our older literatures have gone through a similar trial
during the over-hasty superficially critical nineteenth century. The
Nibelungenlied has been attributed to two or three writers instead of
one. The Cid, the national epic of Spain, and the Arthur Legends, the
first British epic, have been at least supposed to be amenable to the
same sort of criticism. In every case, scholars have gone back to the
older traditional view of a single author. The phases of literary and
historic criticism with regard to Luke's writings are, then, only a
repetition of what all our great national classics have gone through
from supercilious scholarship during the past hundred years.

It is not surprising, then, that there should be dual or even triple
ascriptions of authorship for various portions of the Scriptures, and
Luke's writings have on this score suffered as much or more even than
others, with the possible exception of Moses. It is now definitely
settled, however, that the similarities of style between the Acts and
the third gospel are too great for them to have come from two different
minds. This is especially true, as pointed out by Harnack, in all that
regards the use of medical terms. The writer of the Acts and the writer
of the third gospel knew Greek from the standpoint of the physician of
that time. Each used terms that we find no