of opinion between the
two apostles were grossly exaggerated by the critics of fifty years
ago. It is therefore granted that there was less necessity for the
forgery than there was said to be by the critics in question. It is
also very obvious that we cannot fairly charge a historian with
dishonesty because he wishes to balance one great character with
another. No one would assert that a modern writer was a partisan or a
liar because he devoted in the same book twenty appreciative pages to
the Evangelical Revival and twenty appreciative pages to the Oxford
Movement. In spite of this fact, the trustworthy character of the book
is still vigorously assailed. It is said that no statement in the book
deserves ready belief except the "we sections," that those sections
were written by an unknown companion of St. Paul, and impudently
"appropriated" by a Christian who wrote between A.D. 105 and A.D. 130.

This argument about the "we sections" can be completely overthrown by a
consideration of the _linguistic evidence_ of Acts. If language
implies anything, the peculiarities of Acts imply that the author of
the "we sections," who was a companion of St. Paul, was the author of
the whole book. And they also show that the author of the whole book
was the person who wrote the third Gospel. There are many words and
phrases found only in the "we sections" and in the rest of Acts. There
is, too, a large number of words and phrases in the "we sections" which
are rarely used in those books of the New Testament which are _not_
attributed to St. Luke, and occur frequently in the rest of Acts and in
St. Luke's Gospel. If {104} we compare Acts with St. Luke's Gospel, we
find that Acts contains 108 out of 140 which are characteristic of this
Gospel, whereas it contains only about a half of those which are
characteristic of Matt. and Mark. There are 58 Greek words which are
found in both Acts and Luke and nowhere else in the New Testament.[2]
Among the terms which serve as connecting links between St. Luke's
Gospel and Acts, including the "we sections," occur various medical
phrases. It is becoming more and more widely recognized that these
phrases imply that the writer was a physician, such as we know St. Luke
to have been (Col. iv. 14). It is all the more remarkable that many of
the words peculiar to Acts are found in St. Luke's contemporary, the
physician Dioscorides.

It is true that the sections taken from Mark show numerous