The Acts of the Apostles dates between A. D. 140 or 150 and A. D. 170. The book, as we now find it, was not in existence before Justin's Apology, because before his time there were no miracles, as will be shown; while the Acts abounds in those of the most extravagant character. Between A. D. 140 or 150, and A. D. 180, is the time when the war among the different sects raged with the greatest violence, and frauds and forgeries were practised by all parties without remorse or shame. It was during this time that Lazarus was made to rise superior to death, and assume his place among men, after his body had become putrid and began to decay. There was nothing too false or extravagant for parties to assert at this period of the world, and the only wonder is, that the absurd stories of the age have passed down to subsequent generations as truths of a revealed religion.

The book of the Acts, in its present form, came to light soon after the doctrine of the Apostolic succession was conceived, for it is very evident that the first half is devoted to give prominence to Peter among the Apostles, who was to be made the corner-stone of the Church. As all other churches are made to bow to the supremacy of Rome, so all the Apostles must be subordinate to Peter. This is so obvious that the work is overdone. On the day of Pentecost he is put forward to explain the miracle of the cloven tongue, and show that it was in accordance with what the prophet Joel had foretold—which if Peter did say what he is made to say, only proved his ignorance of what the prophet meant. His miraculous powers are wonderful. He cured a man forty years old, who had been lame from his birth, so that he leaped and walked. His power extends over death, and he raises Dorcas from the grave. He is now chief speaker. Ananias and his wife Sapphira fall down dead before him. So extraordinary is his power over diseases, "that they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them." (Acts v. 15.)

It is surprising that the incredulity of the Jews did not give way before such wonderful works; but it seems it did not, and the only effect produced on their minds was to send Peter to prison. Peter is twice committed to prison for doing good, and the sole object in sending him there is to give an opportunity to the Lord to deliver him, and show that he is under the special protection and guardianship of God. "And behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison; and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell off from his hands. And the angel said unto him, Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals: and so he did. And he saith unto him, Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me." (Acts xii. 7, 8.) "And when Peter was come to himself, he said, Now I know of a surety that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews" (verse 11).

The person over whom the Lord had manifested so much care, must certainly have been set apart to act some great part in his providences towards our race. At the time we are writing about, the struggle between the followers of Peter and Paul was raging; the latter claiming that the Apostle of the Gentiles was of equal authority as to doctrine with Peter or any of the Apostles; while the former insisted that Paul had a special commission—to convert the Gentiles—and as he had performed his work, his mission ceased, and he was no longer to be regarded as an authority in the church. No less a person than God himself can settle the dispute, and the cunningly devised stories of Cornelius, and Paul's conversion, are introduced into the Acts in order to give the Lord an opportunity to decide between the two parties.

Cornelius, a devout man, is laboring under what is called religious conviction, and is in doubt what to do. He stands in need of a spiritual adviser, and when in this condition of mind, "He saw in a vision evidently about the ninth hour of the day, an angel of God coming in to him, and saying unto him, Cornelius. And when he looked on him he was afraid, and said, What is it, Lord? And he said unto him, Thy prayers and thy alms are come up for a memorial before God. And now send men to Joppa, and call for one Simon, whose surname is Peter." (Acts x. 3, 4, 5.) The centurion was sent to Peter, because he was the depositary of divine light, and the dispenser of spiritual gifts—an intimation from God to all the world, for all ages, where men must look to, to find the true interpreter and expounder of religious faith. Cornelius did as he was commanded.

But it was not enough that this was true of Peter; but it must be shown that Paul was but a simple missionary, whose powers ended with his death. To do this, the story of his conversion in the Acts is told, notwithstanding it is in direct conflict with what Paul says himself on the subject. When Ananias was requested by the Lord to call on Paul while he was still prostrate from the effects of the blow he received near Damascus, he declined to do so—apparently in fear of Paul, on account of his previous treatment of Christians. This gave the Lord an opportunity to tell Ananias, why he is anxious to do as he was requested. "But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: for I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake." (Acts ix. 15, 16.)

The Lord has now settled all disputes between the followers of Peter and Paul, and the office of each is settled and defined. Under such a judgment, pronounced by God himself, no wonder the influence of Paul ceased to be felt in the latter part of the second century, and Peter proportionally increased in weight and authority. This attempt to put up Peter and put down Paul, determines the date of the Acts, and fixes it somewhere between A.D. 150 and A.D. 170, a period in the century prolific of spurious writings. It may be called the Petrine age of Christianity.

When Paul made his defence before the Jews at Jerusalem, and explained to them the mode of his conversion, it would be dangerous, or at least suspicious, to leave out the story of Cornelius; but as it differed so much from the one he gives in second Corinthians, it was necessary to omit the one given in the epistle entirely. But the fraud is easily detected. The account as given in the Acts, to the sixth verse inclusive, is as it was doubtless delivered by Paul; but from this point the story diverges from the one given by himself, and is a sheer fabrication. "And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great. light round about me." (Acts xxii. 6.) Then according to Paul's account, given in his letter to the Corinthians, he was caught up to the third heaven, and there heard unspeakable words which it was not lawful for man to utter. What transpired between God and Paul, all took place in heaven, where no man could bear witness. The account in the Acts, which commences in the seventh verse, says that after the light shone from heaven, Paul fell to the ground, and did not ascend to heaven, but was led by the same light to Damascus. This version is to let in the story of Ananias. He could not bear witness to what passed between the Lord and Paul in the third heaven, but he might if the scene was laid on the earth. Besides, what passed between the Lord and Paul the latter does not pretend to state, for the words he heard were unspeakable and not lawful for man to utter. There is nothing in the story in the Acts that is unspeakable or unlawful to be repeated, unless it is to be regarded as a piece of blasphemy.

Had Paul told the story as given in the Acts in his defence, there was nothing in it to arouse the Jews to such a pitch of madness as to cause them to insist that he should be put to death. There was more in it to provoke a sneer than to excite anger. The scene in Jerusalem, when Paul was compelled to make his defence, was in A.D. 58, and he could have appealed to Ananias, who in the course of nature might still be living, and others, if the story was true. It was not the story in the Acts that incensed the Jews. When Paul claimed he was taken up to heaven, and there met the Lord and talked to him face to face, he had reached, in the minds of his hearers, a point in blasphemy that drove them to frenzy, so that they exclaimed: "Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live." The Jews listened to Stephen with patience until he exclaimed, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God," when they could stand it no longer, and ran upon him with one accord and stoned him to death. It is clear that Paul's defence, made before the Jews, of his conversion, is omitted, and the story of Ananias substituted, to aid the enemies of Paul in placing Peter over him.

When we find the same story variously stated by Paul, and in the Acts, there should be no hesitation in choosing between the two. The Acts, like the works of the early fathers, bears so many marks of forgeries, to suit the emergencies and wants of the day, that very little contained in either is of any historic value. The epistles of Paul had obtained a large circulation before the time when the men of the second century inaugurated an era of forgeries, and long before the Acts were in existence; so that the forgers were compelled to exercise great caution when they came to deal with the epistles, and only ventured to insert passages into the genuine writings to give the sanction of his name to the doctrines of the Alexandrian or Johannean school, or some dogma of the day. Such passages are scattered all through the epistles, but we can easily point them out, for they are doctrinal and exceedingly pointed.

Peter disappears at the end of the twelfth chapter; but enough has been done to make him chief among the Apostles, and claim for him a spiritual supremacy in all matters which relate to the church. John, afterwards the great light of Asia, only plays the part of an esquire to Peter, his lord and superior. They are often together, but John is not suffered to speak. It was designed that John, who was to take Asia in charge, should stand next to Peter; but the writer, by imposing silence on him on all occasions, took care that the supremacy of Peter was not put in jeopardy. The preaching of Philip in Samaria was a device to show that Peter and John were superior to the rest of the Apostles in their power to confer the Holy Ghost. Philip made many converts, both men and women, and he baptized them—but his baptism was not sufficient. "Now when the Apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John. They laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost."—Acts viii. 14, 17.

According to Paul, and this is made clear by the quarrels between him and Peter, as related in the epistles, the latter was tenacious to the last for the Jewish rite of circumcision, and we have no evidence, and no reason to believe, that he ever gave it up. A sectarian Jew would never answer to be the head and founder of a Catholic church. The sectarian character of Peter must be got rid of, and we see studied efforts in the Acts to do so. We have seen that Peter, in the first words he addressed to Cornelius, took the opportunity to declare that he believed in the doctrine that God was no respecter of persons. But this was not enough, in the opinion of the writer of the Acts, or at least the first half, and to make Peter's emancipation from his old Jewish opinions more conspicuous, and enable him to explain how it happened that the change was brought about, the vision of Peter on the house-top is produced. He went up upon the house-top to pray, about the sixth hour, and became very hungry; but while they were preparing something for him to eat, he had a trance, "And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter, kill and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven."

The command of the Lord to Peter to eat, was a command to give up his Jewish views and notions; for that all flesh was alike, and equally proper to be taken on an empty stomach. Peter was at a loss to understand the vision, and while he was revolving the subject in his mind, Cornelius and his party came to be instructed by him, in accordance with the directions of the Lord. When Cornelius, who was of the Gentiles, made at known the object of his visit, Peter at once understood the import of the vision, and exclaimed, "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons," and that the gospel of Christ is to supply the spiritual wants of all nations, as the beasts and fowls are to furnish food for the hungry.

The conversion of Peter receives further importance and prominence from the defence he is compelled to make before the brethren, for his disregard of the rite of circumcision in the baptism of Cornelius. Peter makes a speech, in which he declares that he was commanded by God, not less than three times, to give up his old Jewish notions; and no sooner was the command given than Cornelius, a Gentile, who was sent to him by God, made his appearance. The command from God to Peter, and the arrival of the centurion, who was instructed by the Lord to come to him, left him no choice in the matter, and that he baptized the Gentile, in obedience to the commands of the Lord. The reason was sufficient. "When they heard these things, they held their peace, and glorified God, saying, Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life." (Acts. xi. 18.) The wall between Jew and Gentile is now broken down, and Peter a fit subject for the head of a universal or catholic church.

It seems that the person who put the speech into the mouth of Peter, renouncing circumcision, was not satisfied with what he said at the time. Something had been omitted or overlooked. Peter had shed his Jewish skin, but the Lord had not given him a commission to preach the gospel to all nations, and this he must have to be the head of a universal church. At the council held at Jerusalem by the Apostles to settle the question of circumcision, Peter, according to the Acts, seizes the opportunity to supply the omission: "And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up and said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago, God made choice among us, that the Gentiles, by my mouth, should hear the word of the gospel, and believe." (Acts xv. 7.) Now there was no occasion for Peter to make this claim or assertion, for it had nothing to do with the subject before the council, and was not true. The account which Paul gives of what took place at the council is quite different, contradictory, and no doubt true. He says, when he stated before the council the trouble and vexations which were occasioned by this rite, and reasons why it should not be forced on the Gentiles, that Peter, James, and John agreed with him—gave him the right hand of fellowship, and then entered into a compact that he should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. (Gal. ii.)

This agreement was never departed from; but not so with regard to circumcision. That Peter, James, and all the disciples disregarded the order of the Council in regard to that subject, is rendered clear by their subsequent conduct. After that, as much as two years, for the Council was held in A.D. 49 or A.D. 50, and the epistle to the Galatians was written in A. D. 52, Peter went to Antioch, where he found Paul. He ate with the uncircumcised until some Jewish converts came from Jerusalem at the instance of James, who found fault with his course. Peter, it seems, then changed front and stood up for circumcision. "I withstood him to the face," says Paul, for he was wrong. A discussion springs up. Paul claimed that men were not to be saved through old rites and ceremonies, nor by-works, but by faith. At this time, neither James nor Peter had given up their contracted notions on the Jewish rite. Nor had Peter as late as A. D. 57, twenty-four years after the death of Christ. Of the four parties which disturbed the peace of the church at Corinth at the time of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, which was written in A. D. 57, the party of Cephas was one. Peter was at the head of a party which held out for circumcision, seven years after the council at Jerusalem; and if he had not given it up then, when he was fifty-seven years old, there is no reason to believe he did after that. Nothing gave the men in the second century who undertook to put Peter at the head of a universal church so much trouble as this thing of circumcision, which we can readily detect by the pains and labors they have taken to free him from it. But the stain will not wash out.

The story told in the Acts about the way in which Peter was disenthralled from his narrow Jewish notions, is wholly inconsistent with the subsequent history of the church at Jerusalem. After the Lord had taken so much pains to prove to the disciples that a new dispensation had commenced, and the wall between the Jews and Gentiles was broken down, there was no reason why they should not all dispense with the practice of circumcision. But they never did. The fifteen first Bishops of Jerusalem, commencing with James and including Judas, were all circumcised Jews. (Eus., Ex. 77., B., iv. ch. v. Sulpicius Severus, vol. 11-31.) With the twelve disciples, jealousy of Paul, who fought this Jewish practice to the last, seemed to be the most active feeling of their natures, and we seldom hear of them unless they were dogging his footsteps, and stirring up the Jews against him. It was through their intrigues that the doors of the synagogue were slammed in his face wherever he went.

The doctrine of ordination, through which that deposit of divine riches which IrenÆus says Christ left with the Apostles is made to flow in an uninterrupted current through all time, is conspicuously presented in the Acts. When Paul and Barnabas were at Antioch, and about to start for the West, on a mission to preach to the Gentiles, the Lord said, "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away." (Acts xiii. 2, 3.) Nothing could impose so great a humiliation as this upon Paul. The Lord again interferes and assigns him to a special duty, and to make this humiliation complete, he is ordered to receive his commission at the hands of the Apostles. Who laid their hands on Barnabas and Paul, is not stated, nor is it of any importance, as the object of the statement is to make it apparent that the latter, the great light of the Gentiles, submitted to the rite of ordination by the imposition of hands, administered by some one of the Apostles. Will any one believe this story to be true? If he does, he does not understand the character of Paul. There is nothing he would resent with so much feeling, as he would such an admission on his part that he was less than an Apostle. When it was claimed he was not, his soul took fire, and in his address to the Galatians, in the first chapter, he delivers himself in this defiant strain: "Paul, an Apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.) But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me." (Gal. i. I, 15, 16, 17.) Is this the Paul who patiently submits to receive his commission from an Apostle to preach the doctrines of Christ to the nations of the earth at Antioch, when he is about to commence his labors?

It is not enough that Paul should submit to receive the Holy Ghost at the hands of the Apostle, and in this way be authorized to preach the gospel; but he gives the ordinance his full sanction by conferring ordination on others. "And it came to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having passed through the upper coasts, came to Ephesus; and finding certain disciples, he said unto them, Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed? And they said unto him, We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Ghost came on them; and they spake with tongues, and prophesied." (Acts xix. 1, 2, 6.) No stronger proof could be given that the followers of Paul were opposed to the Episcopacy and the doctrine of succession and ordination, and contended against a government by Bishops with zeal to the last, than the labored and frequent efforts that are made to show that he himself gave his sanction to the order.

For Paul's persistence in claiming a human origin for Christ, there was a studied effort in the second century to destroy his claims as an Apostle; but after his epistles had undergone alterations so as to make Christ the Son of God in the sense of the Catholics of the second century, he was restored to favor, and his powers wonderfully magnified. He is now able to work miracles, and his power to heal diseases is such, that whatever comes in contact with his person, is so filled or imbued with holy energy, that its curative properties are sufficient to put death at defiance.

It is clear that the Acts of the Apostles is not the work of one century, but of two. The real itinerary of Paul commences in the thirteenth chapter, and from this to the end of the Acts, we can trace his footsteps in his various journeys among the churches, until he finally enters the gates of Rome, in the spring of A.D. 61.