Excerpt from The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. 2: Part 1, the Acts of the Apostles; Prolegomena II; Criticism IN the preface to the former volume of this book we declared the general purpose of our undertaking to be the study and, so far as possible, the explanation of the Beginnings of Christianity. Before, however, attempting to reconstruct this history we believed it necessary to study Acts in the light of the results of modern criticism. Unfortunately some of our reviewers considered that we were already endeavouring fully to recon struct the narrative. This was not our purpose, which was in fact to indicate the points necessary to a more detailed study of Acts and suitable as prolegomena. Later on we hope to return to the subject and reconsider the narrative of the life of Jesus, and the influence on the Church of his own teaching and of the teaching of others about him, - two subjects which are not identical though necessarily related. In the present volume we have endeavoured to deal with the difficult questions of the composition and authorship of Acts and the history of their treatment by other critics. We greatly regret that the important works of Professor Zahn and Professor Loisy on the Acts did not reach us in time to be mentioned. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.