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Understanding the Book of Acts
"Luke's
style is compressed to the highest degree; and he
expects a great deal from the reader. He does not
attempt to sketch the surroundings and set the whole
scene like a picture before the reader; he state's the
bare facts that seem to him important, and leaves the
reader to imagine the situation. But there are many
cases in which, to catch his meaning properly, you must
imagine yourself standing with Paul on the deck of the
ship, or before the Roman official; and unless you
reproduce the scene in imagination, you miss the sense.
Hence, though his style is simple and clear, yet it
often becomes obscure from its brevity; and the meaning
is lost, because the reader has an incomplete, or a
positively false idea of the situation. It is always
hard to re-create the remote past; knowledge,
imagination, and, above all, sympathy and love are all
needed. But Asia minor, in which the scene is often
laid, was not merely little known, but positively
wrongly known."
W. M.
Ramsay, The Morgan Lectures for 1894 in the Auburn
Theological Seminary.
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