Excerpt from St. Luke and a Modern Writer: A Study in Criticism Since many have undertaken to draw up a narrative about the facts which have been fully established among us, as those who were actual eye-witnesses and ministers of the matter delivered them, I too have thought good, most excellent Theophilus, after having followed all the circumstances from the very beginning with the utmost care, to present you with an orderly account in writing, that you may have certain. Information about the things you have been told by word of mouth. Among the books of the New Testament two stand by themselves. Their avowed object is to set forth facts, collected by their author, in literary form. He gathered his information, as he declares, from reliable sources. He was probably, if not certainly, a witness if not a principal actor, in some of the scenes which he depicts. For the facts outside his personal experience he relied on the testimony of the best authorities he could find. His preface, though not without parallels in antiquity, is strangely modern in tone, in claiming to present his little books as the result of laborious investigation. 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.