In a chapter in his collection of essays entitled Pauline and Other Studies in Early Christianity, compiled over a hundred years ago, William M. Ramsay records and summarizes his reflections across the span of his scholarly career on the dating of Acts. The piece is both a methodological assessment and a personal meditation on how his mind changed from viewing Acts as a product of the mid-second century to claiming that it ought to be fully situated within a first-century early Christian milieu (Ramsay 1906: 199). Ramsay lays the foundation for the mid-second-century composition of the book of Acts at the feet of the European “critical” school (ibid.: 191–2), by which he means the German scholarly trajectory emerging out of the theoretical framework of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) and his colleagues and students. Ramsay admits that, by the time he is writing his essay, the mid-second-century view has been in decline, and has certainly been modified in terms of some of its earlier exaggerations. For Ramsay, the chief problem with the New Testament “critical” European approach had been the lack of readily available information on Roman imperial history (ibid.: 192–4), particularly the work of Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), which represented a sea-change in the study of the ancient Romans. Although Mommsen's major work on Roman imperial institutions and the governance of the provinces emerged during the same time period that the “critical” school was gaining traction in Europe (mid-1800s), it was relatively ignored by German biblical scholarship until later.