(16 votes, average: 4.81 out of 5)
Loading...I have now completed my posts on the debate I had with myself in front of my New Testament class on the question of whether the New Testament book of Acts is historically reliable. If you want to see the whole debate, just read the posts in sequence: the affirmative speech arguing Acts is indeed reliable; the negative speech arguing that it is not; the negative rebuttal of what the affirmative side said; and finally the affirmative rebuttal of what the negative side said.
In class I delivered the speeches one after the other. When “affirmative” I was wearing a sport coat, but no cap; when “negative” I was wearing a baseball cap but no sport coat – just so students would remember that it was a “different” speaker speaking.
I have pointed out on the blog before that even though I do a lot of public debates, I often find them more than a little frustrating and frequently (in fact, almost always) ask myself, in the course of the debate, why I’m doing this to myself. People basically hear what they want to hear, and most of the time people simply want to hear someone arguing for the position that they already hold in order to confirm to themselves that they are right. Nearly everyone does this. So what’s the point? People come in, almost always, either agreeing or disagreeing with me, and almost nothing I say (or my opponent says) will change their mind. They will simply feel confirmed by the side they already agree with.
I feel that frustration even in this debate that I have with myself. The first time I did this debate,
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My issue with the negative side is that, while they point out various inconsistencies and embellishments in Acts, “Luke” seems to still know a heckuva lot about Paul. The negative side fails to offer up a theory of how, if he wasn’t a part-time traveling companion of Paul, he knew so much about Paul. If the theory is he copied someone else’s earlier text, then the real question would seem to be, was that earlier author reliable?
I know a lot about John F. Kennedy, but I doubt my narratives about him would be accurate.
To use an analogy from my field: if we were evaluating whether an ancient doctor provided good medical care we wouldn’t just say, “Well, he was using the methods common in his day, so he must have provided good care.” We might acknowledge that he was very disciplined about using the standard methods of his day, but that doesn’t equate to good medical care. Neither does it equate to accurate history in that field.
I would very much like to know what you would say about the two resolutions mentioned in the last paragraph:
“Resolved: The author of Acts was a very good historian when judged by the standards of his day”
“Resolved: The book of Acts is an excellent example of ancient historiography”
I would say “pretty good” instead of “very good” and “example” instead of “excellent example.”
Since it is Palm Sunday I have a question related to the Triumphal Entry.
You have stated in the past that Matthew (Chp21) has a misguided understanding of the episode of the riding of the donkey based on his failure to see the poetic structure of the OT prophecy he draws on.
Matthew writes that the disciples placed cloaks on the TWO animals and Jesus sat on THEM. This conjures up a picture of Jesus straddling both beasts.
Does the Greek text only permit this translation or could the pronoun refer not to the two beasts but to the cloaks placed on them and so Jesus was sitting ON THE CLOAKS on ONE of the donkeys rather than bizarrely riding both of the animals?
Yes, some have argued for that interpretation to get around the problem. But when you look at the Greek, it seems pretty clearly to mean that Jesus straddled the animals. (Apart from the fact that he introduces the *two* animals and there’s not much point in doing so unless they are both significant). It says that the disciples spread their clothes ON THEM and that Jesus then sat ON THEM. The natural way of reading the verse is that the “THEM” is the same in the two instances.
I wonder if you are aware of any medieval or renaissance artwork depicting the entry in this way (astride two beasts)?
No, I’m not.
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
Paul Simon
Dr. Ehrman,
Several days ago you had a post about if there’s any point to you doing public debates. I asked *why* you debate and your answer was that you’re trying to plant seeds in open minds.
I see you as an itinerate preacher of sorts. You travel, sleep in strange beds (it’s not home), maybe get a meal or 2, and try to spread your news to those who might listen while dealing with the venom of those who disagree with you. That sounds like meaning/purpose, in the Ecclesiastes sense: everything we do is chasing the wind but try to find joy in our toil anyway.
Question: when the affirmative side says “The apparent discrepancies between Luke and Paul dissolve away if you take them in their own contexts”, what is your response?
I’d say that the question is whether they can both be accurately describing what actually happened if one or both of them have changed the stories in light of their own contexts. They may certainly have had reasons for altering the accounts they inherited, and we might appreciate why they did so for literary reasons. But by doing so they altered their accounts so that they no longer describe what happened in the way it happened. That is fine if you are interested in their literary prowess; but if you want to know what happened, you don’t want accounts that have been changed for literary reasons.
Hi Bart. The problem with your affirmative team is not only that they have used this bogus argument about the standards of Paul’s day, but also that they have missed important arguments that would have made their case much stronger. I’ll give you one further example.
Festus went from Caesarea to Jerusalem and returned to Caesarea. Acts 25:6 says that he was with the Jews in Jerusalem for “not more than 8 or 10 days.” Why doesn’t Luke simply say “less than 11 days”. Why doesn’t he make up a more precise time? Answer: he was with Paul in Caesarea and therefore knew only how long Festus was away from Caesarea. It takes 2 or 3 days to travel between the two towns, and there would be some uncertainty about how much time was taken by Festus. Thus he writes “8 or 10 days”. But what if Festus had spent time in a town en route? This thought explains why Acts 25:6 reads “_not more than_ 8 or 10 days.” Is there another explanation? In Acts 20-28, Luke gives many precise time intervals for recent events that the author remembered, but he invents no such intervals for early events.
Works of fiction use that kind of phrasing all the time, so I don’t see how it’s evidence of eyewitness reporting.
I wrote: ‘Acts 25:6 says that he was with the Jews in Jerusalem for “not more than 8 or 10 days.”’ Here, as I explained, Luke redundantly qualifies the time interval in two ways. Firstly, he includes two alternative numbers. Secondly, he includes “not more than”.
You replied, “Works of fiction use that kind of phrasing all the time, so I don’t see how it’s evidence of eyewitness reporting.”
Please identify a work of fiction, preferably from antiquity, that qualifies a quantified time interval twice, or even once. The closest parallels to the wording in Acts 25:6 that I have found so far are in non-fictions (by Thucydides, Pliny, Demosthenes, Julius Caesar, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, Lysias).
Why are quantified time intervals very common in Acts 20-28, but very rare in the first 15 chapters? I think it is because Luke was present for the events of chapters 20-28 and those years were fresh in his memory. How can it be explained on your theory that the author was not a companion of Paul?
It’s common even today to say “a day or two later” or “a week or ten days later.” It has nothing to do with whether the words of the person allegedly saying it are being reported with precisision. Are you asking me to reread all the Greek and Roman works of fiction to identify places where they do this?
May I ask why you’re so set on showing that Acts is completely reliable? Do you think there are any historical mistakes or contradictions in it? If you don’t, why is that? Do you know of other historical works that are completely inerrant?
Catherine Rubincam found that Greek historians qualified numbers (with “about”, “more than”, etc.) about 18% of the time, whereas Greek poets did it only about 1.3% of the time. She points out that careful historians give ranges when exact numbers cannot be obtained. For the earliest Apocryphal Acts, I estimate 3%. Luke’s Acts has 15%. If this metric correlates with reliability, and if Acts scores favourably, would you take that to be evidence for the reliability of Acts?
You wrote, “May I ask why you’re so set on showing that Acts is completely reliable?”
I am not.
You wrote, “Do you think there are any historical mistakes or contradictions in it?” Very likely there are. The best candidates, for me, are the issue of whether Paul’s companions saw the light, and the Theudas thing, and maybe the 40 days thing. Interestingly, all of these concern events more than 14 years before Luke joined Paul.
No, why owuld the abundant or restricted use of qualified numbers show that a historical narrative was accurate? Just on the basis of logic, it doesn’t make sense. “Bill Clinton was president for something like 12 years….” Is that accurate?
Amen, Bart. Fact or fiction? Rhetoric or logic? Knowledge or faith? Truth or propaganda? Open mindedness or prejudice? Humanity will have to rise above this struggle or sooner or later we will be lucky to survive as a species of insignificant little tribes – again. I’m probably naive, but it seems to me that never before has an individual in the “Western Civilization” had the ability and capacity to ascertain the truth and facts of a situation, whether current or historical, yet face such an assault, or at least discouragement against the attempt to do so.
And the fact that the people who argue against you start with the basis that the Bible was “inspired/written” by the “Creator of Heaven and Earth”……well, no wonder the world has always been such a mess!
Is it fair to say that Acts is somewhat reliable in at least giving us a window into the general activities of Peter, Paul, and some others in the early days of Christianity? But is the book consistently historically and factually reliable? Surely not.
I don’t know if it’s generally relable about Peter and the others, because there is nothing else to compare it with. With Paul it gets many aspects of his ministry generally right, and many generally wrong (e.g., that he never did anything contrary to the jewish law — a significant point for Acts that Paul flat out contradicts).
It seems to me that it is fair to say that the book of Acts has parts of it that are historically reliable and other parts of it that are not. In other words, there was a Jerusalem church, there was a “persecutor” of that church named Paul, that Paul adopted his own form of the religion and founded various churches in Asia Minor, he converted people to his faith, he met with other Christian leaders, and so on. It is also true that the speeches in Acts are historically unreliable, the alleged theological agreement between Paul and the Jerusalem church is unreliable, Jesus appearing over 40 days is unreliable, the miracle stories are doubtful, and so on. In other words, it is a mixed bag. The problem with the question “is the book of Acts historically reliable?” presupposes an all or nothing answer — either yes or no. Don’t you think the correct answer is that the historical accuracy of Acts is a mixed bag?
Yup, I’d agree. But if you have a friend who is right in what he says say, 60% of the time (e.g., in giving you directions, or describing what happened yesterday), would you be inclined to regard her as “reliable” in what she says?
Sixty percent of the time he is reliable. I wouldn’t know what to think in that scenario. It’s like gossip: sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not.
Right. But if someone was wrong in the directions she gave me 60% of the time, if I really wanted to get someplace I would almost certainly ask someone else, since I wouldn’t consider her reliable on that score.
Yes. But how do you deal with people who claim that she is inerrant?
Very simple. I know she is not, and if they think she is, well, OK. If they don’t recognize problems that’s … their problem. And good luck to them getting to where they want to go!
Dr. Ehrman, I have a question. Who is Melchizedek in the NT?
It’s a reference to the figure mentioned in Genesis 14.
Understood. In my belief, there is no higher than Olympus. Dr. Ehrman, have you seen this video of Dionysus? Lol 😆.
https://youtu.be/pMX3pNm87f4?feature=shared
“And about two-thirds of the class thought that the affirmative side did, the side arguing that Acts was in fact historically accurate.”
This is what I am attempting to point out in our other discussion. If they don’t understand how the historical process should work, and how historical accuracy is determined, why wouldn’t they see this as supporting their current beliefs?
All you seem to be telling them is, this is how Bart Ehrman thinks you should do history.
I try to teach my students how to reason, argue, evaluate arguments, understand logic, and recognize illogic, nonsense, ad hominem arguments, and non sequiturs. It just seems very hard for people to apply the same logic to their religion that they apply to every day life, unfortunately.
Perhaps we have become so accustomed to the way our media incorporates their biases in reporting current events that we’ve come to expect that real historians, ancient or modern, are doing the same. In other words, “that’s how it always has been done and always will be.” No one simply records the facts as they happened. Historians sometimes rewrite history to modern sensibilities, but aren’t they really changing the color of the glasses through which they view history, not truly restoring truth? When discerning “truth” it seems your students are doing the same. Maybe their bias toward the affirmative is a good sign they aren’t as cynical as they might be.
Paul’s conversion is narrated three times in Acts.
It would be unreasonable to tell exactly the same story three times, so differences are obviously introduced by Luke intentionally and are not just mistakes.
My point is that Luke wanted to radically change Paul’s depiction of his own conversion without directly contradicting him.
If we read about Paul’s conversion in Galatians (Gal 1:16), it is narrated as something experienced on a personal level (“to reveal his Son IN ME” – αποκαλuψαι τoν υἱoν αuτοu εν εμοὶ) and Jesus gives direct orders to Paul (“that I might preach him among the Gentiles”).
This passage was dangerous for the early church; any Christian could claim that they also converted,
receiving orders directly from Jesus WITHOUT the need of the CHURCH.
In Acts’ version of the same event, Paul is not alone, and even when he thought he was the only one hearing Jesus’s voice (22:9), in fact, all his companions heard it (9:7). It is not an error; it’s just that Paul did’nt know if the others really heard the voice. Moreover, Jesus spoke in Hebrew (26:14) so everybody could understand him (and Luke could have another “source” of Jesus’ words other than Paul,s).
More importantly, Jesus’ direct orders were not to “preach AMONG THE GENTILES” (Gal 1:16) but
“enter the city and YOU WILL BE TOLD WHAT TO DO” (Acts 9:6).
To deal with this difference, Luke makes Paul remember his own conversion twice.
The first in Acts 22:10, where Paul repeats Luke’s version about Jesus’ orders
(“go into Damascus and YOU WILL BE TOLD ALL THAT IS APPOINTED TO YOU TO DO”).
In the second one (Acts26:17), Luke makes Paul repeat something more like the Galatian’s version,
‘the GENTILES to whom I AM SENDING YOU’.
Why would Paul be so confused about Jesus’s real orders?
Luke smartly introduces a second Jesus’s speech to Paul in Jerusalem – “I will send you to the Gentiles” (Acts 22:21) , so we have to imagine that in chapter26 Paul is mixing two different visions of Jesus,
that of his conversion and the one in Jerusalem.
After Luke’s reinterpretation of Paul’s conversion, any Christian claiming that he converted following orders received directly from Jesus would be answered “even when Paul converted, there were witnesses of what Jesus said to him, and he did not instruct Paul directly but commanded him to be instructed by somebody from the church”.
It has been interesting to follow your “autodebate”, but I think the question you ask is too vague to be answered properly. What does “reliable” mean? If it just means what you wrote above, that “it tell us what actually happened in the way that it happened”, then the answer is “Of course not”. This is obvious, since Acts contains a lot of stories about miracles, and although I won’t dogmatically say that miracles can never occur, I say that extraordinary events such as miracles cannot be accepted as real without extraordinary evidence, and the book of Acts certainly is not that.
But that doesn’t exclude that the narrative of Acts has a true core, or “gist”, that it is based upon facts but includes a lot of exaggerations, such as miracles, mistakes (about Paul’s activity etc.) and theologically motivated distortions (such as downplaying the conflict between Paul and Peter and James).
The question is then how many errors and distortions etc. one can accept and still call it reliable. It would be unreasonable to demand that every word in Acts should be true, but how much one should demand is not clear.
Therefore I refrain from answering the question.
That’s actually part of the point of the wording. What does “reliable” mean. To ME it means: the narrative describes things that actually happened as the narrative says.” Others are happy to say “it’s in the ball park.” My sense is that people DON’T think that way or say that when, for example, they wonder if someone has given them the right directions to get somewhere. (Well, the SatNav got me to the right state, anyway….)
I don’t know if anybody else has already mentioned this -because I haven’t followed these posts in a while-, but I’ve been wanting for a long time to say that maybe the most underrated gift of yours is your ability to present every side of a debated point fair and with undeniable clarity. That says a lot about your intellectual integrity.
As far as the meaning of the debates in general is concerned, I would say that it does feel pointless at times, insofar as most people approach it in the context of a performance. In the last 4-5 years, I’ve watched so many debates with regard to the stuff you deal with as well as atheism vs theism, and I feel I’ ve come to a point that I just don’t want to listen to apologists anymore. I mean, I’ve really done the hard work and listened to them respectfully, but it has become borderline insufferable to listen to their mental gymnastics. I don’t know how you still, after all these decades, put up with it.
Thanks. Yeah, I have a problem with mental gymnastics generally. And we’re seeing a lot more of them these days in various realms….
Dr. Ehrman. In Genesis 18:1-15, we are told The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre. But in verse 2, Abraham saw three “men”. Abraham invites the three men to stay. The scribe refers to them as men one minute and yet one of them is also called ‘the Lord ’. He speaks to them and each time, it is the one referred to as ‘the Lord’ who replies. In other words, The Lord answers him and is accompanied by two other ‘men’ ( the scribe does not speak of ‘angels’). Isn’t it odd that God comes down to Earth in the form of a man, accompanied, not by angels, but by another 2 men?
What do you think of it?
In my own opinion, the scribe didn’t really understand the things he described. So I think “the Lord God” at least in this passage is not true God (I mean the Creator of universe; and I don’t think the Creator has a human face). Maybe, the “three men” are probably just Extraterrestrials?
How do you think of this name confusion? Has biblical academia noticed this problem before? Looking forward to your reply!
Oh yes, it’ a famous old problem, discussed in Xn sources since the second century! The three “men” are two angels and God himself. In the OT when angels or God come to speak with people (God already in the Garden of Eden) they appear to be humans, but it’s simply an appearance to make human interaction possible. In this passage one of the “men” is eventually identified as God, the other two are angels as seen in 19:1.
Hi, Bart,
1) Do you know of any books that talk about the psychological/sociological/emotional damage that evangelical/fundamentalist upbringing has on people?
For exemple, I stumbled upon this title: “Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free” by Linda Kay Klein
2) I heard people sometimes tell that “Someone who doesn’t know God cannot/doesn’t know love (truly)”. I have also heard that a man who doesn’t know God is not masculine or cannot make for a good marriage. What do you say of these?
1. Yes, that looks like a terrific book. And yes, there are lots of books like that, but I’m afraid I haven’t read any. I bet some others on the blog would know! Maybe someone can tell us. 2. I think both of those are completely wrong. Demonstrably wrong. Easily demonstrably!
I & my sister are example of parental neglect & true believers in a Taiwanese Fundamentalist Cult way of life from the 4th grade. My mother was an enthusiastic Trump fundraiser.
We are nonWhite born in Berkeley Americans.
But to figure out what is reliable in Luke-Acts, as with most folks, we don’t have the leisure or expertise to figure that out!›
Charrua, this is fascinating. I think what the author of Luke-Acts understood better was the ‘pecking order’ of the ANE. In their account, Paul is a student of Gamaliel, so why would he be subject to James, the actual son of a tekton. But answering to certain Damascene followers of Jesus, sure. Per Paul, it still had a Nabataean ethnarch.
And it was originally the capitol of all of Aram. I think the early First Century Transjordan was seeing a neo-ancient Aramean Founder revival when looking at epithets, symbols and practices.
It’s my hypothesis that some ancient Arameans and Arabians had a more illustrious lineage than even Abraham (who my best guess so far is a nomadic Yamhad dynasty king under the neo-God-Emperor revival of the Sargon of Akkad lineage).
Also Bostra is at times considered just “southern Damascus.” It’s the new capitol of a mysterious new king crowned in 40 CE after a favorable Roman emperor change. For me, he’s a candidate for Jesus after ‘ascending to the heavens’ (imo, poesy for elevation).
The author says he’s attempting to correct previous correct previous accounts, why couldn’t he be attempting to clarify points pf Paul’s?
Paul’s Nabatean connection is very interesting.
I think Paul’s modus operandi as he states in Romans (Rom 14:20)
was to avoid overlapping with other apostles (“I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.”)
So when he ‘converted’ in Damascus he went to Nabatea to start his own business there, where probably there was no competition.
Years later when he broke up with the Antioch church he also went right to Macedonia to start his own churches again (Phil 4:15 “in the BEGINNING of the gospel, when I left Macedonia”) .
This time he was very successful in founding churches in Macedonia,Acaya,Asia and Galatia (in that order) but he was finally defeated because of the hard competition from other apostles and his own collaborators. Then he decided to gather all the money he could with his illegal(see Pliny the Younger’s letters book 10 , 91-92 ) scam (see Antiquities XVIII 3.81) and start it all over again from the western end of the empire, Spain, repeating his modus operandi of avoiding overlapping.
Dr. Ehrman. is the “Kingdom of God” same as “Kingdom of heaven”? Because in the Gospel, sometimes Jesus didn’t say “Kingdom of God” but “Kingdom of heaven”. I know the “Kingdom of God” is an earthly Kingdom, here on earth, but how about Kingdom of heaven?
And in the Revelation of John, when the New Jerusalem come, the text did not say the word “Kingdom of heaven”. In my understanding, the New Jerusalem is on earth, not in heaven. But why in China the Christians always think the Revelation describe a “Kingdom of heaven”（Literally）? even though the word doesn’t appear in the text.
By the way, I have already read you book Armageddon. But I still have this question. Thank you very much, look forward to your reply!
Yes, Matthew, usually uses “heaven” for “God” in the expression as a circumlocution of respect.
As to China: I don’t know. I didn’t know that was their view! But I’d say most Christians think of the New Jerusalem is “heaven,” blithely ignoring how it is actually described in Revelation itself. It’s very easy to read something and assume it’s saying what you would expect it to say; so if you’re sure eternity is in heaven above, not down here, it’s simple to think that’s what Revelation is talkig about….
The irreconcilable differences within Acts are interesting, but what’s more interesting to me is *why* these differences exist, whether the differences with Paul’s letters, with Josephus, or internally within Luke-Acts itself, and we could extend on out to include differences of Luke to Mark, Matthew, and John. I doubt it’s all due to sloppiness or differing oral traditions.
Yup, that’s the big question, I agree. Unfortunately too many people can’t get to the big question because they refuse to see the answers to the smaller ones! But “contradictions” are almost never important in and of themselves. They are important because they get you to consider even more important and intriguing and fruitful things.
I was a pilot. thus read all aircraft accident reports. Such reports include numerous “eye witness” accounts of the accident. Such eyewitness accounts “always” have contradictions of some facts with all other eye witness accounts. Thus, when author of Luke/Acts states upfront that the given account is based on numerous accounts, then it is expected that there be contraditions of certain facts. Therefore, it appears that Luke/Acts is exactly what the Author claims it to be.
The bottom line, is that what is historically correct (actual facts), can only be a general event with limited detail. So to answer your question “is Acts historical?”, the answer is “Yes” on general events, and “No” (or Unknown), as to specific details. Overall, Luke/Acts would be most historical outside of Paul.
Re: Debates.
There’s no value in agreement with my own views unless additional factual information. I find dissagreement more valuable as such provides the necessary “test” of hypothesis in order to formulate a proper view. A proper viewpoint is built from the ground up, rather from the top down as Christianity (religion) does. Problem is debating religious vs factual viewpoint as religion is based on Faith not facts. Apples and Oranges.
Another thing is that Luke is not in the same category as Tacitus or Josephus. We know who those people were, we know when and how they worked, and we know what sort of sources they used because they told us. We don’t know any of those things for Luke, or whatever his name was, except for his vague comment that he used “traditions and stuff” (my paraphrase). So, even by the standards of his day, he comes up short.
New here. My thought is that Luke intended Acts to be historically reliable, and mostly gets it right. There are some mundane errors of fact. Human nature being what it is, I can’t exclude the possibility that Luke might have made some exaggerations to support his own agenda. But I don’t think that he told any out-and-out fibs. He wasn’t making any money on this. My inclination is to view Acts as reliable, unless there is a specific reason to call a certain passage into question, in which case we take another look at that passage.
Thanks for the reflection. I don’t think the issue is whether it’s historically accurate OR he was telling fibs. Many, many people try to tell what happened in the past with good intention but don’t get their information correct. And it happened a LOT more in antiquity when research in our sense was more or less impossible. The only way to know if an author like luke is accurate is to do a careful analysis — for example, by seeing if he contradicts himself when telling the same story twice, and seeing if what he says is disconfirmed by other sources that can be shown on other grounds to be completely trustworthy, and seeing if he is at odds with what those involved with the events he narrates actually say about them, etc.
“ , I often find them more than a little frustrating and frequently (in fact, almost always) ask myself, in the course of the debate, why I’m doing this to myself. People basically hear what they want to hear, and most of the time people simply want to hear someone arguing for the position that they already hold in order to confirm to themselves that they are right. ”
I too understand why you might want to bail on debates, I’ve watched just about every lecture of yours on YouTube but after a couple of debates I’ve decided not to watch any more of those, I find the bad faith cherry picking of quotes or lines to attack during debate rather than engaging with your actual ideas to be very tiresome so I just don’t watch them