Loading...We could deal forever with the question of the historical accuracy of Acts. There are entire books devoted to the problem and even to *aspects* of the problem, and different scholars come to different conclusions. My own view is that since Acts is at odds with Paul just about every time they talk about the same thing, that it is probably not to be taken as very accurate, especially in its detail. In yesterday’s post I dealt with a couple of places where it’s portrayal of Paul’s *actions* seem to be at odds with what Paul himself says; in today’s, my last post on the topic, I speak about Paul’s *teachings/views* and come to the same conclusion. I’ll pick just one example, and again, draw my remarks from comments I’ve made elsewhere in print.
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Almost all of Paul’s evangelistic sermons mentioned in Acts are addressed to Jewish audiences. This itself should strike us as odd, given Paul’s own repeated claim that his mission was to the Gentiles. In any event, the most famous exception is his speech to a group of philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens (chapter 17). Here Paul explains that the Jewish God is in fact the God of all, pagan and Jew alike, even though the pagans have been ignorant of him. Paul’s understanding of pagan polytheism is reasonably clear here: pagans have simply not known that there is only One God, the creator of all, and can thus not be held accountable for failing to worship the one whom they have not known. That is to say, since they have been ignorant of the true God, rather than willfully disobedient to him, he has overlooked their false religions until now. With the coming of Jesus, though, he is calling all people to repent in preparation for the coming judgment (Acts 17:23-31).
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So if the Acts of the Apostles is unreliable, we can place Peter elsewhere than in Jerusalem, namely Antioch for seven years, then Rome for twenty-five, right? 😉 (There’s another common one to debunk…)
Hmmm… I’m not familiar with this timetable.
This has been a great series, and it has opened my eyes to several things I had never even considered. Thank you.
Could stories about Paul be part of The Jewish ORAL tradition similar to the OT & Gospels?
I doubt if non-Christian Jews were telling stories about Paul; but hte Christians certainly were.
Would it be fair to say that very little of Luke/Acts is historical and that these two books are how the gentile church remembers the beginning of Christianity? Therefore there are dramatic events and miracles, thousands of converts, but which reflect a secondary layer of traditions that came from the Syrian Hellenist Jewish Churches? Maybe from Damascus and Antioch.
I think it does record some historicla events in broad outline; but the details are often highly problematic.
Does it not seem strange that Luke, writing some thirty years after the fact, would have known that many details of Paul’s travels and not have had access to Paul’s letters?
The problem is that the details he provides don’t come from paul’s letters (since they vary from those letters wherever there is overlap). He got the details from stories he had heard about Paul.
Interesting criticism for not only the author of Luke but all early Christian writers: who had asked the Galations, the Ephesians, the Romans, the Corinthians, etc. for copies of Paul’s letters; and, when there was a call for these letters, were some invented?
Did Tertullian have copies? Did Eusebius have copies?
We know authors who referred to and quoted from multiple letters of Paul (Ignatius, probably, Polycarp certainly), so they were being collected no later than early 2nd c. Even 2 Peter 3:16 refers to a collection. And yes, Tertullian and Eusebius had copies of a collection.
Thank you.
Steefen
As always very interesting. So, were the “we” passages added by the author of Acts as a way of showing that the author knew about what he was writing since he was a “companion” of Paul or did they result from the Acts author/editor patching together his sources without really editing them that much so that third person narrative gets occasionally changed to first person plural due to different sources? Could the “we” passages have been added by a later scribe trying to provide evidence that the author of Acts was the companion of Paul or do they appear in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus and are they quoted by the patristic authors like Didymus the Blind?
The we passages were definitely there from the outset, and I think they were added to make readers assume that hte author was one of Paul’s companions (and so a reliable source).
I just got to wondering about this. *Why* would a person forging a letter in the name of Paul have gone to the bother of describing this “Luke” as a “gentile physician”? Was it relevant to what he was saying about him? (Or might he actually have heard a *tradition* of Luke’s being a gentile physician?)
Forgers very commonly add little details to their work for the sake of verisimilitude. You can see this in lots of forgeries that everyone acknoweledges as forgeries.
The suspense is building….
Not to mention the clearly different versions of Paul’s conversion between those in Acts and the one in Galatians. (Which I’m sure you’ve covered before.)
While Paul and the Jerusalem Church were traveling to and from Antioch Syria, the author of Acts was in contact with Paul.
After Paul is defeated at Antioch Syria, why would the author of Acts follow him to Greece?! Before going into my study/library to meditate on your post above, I’m not shocked that the author heard Paul was in Greece and made up some speeches. The passages of Acts that do not deal with Paul ARE more historically accurate than what happened after Antioch with Paul.
So, I am in partial agreement with you.
Elsewhere in the blog or in your books do you discuss this timeline I’m putting forth? Please point out the discrepancies at Antioch in favor of Paul. If I remember correctly, Paul was not telling the truth by saying the Jerusalem church only wanted circumcision but James gave me permission to waive that. Paul did not tell the church of Antioch that the Jerusalem church also wanted dietary rules followed (Noahide laws). Here, the discrepancies between Paul and the Jerusalem-biased author of Acts of the Apostles favors the Jerusalem scene.
I haven’t dealt much with Pauline chronology. And it’s not clear that Paul lost in Antioch.
“But another explanation is that Luke, rather than Paul, is the author of the speech on the Areopagus, just as he is the author of all the other speeches in his account, as we saw in Chapter 9.”
I have always thought of Luke as being the true author of all the speeches in Acts. But, if I’m not mistaken, you have also sometimes appealed to primitive elements of a speech offering independent attestation of something recounted in the gospels. Perhaps you have also pointed to primitive elements in a speech to point earlier christolologies?? Am I mistaken, or is your view more nuanced, or perhaps evolving with respect to Luke’s authorship of all the speeches in Acts?
No, that’s right. My view is that Luke wrote the speeches, and to do so he sometimes used older surviving traditions (not of speeches but of sayings, creedal statements, affirmations of faith, and so on).
Aha! I knew there had to be an argument in here somewhere about the unreliability of Acts. I couldn’t wait for the next post; it was killing me!
I’m a little bit sad now. It’s like finding a Christmas present that’s hidden in the closet. Now, I’m not gonna be surprised. 🙁
Dr Ehrman –
Given Luke inserted Peter into the empty tomb story (against Mark’s account):
1. Is it not conspicuous (read: odd) that Peter fails to bring up an empty tomb discovery in his speeches in Acts?
2. Especially since Peter, the uber-apostle, was confounded by it (in the gospel), and one of the Petrine soliloquies seems a perfect opportunity to show that he ultimately did grasp it?
Thanks a ton.
My sense is that Luke is getting the discovery narratives in the Gospel and the apostolic speeches in Acts from different sources.
Many thanks!
That then sparks a related question (thanks for your patience): given Luke received the traditions of the apostolic speeches, he thus seems to take license in handily working them over, such that the tone/style/content of Peter’s speeches matches those of Paul. If Luke didn’t invent them (instead received in proto-form), and yet clearly feels no problem rendering them to his reader heavily wrought by his own hands: it still seems somewhat odd that he didn’t put those (empty tomb) words in at least Peter’s mouth, if not to further underscore the veracity of the resurrection, then at least to make Peter look less stupefied by the discovery (with some benefit of hindsight post Jesus’s appearance). Luke also demonstrates the similar behavioral pattern that he’s willing to change Mark’s predecessor account when he (L) deems it appropriate for his purposes.
Admittedly, this line of thinking may be reading the text through too much of a modern lens or doing too much Monday morning quarterbacking. Curious if it does not also strike you as a bit incongruent? And again, thanks for your patience with this lay person…
Thanks a ton!
Yes, I’d say Luke did edit the speeches. But he simply saw no need to insert the empty tomb, I would guess, since he’d already covered that in considerable detail and he knew as well as all other early Christians that the “proof” of the resurrection involved the appearances of Jesus, not the empty tomb (the tomb just creates wonder and speculation; it never generates faith in the NT)
Many thanks!
Is there any reason to think that any of the speeches in the Gospel narratives are close to what was historically said given the length of time between events and the writing, as well as the nature of oral traditions? My meaning is not that it is all made up by the author, but that even with good intentions they would be severely impaired from giving an exact accounting of a speech or is there reason to think some speeches are closer to verbatim?
I doubt if they longer speeches could possibly be historically accurate, thoguh Jesus certainly said some/many of the sayings found in the speeches. I deal with all this in my book Jesus Before the Gospels.