Acts of the Apostles Archives - Page 2 of 4 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Discovering the book of acts and the apostles.

Hard Evidence that the Book of Acts was Written by an Eyewitness?

Here is an interesting question I received about a Christian apologist’s argument that the book of Acts must be written by an eyewitness, a view that I think is completely wrong. It’s one of those arguments that has no bearing on anything when you actually think about it, but until someone points out the flaw, it’s hard to see it -- or I assume so since so many people get taken in by this sort of thing. It comes in a book called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, a title which, I have to say, is a clear indication of how well informed the book will be. But that would be an entire post of its own. Here I’ll focus on the question raised: QUESTION: One thing about the reliability of the book of Acts I’m constantly encountering when researching popular apologetics is Frank Turek’s argument in his book I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist. In it he quotes a Colin Hemer, who apparently chronicled the last 16 [...]

BDEhrman2020-10-23T23:34:48-04:00October 4th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

So: Was Luke Luke?

I started this thread over a week ago on the authorship of the Third Gospe and its accompanying volume, the book of Acts, and would like now simply to bring some closure to it before moving on to other things. To sum up: there is a kind of interpretive logic that can lead one to think that the books were written by Luke, a Gentile physician who was a traveling companion of Paul. This is what I myself thought for years, and it was based on this logic, that: The author of Acts also wrote the Gospel of Luke That the author of Acts, and therefore of Luke, must have been a traveling companion of Paul (since he speaks of himself in the first person on four occasions) That this author was probably a Gentile because he was so concerned with the spread of the Christian movement among Gentiles (the whole point of the book of Acts) Paul himself speaks of a Gentile among his traveling companions in Colossians 4, naming him as Luke the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:01:01-04:00January 19th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters|

Does the Book of Acts Accurately Record Paul’s Teachings?

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. *************************************************************** 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:02:08-04:00January 17th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters|

Did Any Companion of Paul Write Luke and Acts?

I am circling around the ultimate question of this thread, whether Luke, the companion of Paul, wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. A big reason this matters: if Paul's companion, "the gentile physician," wrote Acts, he had first-hand knowledge of Paul's life and teachings. That would certainly increase the likelihood that he was giving an authoritative account! The first step to answering the question -- was it written by Luke? -- was to show that Paul never *mentions* Luke as a gentile physician in any of his undisputed letters. The second step involves asking the question of whether *any* companion of Paul – whether Luke or anyone else – wrote these books. The argument that a companion of Paul did write the books is based on the “we-passages” that I mentioned in the previous post. Now I want to advance the argument by saying that I don’t think the we-passages indicate that a companion of Paul wrote Acts (or, by inference, Luke) because I think there is good counter-evidence to indicate [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:07:35-04:00January 16th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters|

Does the Author of Acts Identify Himself?

In this thread I have been discussing whether Luke, the gentile physician, the traveling companion of Paul, wrote the Third Gospel and the book of Acts. The first point I’ve made, over a couple of posts, is that the idea that Paul *had* a gentile physician as a traveling companion is dubious. That notion is derived from the mention of Luke in the book of Colossians, but Paul almost certainly did not *write* Colossians. Paul does mention a companion named Luke in the book of Philemon, but he does not say anything at all about him (not, for example, that he was a gentile or that he was a physician). Still, one could argue – and many have! – that whatever his name, it was a companion of Paul who wrote the books of Luke and Acts. The main argument in favor of that thesis – with which I heartily disagree – is the presence of the “we-passages” in Acts, that I mentioned previously. My view is that these passages do NOT demonstrate that the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:07:17-04:00January 13th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels|

Problems with Thinking That Luke Wrote Luke (and Acts)

I continue now with my discussion of whether one of Paul's traveling companions wrote the account of his life in the book of Acts, and thus, by association, the Gospel of Luke. It turns out to be a really sticky problem -- one of those that can't be solved simply by looking at a couple of verses and applying some basic logic. In my previous post I gave the logic that is typically adduced for thinking that the Luke was probably written by Luke, the gentile physician who was a companion of Paul for part of his missionary journeys. The short story, in sum: the author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts; the book of Acts in four places talks about what “we” (companions with Paul) were doing; both books were therefore written by one of Paul’s companions; Acts and Luke appear to have a gentile bias; only three of Paul’s companions were known to be gentiles (Colossians 4:7-14); Luke there is a gentile physician; Luke-Acts appears to have an enhanced interest in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:06:51-04:00January 8th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Did “Luke” Really Write Luke? And the book of Acts?

Here is an important question that I received recently, which I’ve addressed long ago on the blog, before living memory. Time to address it again! The basic issue: isn’t there good evidence that the book of Acts, which describes the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world, especially through the missionary efforts of Paul, was written by an eyewitness, an actual traveling companion of Paul who was with him for a number of his endeavors? (Whoever the author is, he wrote the Gospel of Luke as well – so he wrote more words than any other author of the New Testament! Even more than Paul.) Here’s the question and the beginning of a response, the totality of which will take two or three posts. In this beginning, I explain how the tradition started that the author was someone named “Luke” the traveling companion of Paul. ******************************************************************************* QUESTION: Acts mentions Luke as a traveling companion with Paul. And in areas where it appears the Luke joined Paul, Acts point-of-view changes from “he” to “we”, and then [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:06:16-04:00January 5th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Reader’s Questions|

The Life and Message of Paul

I return now to the next portion of a longer post I’m composing on the New Testament, a general survey in what is now looking like 10,000 words or so? My most recent segment was an explanation of what we can know about the life and teaching of Jesus: https://ehrmanblog.org/who-was-jesus/ This one is a corollary: what we can know about the life and message of Paul. Next to Jesus himself, Paul was the most important figure in the entire history of Christianity. Nearly half the books of the New Testament claim to be written by him; one other book (Acts) is largely written about him. More than anyone else we know of, he was responsible for the spread of Christianity through much of the Mediterranean world. And perhaps most important, he significantly developed the theological understanding of the significance of Jesus. For Paul, far less important than Jesus’ earthly life and teaching were his death and resurrection, which were God’s means of salvation to the world. It may be too extreme to say that Paul [...]

BDEhrman2022-03-03T14:37:28-05:00December 28th, 2019|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters|

What Is the New Testament? A Broad Overview

With some very sage outside advice, I have decided to add a new feature to the blog. Once or twice a week (at least that’s the *plan*) I will create a kind of “general introduction” post, dealing with some broad and basic matter connected with the New Testament, the Historical Jesus, the apostle Paul, the role of women in the church, persecution and martyrdom, heresy and orthodoxy, the development of theology, the Christianization of the empire, etc. etc. Broad overviews, of the BIG matters, at the introductory level. The idea is to make, say, three or four related posts on each issue, and then, when they’re completed, edit them all together into one massive post (say 4000-5000) words, and have that post well indexed with lots of links to other posts on the blog. That way, we can maximize its wide availability throughout the internet. When someone googles “What Is The New Testament,” they will find this particular post; the post will link to other posts on the blog. People go to these other posts. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:26:10-04:00November 5th, 2019|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Could Peter Have “Written” 1 and 2 Peter Some Other Way?

Here is the last of my three posts digging down deeper into the question of whether Peter would have, or could have, written the books we now call 1 and 2 Peter, composed in highly literate Greek by someone skilled in Greek composition. ****************************** It should come as no surprise that Peter could not write Greek (or Aramaic, for that matter). As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi , a Greek word that literally means “unlettered,” that is, “illiterate.” And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for him not writing 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn’t write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their [...]

BDEhrman2022-12-01T13:25:31-05:00November 30th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Miraculous Conversions in the Book of Acts

This new box in my New Testament Introduction deals with one of the fascinating and best documented phenomena from early Christianity -- that the earliest followers of Jesus were believed to be able to do great miracles, leading to the conversion of outsiders to the new faith. This notion is recorded already in our earliest sources. Here is what I say about it from the book of Acts, our first account of the spread of Christianity. ************************************************************************ Another Glimpse Into the Past Box. 17.6 Miraculous Conversions in Acts We have seen that the earliest Christians spread their faith by telling tales of the great miracles done by both Jesus and his apostles (see Box xxx). We find such miracle stories in our earliest account of the first conversions to the Christian faith, in the book of Acts. The first episode occurs already in chapter 2, where the Holy Spirit comes upon the apostles on the Day of Pentecost, less than two months after Jesus’ death. When the Jewish crowds hear the Spirit-filled apostles preach in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:11:14-04:00November 2nd, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Are Contradictions the Real Point?

In my last couple of posts I’ve talked about internal contradictions in Luke-Acts and John. I’ve had several readers tell me that they already “got the point” and so they don’t see any reason for me to keep harping on it: there are contradictions so you don’t think the Bible is inerrant. OK OK OK, got the point! As it turns out, that’s not really the point. To be sure, it is *one* of the points. But it’s not actually the main one. If I had to explain fully why it matters that there are internal contradictions in an ancient document created by the use of disparate sources (the case with both Luke-Acts and John) I would do so under three distinct rubrics, each rather complex. Religious implications. Yes, if there are contradictions in a book found in the Bible that means that the common fundamentalist understanding that the text is inerrant is almost certainly wrong. I have tried to word that statement carefully. I’ve noticed that often in these kinds of discussions, people don’t [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-16T12:55:22-04:00June 27th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Does Luke Appear to Contradict Himself?

A question has come from a reader, based on my recent post dealing with the apparent contradiction between Luke and Acts on the timing of Jesus’ ascension. Do contradictions often result from authors editing several documents together and inserting them side by side in their work? If different source documents have different views, that would create contradictions in the final product which embodies their amalgamation, no? Here’s the question. QUESTION: I continue to be struck by how often Bible authors, since there were no copyright laws, seem to edit two or more different versions of an event together as seen in the Documentary Hypothesis. Is it likely that Luke and Acts had such an editor editing two or more manuscripts together thus producing contradictions? I would also like to know if this kind of editing together of two or more manuscripts was a common way of writing ancient books. RESPONSE: The answer is Yes and Yes. This apparently did happen with the book of Acts and it is indeed a phenomenon we can [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:13:36-04:00June 25th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Reader’s Questions|

Does the Book of Acts Portray the Teachings of Paul Accurately?

This is my second post on the portrayal of Paul in the book of Acts. In the one previous I tried to show, briefly, how the account of Paul’s activities in Luke’s narrative do not gel well with what he says in his own letters. Here I address the question that was originally raised: his teachings. Do the things Paul says in Acts coincide with what he himself indicates? I won’t give a detailed discuss, but just look at one key passage. Again, this is drawn from my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ************************************************************** Paul’s Teaching. 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 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 (chap. 17). In this speech, Paul explains that the Jewish God is in fact the God of all, pagan and [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-07T11:23:31-04:00June 18th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Paul on Trial for the Resurrection

In previous posts I have discussed the different Jewish sects that we know about from the first century, at the dawn of Christianity (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Fourth Philosophy) in order to show that (a) there were different understandings of the afterlife among them, but (b) there was a belief in a future resurrection of the dead attested in at least two of the groups: the Pharisees and Essenes. We don’t know what the eschatological views of the Fourth Philosophy were; possibly different Jews who wanted the violent overthrow of the Roman overlords had various expectations. We really don’t know. One reason we don’t know is that we don’t have any writings from any of them. On other hand, that’s true of the Sadducees and the Pharisees as well. That may seem weird, but it’s the case. We have no clear and certain writing from any Sadducee in all of antiquity that explains what it is they thought and believed. Even more strange, from all of antiquity up until the time of the Jewish war, leading [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:13:03-04:00September 26th, 2017|Acts of the Apostles, Early Judaism, Public Forum|

Is Luke’s Christology Consistent? A Blast from the Past

I have had several comments about the point I made that in Acts 2 Luke indicates that it was at the resurrection that God "made" Jesus both "Lord" and "Christ." Uh, does that fit in with Luke's views otherwise? Wasn't he *born* the Lord and the Messiah, for example? Then how could it be at his resurrection? I dealt with the question on the blog a couple of years ago, and after some digging, found the post. When I discussed the issue before it was because at Jesus' *baptism" Luke appears to indicate that it was then that God made him his Son. So how does all that tie together? Or does it? Here is that post again: ************************************************************************** Does Luke present a (strictly speaking) consistent view of Jesus throughout his two-volume work of Luke-Acts? I raise the question because of the textual problem surrounding the voice at Jesus’ baptism. I have been arguing that it is likely that the voice did NOT say “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-16T12:57:34-04:00September 25th, 2017|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Did Luke Have a Doctrine of the Atonement? Mailbag September 24, 2017

For this week’s readers’ mailbag I have chosen a question about my claim that the author of Luke-Acts, unlike other writers of the New Testament, does not have a doctrine of the atonement – that Jesus’ death brought about a restored relationship with God (for Luke, it was the *resurrection* that mattered, not the crucifixion). The questioner sets up the question with an important observation. I suspect my answer will not be what he expected. QUESTION: I have spent a lot of time looking in the gospels for teachings on the atonement. I could only find 5 passages (really more like 2, because they are parallel). Mt 20:28/Mk 10:45 Jesus life as a ransom for many Luke leaves this part out of the story Mt 26:28--this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. Mk 14:24--This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Lk 22:20 This cup that is poured out for you is the new [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-07T11:28:59-04:00September 24th, 2017|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Does the Book of Acts Underplay the Significance of Jesus’ Death?

One of the things that I have found most interesting about doing the blog over these, lo, past five and a half years is that when I decide to write a post on something, I often realize that I need to provide some background that involves something else that, on the surface, may seem unrelated, but that is crucial for understanding the point I want to make. Which leads me to a different topic and then to another, and so on. I suppose that’s why I still haven’t run out of things to say (yet); I *thought* I’d have nothing to write about after six months. But it hasn’t happened yet. I’ve been talking about the sects within Judaism because I wanted to make a simple point about how widespread the views of “resurrection” were at the time of Jesus and Paul. This morning it occurred to me that it would be helpful to illustrate the conflict between Sadducees and Pharisees over the issue, as exemplified in a famous passage in Acts 22 where the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:12:11-04:00September 22nd, 2017|Acts of the Apostles, Early Christian Doctrine, Public Forum|

James the Brother of the Lord

In my previous post explaining why I think the Mythicist position – that there never was a man Jesus – is simply untenable, I pointed out that among the things Paul says, none is more specifically relevant than the fact that he indicates that he was personally acquainted with Jesus’ own brother James (along with Jesus’ disciples Peter and John). When Paul mentions knowing and spending time with James, it is decidedly not in order to prove that he knew him. The comments he makes are completely incidental, explaining to people who already know about James how it is that he, Paul, met with him on a couple of important occasions. One of these occasions was just three years after Paul converted – so in about 36 CE. At that time Paul paid a visit to Jerusalem to meet with Cephas and James, the leaders of the church there. Paul is reluctant to mention that he had gone there, since the entire point he is making is that he did not learn anything of relevance [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T21:29:42-04:00November 4th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Death of Paul in Acts and Unrelated Topics: Readers’ Mailbag April 29, 2016

I will be dealing with three very different questions this week in my Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: why does the book of Acts not narrate the deaths of Peter and Paul; what is the difference between the Day of Atonement and the Passover; and how I dealt with discrepancies and contradictions when I was an evangelical Christian in college. If you have any questions for me to address, pass them along! QUESTION: If Acts was written after 75 CE why do you think Acts doesn’t contain details of Paul’s and Peter’s deaths? RESPONSE: I get asked this question a lot – maybe five times this month! I’m not sure why. But it’s something people seem to be interested in, and in part that’s because some conservative evangelical scholars want to claim that Acts was written before Paul’s death in around 64 CE (since otherwise the author would “surely” have narrated his death), and that therefore Luke’s Gospel (written by the same author) was written before then, so that both Luke and Acts are nearer [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:45:35-04:00April 29th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Early Judaism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Previous 123 4 Next