Acts of the Apostles Archives - Page 4 of 4

Reader’s Mailbag on Virgin Birth: 10/29/15

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my queries about how we could make the Blog better. I received some very good ideas, and one in particular that I want to implement, starting with this post. That involves a weekly Reader’s Mailbag. I get a lot of questions each week, and usually can only devote an occasional post to them. Otherwise, all I can do is give a one-sentence or so response in my Comments. But the idea that several people suggested was: why not have a feature where, in a short directed response, I address interesting questions people raise? I could do this every week. The comments would not be as long as a full post, let alone a thread, but much fuller than I can make in my Comments section. I think it’s a great idea. So I’m gonna try it. My idea is that the questions should be short and to the point. They can be on any topic involving the New Testament, the history of early Christainity, or any related [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:12-04:00October 29th, 2015|Acts of the Apostles, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Death of Judas in the NT

In this and the next couple of posts I will be talking about what we know was in Papias’s five-volume book, now lost, Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. As I previously indicated, the only reason we have any clue about the matter is that later church fathers quoted a few passages from the book. Would they had quoted more! But what they give us is very tantalizing. The first passage I want to discuss involves the death of Judas Iscariot. To make sense of what Papias has to say, I need to provide some context. Many people don’t realize that Judas’s death, after he betrayed Jesus, is not mentioned in three of our Gospels: Mark, Luke, and John. It is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, however, and just as important, in the book of Acts, written by the same author who produced the Gospel of Luke (so, well, let’s call him Luke). What is striking is that the descriptions of Judas’s death in these two accounts are at odds with one, even [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 2nd, 2015|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels|

Summing Up: Was Luke Luke?

I started this thread over a week ago on the authorship of the Third Gospel, 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 this Gospel was 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 beloved physician. Therefore this person was likely the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 6th, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Accuracy of Acts: Part 2

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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 5th, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Historical Accuracy of Acts

I am circling around the ultimate question of this thread, whether Luke the gentile physician, the companion of Paul, wrote the Gospel of Luke. The first step 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 someone else – wrote the books of Luke and Acts. The argument that one did 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 that Acts (and Luke) were decidedly NOT written by someone who was familiar, personally with Paul. Here I’ll reproduce my comments on it from my college-level textbook, more accessible than some of my other posts recently. The basic point I’m making at this stage is that the book of Acts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 4th, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Wrote Luke and Acts?

In this thread I have been discussing whether Luke, the gentile physician, the traveling companion of Paul, wrote the Third Gospel. 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 author was Paul’s traveling companion. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 3rd, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Exaltation Christology in the Speeches in Acts

In this post I return to the topic of early Christology. To review what I’ve covered so far: I have indicated that early on in the Christian tradition there were two types of Christology, one of which I have called “exaltation” Christology (I have not mentioned yet the other type); this is sometimes called a “low” Christology or a Christology from below. This is the view that Jesus started out as a human, nothing more, but came to be exalted by God to become his Son, the Lord. This view, I have argued, can be found in fragments of creeds and confessions that were later quoted by authors of the New Testament, so that in terms of raw chronology, they were formulated well *before* the New Testament was written. And I isolated Romans 1:3-4 as just one such case, where Paul quotes a confession that indicates that whereas Jesus was the human messiah from David’s seed, he became the “son of God in power” at the resurrection. This is not exactly Paul’s own view, but [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:24-04:00February 11th, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Early Christian Doctrine|

Paul in Acts: Part 3

I mentioned in my previous posts that there are discrepancies between Paul’s letters and the book of Acts in both major and minor ways, and in my last post I dealt with some differences that appear when one looks closely at the details (the issue I addressed: what does Paul do immediately upon his conversion). There are many instances like that throughout Acts: if you compare what Paul has to say with what Acts has to say, on the same topic or about the same event, you will find differences, and often these differences matter a lot to the overall narrative. There are also of differences that emerge from the overall portrayal of Paul and his Christian mission. In this post I’ll deal with one example, and in a future post with one other. For this Post: Paul and the Other Apostles. One big area of interest is Paul’s relationship with those were apostles before him. This consists principally of the former disciples of Jesus (Peter, John, etc.) and Jesus’ own brother James, who was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:09-04:00July 24th, 2012|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Paul in Acts: Part 2

My post on the portrayal of Paul in Acts generated a considerable response, so I thought maybe I should say a few more words about this issue in another post – or in a series of posts, if need be. Some responses have suggested that maybe “Luke” (we don’t know the author’s real name, so we may as well call him this) had sources of information available to him for the book of Acts, just as he clearly did for the Gospel (e.g., the Gospels of Mark and Q). I think this is absolutely right, he almost certainly did have sources. Otherwise he would have had to make everything up himself, and I don’t think there’s any way that happened. There are too many close parallels to what Paul has to say about himself -- even though on closer look, in almost all these parallels there are striking discrepancies; so Luke had sources, but the sources were not completely reliable; and he altered them as he saw fit. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:09-04:00July 22nd, 2012|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Paul the Persecutor and the Historical Jesus

QUESTION: You mention in your book "Did Jesus Exist?" that Paul started his persecution of Christians in the early 30s. If he was tasked with hunting down Christians by the Sanhedrin he must have had a fairly high position among the Sanhedrin (I don't mean that he was a member). How come he didn't witness the crucifixion or why didn’t he in some way have firsthand knowledge of the events in immediate connection with the crucifixion? RESPONSE: Ah, an interesting question. So, it’s part of a much, much larger issue. Let me explain. We have two sources of information about the life of Paul: his own letters and the book of Acts. There are lots of reasons for thinking that the book of Acts is not always reliable when it comes to describing events in Paul’s life. I may devote an entire post – or maybe even a series of posts – to the question. For now, suffice it to say that whenever you can compare what Paul has to say about his own [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:09-04:00July 20th, 2012|Acts of the Apostles, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

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