Everyone knows that the narrative voice in Acts switches abruptly from third to first person plural (we) suggesting the author is present, making that portion of the story an “eyewitness account”. Numerous scholars doubt the author was present. Yet I have not heard one plausible reason for the author to switch so abruptly as he does.
What explanations have you come across?
One perhaps plausible explanation is knitting together two narratives, one that tells the tale of the trips and the other episodic about evangelizing in the different locations. If the episodic narrative goes into more detail, it might be the preferred narrative for the parts of the tale that it covers.
Then if the tale of the trips were more explicitly a “modest” forgery written as if it was Luke narrating it, then back and forth between the “I” sections when Luke is present and the consistently 3rd person episodic narrative could make the kind of “flickering” “I” passages.
How plausible that is may depend in part on how late canonical Luke / Acts is dated. If it’s dated the 130’s-140’s, there’s obviously more opportunity for multiple journeys of Paul narratives to have been composed.
BruceRMcF said
One perhaps plausible explanation is knitting together two narratives, one that tells the tale of the trips and the other episodic about evangelizing in the different locations. If the episodic narrative goes into more detail, it might be the preferred narrative for the parts of the tale that it covers.
Then if the tale of the trips were more explicitly a “modest” forgery written as if it was Luke narrating it, then back and forth between the “I” sections when Luke is present and the consistently 3rd person episodic narrative could make the kind of “flickering” “I” passages.
How plausible that is may depend in part on how late canonical Luke / Acts is dated. If it’s dated the 130’s-140’s, there’s obviously more opportunity for multiple journeys of Paul narratives to have been composed.
I am unconvinced by yours or any of the above explanations.
Acts made it into the canon; it is doubtful it made it into the canon because christian readers said, “at some point in the narrative we have a first person perspective and therefore an eyewitness”.
If there were a first person perspective from start to finish, I could well accept that the perspective was apologetic, that is, forced and unhistorical.
I want an explanation as to why, SUDDENLY, and several chapters in, the writer switches to first person.
Any explanation of “lending support” is bogus–he is writing all this prior to publishing. He could have written “we/I” at any point. Hell, he could have said he was one of the apostles at pentecost. The whole damn thing could be written in first person.
Give me a PLAUSIBLE reason for an author to switch abruptly from third to first person plural.
Robert said
It is an implicit claim to anonymous but quasi-authoritative authorship by an associate of Paul. I think Bart terms it to be something like non-pseudepigraphical forgery. In layperson terms, he’s falsely posing as an eyewitness to some of these events. I see more of a pattern in the jumps into and out of first-person narrative, situating the supposed author in a specific geographic region and time-frame.
that does not explain why the author switches at the point he does. Luke remains a third person narrative; half of acts remains a third person narrative. Why the switch?
(better yet, why don’t more scholars answer, “we.don’t.know.” because it is obvious, they don’t know. It is a mystery.
…that does not explain why the author switches at the point he does. Luke remains a third person narrative; half of acts remains a third person narrative. Why the switch?
Well “why” is not a question that can be answered to anyone’s satisfaction. However if you read ancient literature you’ll see this is a common literary technique to establish verisimilitude in a narrative. To the ancients our modern categories of history and fiction were much less rigid, if not totally non-existent.
brown.connor4 said
BruceRMcF said
One perhaps plausible explanation is knitting together two narratives, one that tells the tale of the trips and the other episodic about evangelizing in the different locations. If the episodic narrative goes into more detail, it might be the preferred narrative for the parts of the tale that it covers.
Then if the tale of the trips were more explicitly a “modest” forgery written as if it was Luke narrating it, then back and forth between the “I” sections when Luke is present and the consistently 3rd person episodic narrative could make the kind of “flickering” “I” passages.
How plausible that is may depend in part on how late canonical Luke / Acts is dated. If it’s dated the 130’s-140’s, there’s obviously more opportunity for multiple journeys of Paul narratives to have been composed.
I am unconvinced by yours or any of the above explanations.
Acts made it into the canon; it is doubtful it made it into the canon because christian readers said, “at some point in the narrative we have a first person perspective and therefore an eyewitness”.
If there were a first person perspective from start to finish, I could well accept that the perspective was apologetic, that is, forced and unhistorical.
I want an explanation as to why, SUDDENLY, and several chapters in, the writer switches to first person.
Any explanation of “lending support” is bogus–he is writing all this prior to publishing. He could have written “we/I” at any point. Hell, he could have said he was one of the apostles at pentecost. The whole damn thing could be written in first person.
Give me a PLAUSIBLE reason for an author to switch abruptly from third to first person plural.
I mean, it would be a false dichotomy fallacy to either have a compelling explanation or a rejected explanation: given the scanty early evidence available, quite a lot of explanations will be plausible explanations that are neither compelling nor falsifiable, and different people considering the question can justifiably disagree on how much weight to place on it.
I gave you one plausible argument — not claiming it to be definitive — and you just decided not to respond to it: the author of canonical Luke compiled it from a variety of sources and one of his sources had the first person in whole or in part.
Then “suddenly and several chapters in” is no longer something exceptional that need to be accounted for, it’s either where he starts relying on the source where it appears or where one of the sources he is relying on switches to it.
I mean, canonical Luke claims to have been compiled from multiple sources, so have you provided strong contrary evidence against that claim somewhere in this discussion?
As far as “it is doubtful it made it into the canon because …”, since the arguments about canonization happened several centuries later when the population of Christians was larger and the copying of texts used by various Christian communities more institutionalized and less ad hoc than would have been the case in the 1st century CE, we of course have a lot more contemporaneous material from the time of that debate. While we surely can presume that many of the advocates for the Acts of the Apostles as the primary church history to rely upon (over the other available “Acts”) pushed for it simply because their community had a tradition of relying upon it, we do know that it was indeed argued that the first person statements in Acts were part of the evidence in support of Apostolic Authority due to Acts being written by Luke the traveling companion of the Apostle Paul.
Of course, even a later dating of Acts puts it within or at the end of the first half of the second century, so its composition is hundreds of years before the canonization debates, so how the passages were used in the canonization debates doesn’t have any direct salience for the editorial decisions made by the compiler of canonical Luke.
Stephen said
…that does not explain why the author switches at the point he does. Luke remains a third person narrative; half of acts remains a third person narrative. Why the switch?
Well “why” is not a question that can be answered to anyone’s satisfaction. However if you read ancient literature you’ll see this is a common literary technique to establish verisimilitude in a narrative. To the ancients our modern categories of history and fiction were much less rigid, if not totally non-existent.
Now that is a promising answer!
Can you please provide some examples where we have abrupt and unexplained transitions?
Robert said
… While some have have argued that this represents a somewhat chaotic compilation of separate traditions that Luke had available to him, I have not yet discounted the possibility that there may be a more coherent authorial implied presence of Luke for almost all of the second half of Acts, from Troas to Rome. …
While I hope it is clear above that I was presenting an explanation as a plausible one rather than as my preferred one*, but I’ll also note that if one tends to be persuaded by the arguments for a later composition of Acts within it’s window of possible composition, as I am, that increases the plausibility of compilation from sources with different grammatical choices …
… since the later in the window it is composed, the broader the range of alternative sources it will have available to draw from.
_______________
{* I may not have the tools to decide which is my preferred one, since I’d want a stylometric analysis of the “travelogue” passages versus the “location witness” passages as part of the support for the “chaotic compilation” thesis as an answer on that specific point, and since I don’t read Greek, I could well be unable to assess the quality of the data analysis.
I have similarly seen a claim regarding travel interludes between scenes sometimes being written in a different style in other contexts, which I would surely not have enough Greek to judge whether that is a valid point or apologetic wishful thinking.}
Can you please provide some examples where we have abrupt and unexplained transitions?
There must be Higher Forces at work. I am currently posting in a thread devoted to the Book of Enoch which provides exactly such examples. The Book of the Watchers begins with narratives that are in the ‘third person’ but when Enoch is recording his heavenly visions the point of view changes to his ‘first person’. I’m currently discussing the Book of Parables. In this text we have just the opposite situation as that of Acts. In the latter you have long stretches of third person narrative interrupted by first person accounts. In the BoP you have long stretches of first person accounts interrupted by third person narratives.
In my early comments in the Book of Enoch thread I noted that the composition sometimes reads like a modernist or postmodernist literary experiment with abrupt shifts in person, time-frame and perspective that would make James Joyce proud.
I also mentioned another literary technique on display in the Book of the Watchers that I’ve not read anyone else comment upon. You first have a synopsis of the coming action. Then a retelling of the story but focusing in more detail on a specific aspect of the story. Then a repetition of the story focusing even more deeply on another aspect of the story. I likened it to throwing a rock into a pool then watching the ever expanding ripples in the water. An interesting technique.
I think the basic point though is that the ancients lacked our concern with categories and genre boundary violations. This is not a value judgement. I don’t want a historian to just make stuff up. But it highlights the problem of projecting our own views onto the ancients without understanding they didn’t think the way we do.
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