(12 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)
Loading...The debate over the historical accuracy of the book of Acts is important, in no small measure because – as I have pointed out already – it provides us our one and only narrative of what was happening among the followers of Jesus in the years immediately after his death. This is the key, formative period in the formation of Christianity. How did it start as a religion? Acts is our only surviving historical account. But is it an accurate history?
The first thing to stress is that Acts – like all histories – is
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“The other apostles figure in on the margins and usually only as a group. Most of them are not even named, let alone discussed. What were Bartholomew or Jude or Matthew doing during these early years? We have no clue. They are not discussed. ”
Have scholars considered that these other apostles may not have been historical? That they were mentioned in the gospels just for the purpose of having 12 apostles to match 12 tribes?
It’s possible that the names are not historical, but it seems pretty likely that Jesus had twelve disciples (it’s attested all over the place) and most of the names in most of the references to them are the same. But Bartholomew and Matthew might be a question mark.
Hi, Bart!
1.Why did Jesus say that faith has saved people and calls others some people with little faith. Faith in what?
2. Why would Jesus heal someone in Mark chapter 1 and say to not tell anyone about the miracle?
He does this also about him being Messiah:
Mark 8:30 NIV
[30] Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.
1. In the Gospels it appears to be “faith that God’s power is working through Jesus” — that is, faith that Jesus is God’s representative on earth; it’s important to recognize, though, that in the Synoptics “faith” is what leads to Jesus doing miracles for people, whereas in John the miracles that Jesus does for people is what leads to their faith. Big dif! 2. It’s a theme throughout Mark (and principally Mark; certailly not in John and quite muted in the other Gopsels), that Jesus kept (or sometimes tried to keep) his identify secret during his ministry, silencing those who acknowledge him, telling those who recognize him in any way not to reveal his identity, telling parable precisely SO THAT no one will understand (4:10-11), and so forth, so that in fact no one DOES recognize him until the very end. Look up messianic secret on the blog and you’ll see posts disussing this.
Not only are most of the 12 ignored but other people start preaching the message, like Philip and Stephen and Paul. I suspect most of the 12 fell away after Jesus’s crucifixion. What do you think?
I wouldn’t be surprised and oh boy I wish I knew.
“Acts is principally about the astounding spread of Christianity to all people of the world.” Not really. Acts says almost nothing about how Christianity arrived in Rome or Alexandria, for examples. Nor does it discuss developments in Palestine after Paul left Jerusalem in Acts 15. Acts was surely written for the believers in the Aegean region. It describes the history of how the faith grew and spread from Jews to Gentiles, from Jerusalem to Antioch to Galatia to the Aegean, and it brings the Aegean believers up to date on Paul’s life after he left them.
Thank you Dr Ehrman. Yes, lots of food for thought here. I guess we do have snatches of some history in Paul’s undisputed letters and the fact that Christianity did spread throughout the Mediterranean (to the point where independent Pagan sources began to notice it) means that some ‘information’ within Acts must have some basis in reality. But it seems to have been driven primarily by theological and thematic concerns.
(Incidentally, I’m currently reading your book – Armageddon – and it’s brilliant 🙂.)
On point #4, isn’t is also true that there is also some “conflict” among the apostles? Example being Paul and Barnabas parting ways in chapter 15 and the Jerusalem church questioning Peter in chapter 11.
Oh yes, to be a good story there has to be conflict! Check out the opening of Acts 5! But almost always the conflicts are readily resolved and thing move on. You’re right, though: 15:36-40 is a curiosity! The author doesn’t make much of it, so much so that most readers don’t notie that there’s a sharp controversy, and it’s very hard to see what it was all about! (It’s referring to 13:13, but that too is a mystery)
I’m glad you wrote about this today. I have always thought about how the angel freeing the apostles from jail in Acts 12) is seen as commonplace for the Book of Acts, but John 5:4 (an interpolation that mentions angelic intervention) feels very out-of-place in John’s narrative!
Hi Bart,
I’m reading your book, Jesus Before the Gospels (very interesting, BTW). When you address Papias and his reported sayings gospel of Matthew, I immediately started wondering if that may have been Q. So, naturally, I googled it and BANG! tons of opinions about that, especially from McDonald.
Do you think the document Papias was calling Mathhew may have been Q?
It’d say it’s impossible to know. Q as we know it was not composed in Hebrew, but in Greek; and nothing would connect it with the tax-collector Matthew. But who knows? All we have is the reconstructed Greek Q and Papias’s one-liner….
Tweet authour is matthew harkle
Quote:
The three main passion predictions in Mark (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34) are basically the “amplified version” of the same tradition we see reflected, in a less developed form, in the three main passion predictions of John (Jn 3:14; 8:28; 12:32-34).
My hot take, based on Brown: if Jesus said anything like the 3 predictions in Mk and Jn, it was likely a more general expectation that the Son of Man would be lifted/raised up, & early Xians found a double meaning in the language of exaltation that helped them reduce dissonance.
End quote
My question :
Does brown believe that the historical jesus thouggt that he would be raised alive, but early christian changed it to mean raised from death to reduce dissonace?
See how the anonymous authour of john needs to explain what jesus meant in the last verse quoted from john in the quote above?
Are you referring to Raymond Brown? I don’t know off hand. I suspect he thought that Jesus genuinely expected to be executed but that the Gospel stories expanded this expectation significantly and increasingly over time. I don’t remember if he thought the historical Jesus predicted his own resurrection.
Bart, how do I delete my account from your blog?
Click on Help and write a note to Support.
Do you think the Jerusalem Church was Torah observant?
Yes.
In jr high school I thought: since the Jerusalem church was not following God. Why get upset & start your own church. As the loud X-ianity in USA has done.
Not love your neighbor. Don’t be humble. Don’t even try to follow Jesus, St Paul or the Commandments.
BUT the point is Jesus DIDN’T spend enough time on Earth to start a new religion & then St Paul & all the other Spouters.
Where are the Original folks that walked & lived with Jesus voices?
We follow European religion, not Palestinian!
Finally. Perhaps, G CAMPBELL MORGAN: called the Gospels & the Acts of the Apostles the Pentateuch of the NT
I just finished reading ‘James, The Brother of Jesus’ by Robert Eisenman, and it furnished so much information over and above what I have previously learned through seminary and self-education, that I am still mentally processing it. I probably would’ve rejected it early on if it had not been for the command the author had of the documents he compares with one another to support his assertions. In short, Dr. Eisenman asserts that the Dead Sea Scrolls are likely the work of an early Christian community, either founded by, or directly descended from, James. He also suggests that the Pseudo-Clementines are likely more accurate historically than the book of Acts. Here is a short list of some of the most shocking assertions:
1. The Acts stories of Mathias as well as Steven were actually about James, Jesus’ brother.
2. Paul was a close friend or actual member of the Herodian family.
3. The death of James was the catalyst for the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD.
4. The James and Peter of the Gospels are likely derived from Jesus’ brothers James and Simon.
5. The Candace was actually Queen Helen, wife of King Agbarus.
I would like to hear your thoughts on Eisenman’s work in this book.
I’m afraid it is not taken seriously by the vast majority of historians of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the New Testament (off hand, among the hundreds of such I know personally and thousands I know of, I can’t think of any!). I know it can all sound convincing…
Hi Dr. Bart,
Long before I joined the blog–several years ago I recall–I e-mailed you personally about Dr. Eisenman. You dismissed him as having little or no authority. Yet, a scholar you respect Dr. Robert Price, regularly quotes Eisenman to support his arguments as does (to a lesser extent) Dr. James Tabor.
Eisenman was a certified PhD in ancient languages and tenured at a major California university (I forget which one.)
Why do these people seem to respect Eisenman but you seem not to?
I think you would be very hard pressed to find much support for Eisenman’s views among the thousands of biblical scholars in the country. I didn’t know that James Tabor accepted some of his views? I’d be interested in knowing which ones. Robert Price has all sorts of views that are far on the margins of crticial scholarship (some of them ones I don’t personally know of anyone who agrees with). But everyone surely has *someone* who agrees with them on something or another. I know most (or at least many) of the bona fide experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and don’t know of any of them who think Eisenman is right in his views. If you know of one, let me know! (Think of names like James Vanderkam, Armin Lange, J. Fitzmyer, Peter flint, L. Schieffman, etc. etc. )
I assume the other commentor is talking about a video James Tabor has on his youtube channel sharing an interview with Robert Eisenman on the DSS and speaks highly of him, recommending people to read his books on the topic (specifically The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians, 1996).
Yeah, I’d be interested in knowing if James Tabor agrees with him. Good point. (I think highly of a lot of people and recommend their books when I don’t agree with him. Don’t know about James in this case)
Hello again!
There is a confusion for me regarding Mark 3:20-21
[20] and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. [21] When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” = Here they restrained him *because (other) people were saying…*
Was his family calling him mad also? How can we read these verses?
Yup, it’s a bad translation. The Greek doesn’t say “fore people were saying.” It says “they were saying.” The antecedent is “family.” His family — specifically his mother and brothers — think Jesus has gone out of his mind! In that connection it’s worth noting that the verse is only in Mark, and Mark has no account of the virgin birth. Nothing here suggests Mary understood who Jesus was (which, of course, she would have done if she knew she conceived as a virgin!!)
Reading through Acts (a great read!) I couldn’t find where the death of Jesus was described as an atonement or a sacrifice for sin. The formula for salvation appeared to be repentance, belief in Jesus as the Messiah and baptism:
Acts 2:33-34
“This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you see and hear.”
Acts 2:36
“Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Acts 2:38
Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
Was the thinking in the early days that since Jesus had been raised from the dead and exalted to Lord and Messiah, he had been given the power to forgive sins based on that alone? Did the idea of sacrifice and atonement develop later in Christianity?
Right! Hardly anyone (including scholars) notice this. I’ll be arguing in my book that the idea of atonement arose right away, as soon as Jesus’ followers came to think he had died as a sacrifice for sins, which I think they came to believe almost as soon as they believed in the resurrection. And that in the entire NT, only Luke (oddly!) portrays salvation as coming by the forgivness of God based on repentance, rather than atonement based on Jesus’ death.
It is great that Bart details the major shortcomings in the Book of Acts. Two things that are extremely difficult to understand are: How did James become the leader, and why would a group of Galileans — with families and friends there — shift operations to Jerusalem? One possible answer is that they hoped to get converts that had more financial resources than the residents of Galilee had. I suppose the reason there is no information concerning the activities of other Apostles is that there were few relevant written records created, and those that did exist were destroyed when the Romans invaded and mostly destroyed Jerusalem in the 6th decade A.D.
It is my opinion that it is much more important to have a relationship with God today, than to be concerned about the fact the there are serious holes in the history of the first two centuries, plus a lot of fiction — just as there is in the O.T.
Bill Steigelmann
Good questoins. 1) My guess is that Peter went outside Jerusalem, either back to Galilee or wherever, to spread the news, and the brother of Jesus was the natural replacement (I doubt if there was a coup). and 2) it’s often thought that Jesus’ followers expected him to return right away and believed he would come back to Mount Zion to destroy the temple, and they wanted to be where he would arrive.
“And that in the entire NT, only Luke (oddly!) portrays salvation as coming by the forgiveness of God based on repentance, rather than atonement based on Jesus’ death.”
1) Do you say “oddly” because if Luke really was the traveling companion of Paul, who believed in Jesus’ atoning death (Romans 3:25), we would expect Luke of all Gospel writers to share this view?
2) Are most scholars that you’re aware of in agreement that Luke 22:19-20 and Luke 24:46-47 in their original form don’t teach atonement theology?
3) Why would Luke say that the Messiah had to “suffer” (Luke 24:26; Acts 3:18, Acts 17:3, Acts 26:23) if he thought that forgiveness was solely based on repentance?
1. Yup. And, it’s odd since it’s the odd-person-out so to speak. 2. The issue is about whether the original manuscript had the longer form of 22:19-20. If it did, Luke did have a doctrine of atonement. There are really compelling reasons for thinking the verses are not original. I’m not sure what a show of hands would be, but there are lots of scholars who are pretty sure they were not original, and I’m one of them. I’ve written about it at length in several places (look it up on the blog!), especially in my book Orthodox Corruptoin of Scripture. 3. Luke definitely thought Jesus had to die. He himself indicates the reason in the book of Acts (e.g read the ealry speeches that convert people): Jesus’ innocent death convinces people that they have done horrible things and that drives them to return to God in repentance, so he will forgive them. You’ll notice in these speeches that apostles never say: believe in the death of Jesus for your sins. They say: and so you killed him and you better repent so God will forgive you! (see e.g., 2:38)
I prefer Luke’s explanation for why Jesus has to die, since it doesn’t violate the Jewish principle that one man cannot take upon himself the sins of another. Ironically, whether or not this Luke is the actual author, it’s in the only gospel that we can be sure was written by a Gentile for Gentiles.
Has anyone (to your knowledge) has tried to reconcile this view with the atonement narrative; that in a round-about way, Jesus is paying the price of man’s reconciliation with God – by recognizing the horrible consequences of his sinfulness ( the way Romeo and Juliet paid the price of reconciling their warring families)?
And Luke makes God look lot better, even if it takes the death of his prophet(s) for people to realize they need, not just to seek his forgiveness, but more importantly, change their ways (also more in line with Jewish thinking). It’s not God simply looking to satisfy some kind of blood-lust.
Then again, there’s the interpretation that Jesus is paying the ransom with his life, for the freedom of man from sin/Satan’s influence.
Can these 3 different views be seen as merely differing poetic expressions of the same idea?
I’d say they are all important ideas but not internally coherent with one another.