Now that I have discussed the major themes and emphases of the Acts of the Apostles, I can summarize what (I think) we can know about its author, when he wrote, and why.

As I’ve indicated, Acts is the second volume of a two-volume work by the anonynmous author of the Gospel of Luke.  In my discussion of the Gospel I’ve show why the traditional view that the author was Luke the gentile physician, a traveling companion of Paul, is probably not right.  In case you want to read/reread the post, it is here:  https://ehrmanblog.org/the-gospel-of-luke-who-wrote-it-when-and-why/

There I point out what I’ve repeatedly argued on the blog, that in virtually every instance in which the book of Acts can be compared with Paul’s letters in terms of biographical detail, differences emerge.  Some of these differences are minor – the kinds of things a friend might just get wrong; others are major and show that the author misunderstands or at least mischaracterizes Paul on significant issues, in ways hard to explain if he was closely associated with him.

I didn’t go into a lot of detail on these differences in that earlier post, so I want to provide more information here.  I won’t bother with the minor disagreements (did Paul go to Athens by himself, without Timothy, as in Acts 17:13-16,; 18:5; or did Timothy go with him, as Paul indicates in 1 Thessalonians 3:1?).  My interests involve differences that seem to matter a good deal.

For example, Paul is quite emphatic in the epistle to the Galatians that after he had his vision of Jesus and came to believe in him he did *not* go to Jerusalem to consult with the apostles (1:15-18).  This is an important issue for him, because he wants to prove to the Galatians that his gospel message did not come from Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem (the original disciples and the church around them) but from Jesus himself.  His point is that he has not corrupted a message that he received from someone else; his gospel came straight from God, with no human intervention.  The book of Acts, of course, provides its own narrative of Paul’s conversion.  In this account, strikingly enough, Paul does exactly what he claims *not* to have done in Galatians: after leaving Damascus some days after his conversion, he goes directly to Jerusalem and meets with the apostles (Acts 9:10-30).

It is possible, of course, that Paul himself has altered the real course of events in order to show that he *couldn’t* have received his gospel message from other apostles because he never consulted with them.  If he did stretch the truth on this matter, though, his statement of Gal 1:20 takes on a new poignancy — “In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie” — for in fact his lie in this case would have been bald-faced.  It is probably better, then, to see the discrepancy as deriving from Luke, whose own agenda affected the way he told the tale.  For him, as we have seen, it was important to show that Paul stood in close continuity with the views of the original followers of Jesus, because *all* the apostles were unified in their perspectives.  Thus he portrays Paul as consulting with the Jerusalem apostles and representing the same faith that they proclaimed.

And so the big question: would a companion of Paul really not know the sequence of events that Paul considered to be of such vital importance?

There are other issues that involve the bigger picture that Acts draws of Paul.  As I pointed out in the previous post, Acts shows Paul standing in harmony with the original apostles of Jesus, no major conflicts at all on any major issue.  Paul portrays matters very differently, especially in Galatians 2, where he has to convince the Jerusalem apostles of his views (in contrast to Acts 10-15) and ends up in a knock-down-drag-out argument with Peter about them (you won’t find *that* in Acts!).

Moreover, Acts indicates that Paul throughout his entire mission stayed faithful to all all of the essentials of Judaism, maintaining an absolute devotion to the Jewish Law.  To be sure, he proclaims that Gentiles do not need to keep this Law, since for *them*, it would be an unnecessary burden.  He himself, however, remains a good Jew to the end, keeping the Law in every respect.  When he is arrested for violating the Law, Luke goes out of his way to show that the charges are altogether trumped-up (chs. 21-22).  As Paul himself repeatedly asserts throughout his apologetic speeches in Acts, he has done nothing contrary to the Law (e.g., 28:17).

What about Paul in his own writings?  Paul’s view of the Law is extremely complicated.  Several points, however, are reasonably clear.  First, in contrast to the account in Acts, Paul appears to have had no qualms about violating the Jewish Law when the situation required him to do so.  In Paul’s words, he could live not only “like a Jew” when it served his purposes, but also “like a Gentile” — for example, when it was necessary for him to convert Gentiles (1 Cor 9:21).  On one occasion, he attacked the apostle Cephas for failing to do so himself (Gal 2:11-14).

In addition, Paul did *not* see the Law merely as an unnecessary burden for Gentiles, something that they didn’t have to follow but could if they chose.  For Paul, it was an absolute and total affront for Gentiles to follow the Law, a complete violation of his gospel message.  In his view, Gentiles who did so were in jeopardy of falling from God’s grace.  For if doing what the Law required could contribute to a person’s salvation, then Christ died completely in vain (Gal 2:21; 5:4).  This is scarcely the conciliatory view attributed to Paul in Acts.

Again, would a companion of Paul really not understand such a crucial feature of the apostle’s views, one that stood at the very core of his Gospel message?

These are some of the reasons critical scholars have long doubted that the author of Acts was not Paul’s traveling companion.

When was the anonymous author writing?  Since Acts is a companion volume to Luke, and since Luke is usually dated to 80-85 CE or so, it has long been thought that Acts was written soon after that, some time before 90 CE.  In recent decades, however, some scholars (especially Josephus scholar Steve Mason and Acts scholar Richard Pervo) have argued that the author of Acts knew the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, that some portions of Acts show dependence on Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, produced in 93 CE.  They have suggested a later date of up to 120 CE for Acts.

A number of scholars have found this view persuasive, but I’m afraid I do not.  I’m not opposed to it in principle; but I don’t think there’s much support for it.  About a month ago I decided to I re-read their arguments carefully, and again I found them interesting but rather thin.

Between Acts and Josephus you don’t find anything like the verbatim agreements in extenso that make you think, for example, that Matthew used Mark.  What you find are some oddities they share, e.g., they both discuss the Jewish rebels Theudas and Judas the Galilean, and in that order, even though chronologically Judas was much earlier.  That is indeed intriguing – and they see it as their strongest piece of evidence – but there are obviously ways to explain it other than literary dependence.

If Acts was written in 120 CE, one would then have to decide what to do about the Gospel of Luke.  Was it written that late as well, by the same author?  That’s hard to imagine, since it may well be quoted earlier, around 100 CE (by the Didache), as I pointed out.  Was Acts written by a different author who was trying to imitate the Gospel written three decades earlier, so they are not actually companion volumes?  Possibly.  Did Luke write the volume two decades later?  Maybe.

My view, though, is that there’s no compelling reason to date it that late.  I still think it dates to the 80s.

That said, why did the author write it?  The only way to know is to infer motives from the account itself.  Among the author’s reasons, I should think the following are likely.

  • To show Christians that the amazing spread of their religion derived from divine intervention through the Holy Spirit.
  • To celebrate the importance of Paul, possibly among Christian communities who were dubious about him (since Paul himself indicates that even within his own communities he had lots of enemies)
  • To show that the law-free mission to the gentiles came straight from God, that it was not just Paul’s idea, and that all the apostles were 100% on board with it from the outset.
  • To show that the true Gospel represents the teachings of Jesus himself, that people need to repent and turn to God so he will forgive them, not that Jesus’ death brought an atonement for sins. Jesus’ death revealed how sinful humans were and once they realized that, they could turn to God for forgiveness.
  • To explain why the end of the age had not yet come. It was not supposed to come yet.  All along it had been the plan of God for the world to be saved.  That required the Christian mission to gentiles, which would take some time.  But when the mission is completed, the end will then certainly come.