3. Acts as a Work of Ancient Historiography

3. Acts as a Work of Ancient Historiography

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Although scholars diverge regarding Acts’ more precise classification, the genre that scholars most commonly propose for Acts is some form of ancient historiography. Several factors converge in support of the thesis that Acts is a work of historiography, including the preface to Luke’s first volume (Luke 1:1–4) and probably his use of speeches. If we conclude that Acts is a work of ancient historiography, its length requires us to understand it as a historical monograph (comparable to those of Sallust), in contrast to the larger multivolume histories of some ancient authors. Exactly what kind of historical monograph it might be merits further exploration below.

By virtue of the limits of conventional language, I will use “history,” “historiography,” and their cognates in at least two distinct (though not unrelated) ways in this introduction: first, the genre of ancient historiography and, second, questions about historical facticity in the modern sense. So long as the two senses of the term are kept in mind, context often should be sufficient to enable the reader to discern which use I intend in each case (often I will also explicitly distinguish the two).

After the argument in this chapter that Acts belongs to the genre of ancient historiography, subsequent chapters will explore issues raised by this claim. I must address the nature of ancient historiography (chs. –) and where Acts lies within the spectrum of this historiography (chs. –). Ancient historiography employed a range of literary and rhetorical strategies to communicate both historical information () and ideological perspectives (). Contrary to what some modern scholars argue, ancient historians did make many claims about historical events. Examining the degree of correspondence with extrinsic data for claimed events thus accords with the expectations of the ancient genre, and ancient critics sometimes evaluated historical works on these grounds.

Despite some common objectives, narration in ancient historiography differed in some respects from its modern namesake, and these differences must be taken into account, especially in subsequent chapters. For example, since ancient historians treated speeches differently than modern historians do, we must explore information regarding ancient speeches (). And since modern scholars’ historical skepticism toward Acts’ reliability often begins with historical suspicion toward Luke’s signs claims, we must also examine them in a separate and fuller discussion ().

Even when this introduction moves to more literary questions, such as Luke’s apologetic purpose, these broader questions are not easily separable from the issues raised in these introductory chapters on Acts’ genre. Thus, for example, the importance of apologetic historiography for authors with minority perspectives like Luke will affect our reading of Luke’s purpose and message.

The dominant view today, earlier argued by such Lukan scholars as Martin Dibelius and Henry Cadbury, is that Acts is a work of ancient historiography. As Johnson notes in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, “The reasons for regarding Luke-Acts as a History are obvious and, to most scholars, compelling.” One sampling of recent proposals concerning Acts’ genre is instructive: two proponents for Acts as a novel, two for epic, four for biography, and ten for various kinds of history. More examples could be listed in each category, but the sampling is nevertheless helpful for getting a sense of proportion: even in a list emphasizing the diversity of proposals, history appears five times as often as the novel and, together with biography, seven times as often as the novel. A similar sampling finds history the most common proposal, with eight examples, and biography the second most common, with two examples, and lists five examples of all other genre proposals put together. Many scholars most conversant in ancient historiography would also concur with Hengel and Schwemer that those who deny Acts as acceptable first-century historiography need to read more ancient historiography “and less hypercritical and scholastic secondary literature.”

In agreement with a majority of Acts scholars today, the Oxford Classical Dictionary notes that Acts displays “the influence of Hellenistic historiography and rhetorical devices.” But what form of history does Acts take? In terms of function, many scholars argue that Acts is apologetic historiography, perhaps of the ethnographic kind (see below). We will address the form of history here (see, more fully, sect. 2.a, “Types of History,” below).

Given its relative brevity, many would call the literary form of this history a historical monograph, a work covering a specific historical topic. Acts is neither a multivolume universal history nor an annalistic history but most likely a historical monograph, focused on a particular topic. In contrast to listing events by year in annalistic fashion, ancient historians might write monographs that arranged their accounts around a main theme. Eckhard Plümacher argues that Acts fits the sort of historical monograph that Cicero describes and Sallust’s extant essays exemplify. The historical-monograph format allows us to explain both Luke’s specialized focus (hence “monograph”) and his consistency with historical data on many external points where he can be tested (hence “historical”). Defining Acts’ genre in this way does not cancel insights from other proposals (i.e., it could also be apologetic history in its mode and another kind of history, e.g., institutional or ethnographic, in its topic), nor does it by itself reveal where Acts stands on the spectrum of dramatic freedoms or accuracy in historical works (see – below). But it does provide a useful step for further investigation.

Various factors support the thesis that Luke conceives of his project as primarily a history of some sort. Unlike in a novel, Luke uses sources abundantly in his first volume (usually agreed to be at least Mark and Q) and presumably in his second volume as well, although we cannot distinguish them clearly in Acts. Luke’s claim to investigate or have close acquaintance with his information (Luke 1:3) fits historical works (Thucyd. 1.22.2), and his occasional use of the first-person plural (see comment on Acts 16:10) emphasizes the involvement considered ideal for a good Hellenistic historian.

Speeches, the preface (Luke 1:1–4; Acts 1:1), the employment of world history as a context, and other features support this understanding of the work’s genre. Most argue that Luke’s extensive use of public monologues in Acts plainly fits the conventions of ancient histories, some scholars observe, but not of biographies or novels. (Indeed, in Acts they may cumulatively consume a larger proportion of the work than in Thucydides or Sallust, although Luke’s speeches are individually shorter than typical speeches in the multivolume histories; see below.) Richard Pervo has offered a detailed and significant comparison with direct speech in novels, arguing that novels reflect a proportion of direct speech closer to that of Acts. The high proportion of direct speech in novels is not surprising; although historians also invent direct speech not likely preserved in their sources, novelists had more freedom to do so and interest in doing so. Nevertheless, the issue is not direct speech per se, but set speeches. A careful scholar, Pervo himself concedes that “Acts lacks soliloquies and has more orations than do many of the other works cited, romantic novels (including Aseneth) in particular.” Pervo recognizes that the space devoted to orations in a historical monograph of Sallust (26.7 percent) is actually higher than, but close to, many estimates for Acts. Other direct speech probably does point to the more popular character of Acts, but the orations fit well Acts’ role as historical monograph.

Luke-Acts also includes what appear very much like the prefaces found in histories. Granted, they also bear some parallels with the scientific-treatise tradition, a tradition that, not surprisingly, overlaps in some of its features with those of works of history more narrowly defined (but not novels). But some proposed parallels with scientific prefaces are questionable, and although Luke’s preface could fit this tradition stylistically (and most kinds of prefaces share some similarities), the stylistic criterion is inadequate without attention to the more important matter of content. Aune points out that Luke-Acts “is obviously not a scientific or technical treatise”; moreover, its prefaces do speak of historical matters (Luke 1:1; Acts 1:1). Aune has also shown that historical prefaces can share the same elements found in the “scientific” (technical) treatise tradition.

Loveday Alexander, who originally pointed out the parallels in technical treatises, has clarified her understanding of the value of these parallels. She agrees that Luke is not writing a technical scientific work; her appeal to such parallels in prefaces was not intended to delineate Acts’ genre.

Nor was I claiming that Luke did not intend his work to be read as “history,” if by that we mean a reliable account of events in the recent past. In fact (paradoxically enough), casting Luke as a sober, pragmatic, writer of “scientific prose” might give us a much more secure handle on his reliability. It is certainly evident (as I have made clear all along) that the preface shows a strong interest both in “reliability” and in the preservation of authentic tradition.

Alexander acknowledges that she may have earlier formulated the question too narrowly, but she is reluctant to claim (with Sterling and Aune) that many characteristics simply transcend genres. She contends that the conventions she cites cluster in some genres more than others; where they appear in historiography, they appear “in marginal authors working on the edges of the Greek cultural tradition (including Jewish writers).” Their dominance in technical treatises could also be consistent with the background that one line of Lukan scholarship proposes for the author (i.e., as a physician) or reveal that Luke had a more factual, less rhetorical, interest than some of his more elite contemporaries. On the basis of his preface, Alexander argues that Luke is clearly not writing rhetorical history or epic history; if Acts is history, it is, she contends, the sort of history where scientific and historical traditions “intersect, i.e. on the more scholarly, less rhetorical side of history . . . , and perhaps especially where the author and/or subject is non-Greek.”

If Alexander debates whether Luke’s preface is appropriate exclusively to history, nevertheless the majority of scholars argue that, in the most important respects, this preface is consistent with, or even points to, historiography. As Terrance Callan notes, a good introduction should summarize what is to follow (Quint. Inst. 4.1.34), and in Luke 1:1, 3, the summary of what will follow is explicitly historical—“an orderly narrative of the things fulfilled among us.” Likewise, his explicit purpose is to confirm what Theophilus has learned about such events (1:4). “Given this statement of the question, it is almost obvious that the preface of Luke-Acts most resembles the prefaces of histories.” Luke focuses on “a narrative of events,” as Herodotus “writes of ‘the great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners’ (1.1).”

Just as Luke’s purpose is to confirm truth (Luke 1:4), Lucian (Hist. 7–14) emphasizes that history’s distinctive commitment is to truth (also Hist. 39–40). Callan argues that after the fourth century B.C.E., usefulness becomes a dominant purpose for writing history but in the first century B.C.E. some historical writers stopped emphasizing utility as their purpose and emphasized instead that they simply would write a “true account of something.” Luke’s purpose expressly fits this category, revived as early as one of Sallust’s historical monographs. Whether we can distinguish between histories committed to truth and those committed to usefulness as clearly as Callan suggests is questionable, but Luke’s interest in the former is clear in his preface. That Luke also sees his work as useful (Luke 1:4) would not conflict with this goal; the tradition of emphasizing a work’s usefulness never died out, as is clear from Lucian in the second century C.E. (Hist. 53). Given Luke’s clear statements, especially in view of parallels to such claims in historical works, Luke-Acts would easily enough appear as a historical work (especially in view of the following narratives) to a first-century audience.

Moessner shows that Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing perhaps a century before Luke, “combines three technical terms that Luke will employ in his short prooemial period (Luke 1.1–4)” and that they share also four other key terms. He argues that Luke compares the arrangement of his narrative with that of his predecessors and gives special attention to the beginning, end, and divisions of his story, as Dionysius expected in historical works. Rothschild cites as common in historical prologues various elements, the following of which appear relevant to Luke’s preface: claims to truth; accuracy; narrative (διήγησις), often “from the beginning”; ordering of the sources (καθεξῆς); and autopsy (eyewitness evidence). Penner likewise notes comparisons of Luke’s stated purposes to those frequent in historical prefaces: the comparison with earlier works; thorough acquaintance with the story; the claim to accuracy (ἀκριβῶς); the claim to an orderly (καθεξῆς) narrative; and the intention to be useful. Although not all these characteristics are limited to historiography (e.g., other writers distinguished themselves from their predecessors in a discipline, including in architecture and dream interpretation), the conjunction of various features in historiography is significant.

Likewise, when possible, Luke sets his events in the context of world history, just as historians (and almost exclusively historians) did in their histories (Luke 2:1–2; 3:1–2; Acts 18:12). Further, neither a biography (Talbert) nor a romance (Pervo) should end in the way that Acts does, because they would focus on Paul the character (and hence perhaps his death or release). But if Acts is a historical work, it can chronicle the “spread of the gospel” and the movement it generated, especially from Jerusalem to Rome. Some scholars have even found in Luke specific stylistic echoes of Polybius and his successors in Hellenistic historiography, suggesting that Luke imitates not only the LXX but also the style of eastern Mediterranean historians.

As noted above, details of local color do not necessarily make a work’s genre historical, but Luke’s consistent accuracy on many events that can be checked with other sources—including some events where Luke reports Paul’s “adventures” (cf., e.g., 2 Cor 11:32–33)—supports the thesis that Acts belongs to the historical genre, whatever individual details may remain in dispute. Ancient novels valued local color but do not betray the sort of careful research or use of historical sources suggested in the case of Acts both by extrinsic evidence in general (see below) and, most frequently, Paul’s letters in particular (see below).

A more specifically Jewish approach could point in the same direction. After surveying Luke’s use of OT historiography, Brian Rosner notes that Luke’s use of analogous features “strongly suggests that Luke was writing what he conceived to be a historical work.” Some scholars even argue that Luke sought to write salvation history as he knew it from the OT. Certainly, Luke cites the LXX far more than any other source, and it is indeed the only extant historical source (apart from Mark) that he quotes (and one that he regularly quotes with marked citations). Nevertheless, as in the case of Josephus’s Antiquities, biblical models would not prevent him from writing Hellenistic history at the same time. Jewish historical writing by this period employed Hellenistic conventions; thus Shaye J. D. Cohen lists among Jewish works of history owing “more to Herodotus, Thucydides, and Hellenistic historiography than to Kings and Chronicles” both 2 Maccabees and Josephus.

As noted above, not every feature of Acts claimed for a historical genre is decisive in its favor. For example, novels as well as historical works could strive for precision “in matters of local color and detail,” although good novels would be more apt to err more often than good histories would (especially regarding details beyond common knowledge about the location). Further, proposed discrepancies with Paul on points of detail could be cited against the historical genre (although the points of commonality are, as will be argued, much more striking). But even if we accept all proposed discrepancies, similar discrepancies appear regularly in ancient historians.

History was conceived, however, as primarily factual (see below) and, in most cases, was readily distinguishable from conventional fiction. Lucian writes that good biographers avoid flattery that falsifies events (Hist. 12) and only bad historians invent data (e.g., Hist. 24–25). By his criticism, Lucian shows us, first, that some historians did fabricate data (or at least could be so accused by those who disagreed with them) and, second, that most historians agreed that the practice was unacceptable, at least for events (rather than, e.g., details of conversations or emotions).

Yet the boundaries of genres were not always clearly defined. Many ancient readers questioned the veracity of particular historians, and some historians used the trappings of history to recount fanciful tales. Cicero opined that Xenophon’s story of Cyrus was meant to teach about proper government, not to present history about Cyrus (Cic. Quint. fratr. 1.1.8.23). Most scholars allow that works such as Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Pseudo-Callisthenes’s account of Alexander are exceptions to the usual division between histories and novels, since they are novels about historical personages, sometimes employing known traditions. Boundary problems are not related only to such works, however; some ancient writers’ statements suggest that even some true histories fell short of the ideal standard. Plutarch complains that some writers added details missing elsewhere—for example, composing a proper tragic finale for Alexander’s life (Alex. 70.3). Even Arrian, one of the more dependable Alexander historians, can subordinate information to the value of moral instruction.

Rhetoricians were permitted to “adjust stories” to provide cohesiveness to their narrative; if Coriolanus died one way and a rhetorician was paralleling Themistocles to him, the rhetorician could make use of a parallel account, already invented by others, of the latter’s death. One could do this, Cicero claimed, knowing full well that the parallel account was not solid history (Cic. Brut. 11.42). C. W. Fornara complains that the view that Cicero here allows rhetors to “distort history” misreads his Latin; rather, Cicero simply speaks of rhetors using historical illustrations in their speeches. The context, however, at least suggests that Cicero expected some speakers to select their accounts on utilitarian grounds, that is, for what worked best rhetorically in their speeches. At the same time, Cicero was speaking about speeches depending on biography, not about Greek historiography, and Luke’s parallels are more modest: Paul is not crucified, and although Peter may have been historically crucified by the time of Luke’s writing, Luke does not retroject this event (which he probably would have known) back into his narrative.

As Loveday Alexander points out, “fact” and “fiction” are not genres themselves, and factual markers can be subverted. As in the case of the more modern Gulliver’s Travels, “fantasy can use the ‘documentary’ technique to frame a narrative of the frankly unbelievable.” Yet early Greek historians distinguished themselves from epic poets not only by employing prose but by explicitly identifying themselves and the limits of their knowledge. Greek novels often focused on ethnographically or geographically remote subjects not easily checked; this allowed the appearance of greater plausibility. Some novels were realistic, but many were inconsistent or uninterested in local color.

What bearing do these factors have on Acts? Alexander points out that Acts, like novels, draws on distant past oracles of a barbarian people (the LXX), “barbarian place-names,” and so forth. Still, in contrast to novelistic expectations, Luke provides no fantasy landscape for Palestine but an urban setting that parallels most of the rest of the Mediterranean world. Further, Luke’s Scriptures are genuine documents, although Alexander thinks that Greek readers would not know this. She argues that the first volume’s preface (Luke 1:1–4) fits the pattern for technical treatises and other “factual” writings (a claim we discussed in ). The work contains supernatural events and other matters about which historians tended to use caution (see the discussion of signs, below) but is set realistically in the Mediterranean world and without “a fantasy happy ending.” The earliest readers would, she notes, decide such issues on the basis of factors extrinsic to the text itself.

Though concurring with most of Alexander’s points, I believe the case for defining Luke’s historical character is still stronger than her limited argument here suggests. Alexander doubts that Luke’s Greek readers would know Luke’s “exotic” Scriptures; as we note later, Luke’s ideal audience appears to possess a working knowledge of Scripture. Further, even when historical works embellished their story in a manner that modern historians would consider fictional, they were bound by the prior story in a way that novelists were not. Moreover, where we can check Luke against extrinsic data, his claims fit the data far better than do novels set in the past, such as Chariton’s romance or Judith. After 70 C.E., information about Palestine circulated widely, if not always accurately (see Tac. Hist. 5.5); given the networking of early Christian communities (see , , below), it is also likely that many post-70 congregations outside Palestine included Judean immigrants who could verify the plausibility of many of the Palestinian settings. An ideal audience in, for instance, Macedonia and Achaia, already informed on many matters that Luke was confirming for them, would thus have every reason to trust the ideal author’s access to information.

Merely arguing that Acts was ancient historiography as opposed to fiction does not resolve all our questions about its character, since there was a wide range of historical writing. This is not to say that we cannot locate various aspects of Acts at particular places along that range but to suggest that simply defining the genre does not by itself fully resolve our questions vis-à-vis modern historical standards. For one clear example of the breadth of range of genre included in ancient historiography, Acts, as a single-volume work on a more popular level, contrasts starkly with Josephus’s multivolume Hellenistic Jewish historical writing, which is on a more technical and rhetorical level. This chapter therefore simply introduces arguments for Acts as fitting the genre of ancient historiography, and later chapters (esp. –) will explore more specific classifications of Luke’s historiography (especially with regard to historical accuracy).

Although it should go without saying, we must be careful to distinguish ancient historiography from modern historiography. When we claim that a biblical (or other ancient) work fits the genre of history or of letters, modern readers often make the facile assumption (happily, more difficult for apocalyptic texts) that we are talking about the same genres as modern history or modern letters. Granted, there are considerable similarities, the ranges overlap, and modern analogies evolved from these ancient forms. But conventions differed, and only those who have done little reading in the ancient sources will simply equate ancient and modern historiography.

It is anachronistic to assume that ancient and modern histories share all the same generic features (e.g., the way speeches should be composed) merely because we employ the same term today to describe them. Thus those who evaluate Acts’ historical details only according to modern standards, whether to defend or to condemn them, themselves risk distorting the historical task. Barring supernatural inspiration to write according to as-yet nonexistent historical conventions that no one in antiquity expected (even when assuming such inspiration), we should not demand ancient historians to conform precisely to modern historiography. Ancient historians sometimes fleshed out scenes and speeches to produce a coherent narrative in a way that their contemporaries expected but that modern academic historians would not consider acceptable when writing for their own peers. This contrast reflects the different interests of ancient and modern historiography: ancients emphasized a cohesive narrative more than simple recitation of facts; moderns value exactness in details much more than the rhetorical flow of the narrative for their audience. Ancient historical writers varied in the degree of cohesiveness and attention to bare facts, just as modern historical writers do, but on the whole, the ancient range of historical writing was far more concerned with fleshing out missing details for cohesive narratives than modern ones are. (See further, in and below, the discussion of historians’ Tendenz and composition of speeches.)

This difference does not mean that Luke or most other historians (including popular historians, such as himself) made up “events.” It does mean that, where necessary, they had the generic freedom to fill in a missing detail to make sense of their sources, to flesh out a speech (cf. the discussions at Acts 5:36–37; 25:14–27), and so forth. In such situations, plausible and probable inferences were acceptable. Having noted this general caveat, however, we do have good reason to believe that Luke had sources for the events in most of his scenes (especially in Paul’s ministry), wrote reasonably close in time to the events he narrates, and was as careful as possible according to the standards expected for popular historiography, especially regarding the events of early Christianity, in which he was deeply interested.

No one would have viewed the occasional filling in of scenes such as Acts 25:14–27 on the basis of plausible inference as deceptive or erroneous; nor, given contemporary expectations about genres, would Luke have imagined a charge of deception being leveled against him on such grounds. Viewing such elaboration as deception is anachronistic because ancients expected such elaboration, often even much more than Luke provides (compare the much longer speeches in most histories). The arrangement of material in his Gospel fits the same pattern; although he may have been creative in suggesting symposia (extended meal scenes with dialogue) or arranging events in his travel narrative, he nevertheless follows the sequence of his sources (where it is possible to check him, especially with respect to Mark) more conservatively than was expected of biographers. Luke also resembles other ancient historians in his omission of material that did not concern him, as well as his editorial asides (e.g., people being “full of the Spirit” and virtues, 6:3, 5, 8; 7:55), which are not as characteristic of modern historiography.

Matters that have invited question today are mainly points at which we would expect Luke to have less information from his Christian sources (e.g., private conversations and some events most geographically and chronologically remote); questions on such points should not be used, however, to ignore Luke’s record on the many other points where we can expect him to preserve the best evidence (just as we would not ignore the value of other historians’ best evidence on account of their more questionable material). Indeed, in such places (e.g., details in the “we” narratives) difficulties of this sort are much harder to find. Divergences from Paul’s letters on matters of history are minor whereas correspondences are often significant and legion (see , esp. , below).

Ancient historical works constituted a recognizable genre, in their normal form conspicuously distinct from the romances. Granted, their treatment of speeches, details, and theology (see esp. – below) might diverge from modern historians’ expectations, but they formed a distinct genre that provides the most complete and necessary resource for modern historical treatments of antiquity. They developed many of the critical methodologies further refined and used by historians today (see the discussion on historians and critical thinking in below). As Klaus Meister notes, some of the ancient historians whose works have had the greatest effect, including Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, “raised and discussed many methodological, theoretical, and ideological questions which have had influence up to modern times and are still intensely debated today.” Although ancient historiography differs from modern historiography, it was its direct ancestor and is closely related to it.

Many scholars thus go too far in holding ancient historians to a standard of precision that few of them could meet. Some have done so in order to defend a particular understanding of how Luke should have written; others use such standards to discredit Acts. Both groups approach ancient historians, including Luke, in an anachronistic manner in this regard.

Yet some scholars, in rightly emphasizing the differences between ancient and modern historiography, have overstated the case. For example, no less a careful scholar than Todd Penner warns, “Although Luke appears to don the mantle of an ancient historian in the composition of Acts, oversimplified suggestions or tacit assumptions that the appellation ‘historian’ means something about historical accuracy and veracity in presentation are misguided.” Although such a statement rightly critiques “oversimplified” views, its apparent skepticism that the genre “means something about historical accuracy” is worded far too strongly if it invites a less careful reader to allow no distinction between history and novel. Although the genre does not guarantee historicity in all details, it certainly offers expectations of some ideal standards.

It is true that ancient historians wrote from locations of class and political and ethnic bias, that they supplied (and historians cannot help but supply) interpretive grids in how they constructed their narratives, that ancient historians, especially elite historians, made abundant use of rhetoric, including epideictic rhetoric, and that historical intention does not guarantee the accuracy of one’s sources. But shall we simply dismiss all historical value in Tacitus, Suetonius, or Josephus, as if they wrote something historically only on the level of novels about historical characters? Such a sweeping claim, if pressed fully, could easily eradicate most of what we claim to know about first-century history. I am not suggesting that Penner himself identifies history and novels; his fuller presentation nuances such statements. (He also recognizes that other readers from different reading locations will sort the same historical data differently than he does.) Nevertheless, scholars less familiar with ancient historical authors could gain the wrong impression.

An even more astonishing claim is that Luke’s interest lay purely in foundation mythology: “The historical kernel is really quite beside the point for Lukan historia.” Such a claim not only redefines the ancient historical enterprise in a manner unrecognizable to ancient historians appealing to wider standards but also contradicts a wealth of evidence where Luke’s historical accuracy, corroborated on a range of details, suggests careful research or information. Granted that Luke’s accuracy is disputed on some points, it is demonstrable on numerous others where it can be tested. Luke’s sole purpose (and that of any ancient historian) was not simple recitation of data from the past, but it is difficult to explain why he expended considerable effort to ensure accuracy on so many points (not only those that were common knowledge) if accurate information was not at least part of his goal (a goal he seems to claim in Luke 1:1–4).

One writer defines history as socially constructed “imaginative narration.” Although this definition is indeed true as far as it goes, by itself it does not address how the historical genre differs from other genres. Both ancient and modern historians can and typically do select from and present real data, no matter how tendentious they and their sources might be in their selection. As I shall argue at greater length in , an opposition between creative, narrative construction and historical information represents an unnecessary dichotomy.

In stark contrast to such claims, Gerd Lüdemann appears to imply that such watering down of the factual historical demands of ancient history represents modern apologists’ attempt to rescue Acts by lowering historical standards. He regards Acts as unreliable by ancient standards, claiming that it included legend along with history, although he acknowledges that much of Acts’ “content is historically reliable and provides information about Primitive Christianity.” Claims that ancient historians wrote history so differently from today that one cannot hold Luke to a high standard “are irrelevant, deceptive, or as false as the occasionally advanced claim that the ancients were not concerned about false attribution of writings”; the ancients did care about “what really happened.” “To say that the great Roman historians did not write what actually happened does not mean—as Ernst Haenchen seems to imply—that they could write almost anything.”

I believe that Lüdemann also goes too far, albeit in the opposite direction from Penner. For example, although Luke’s chronology, like that of other ancient historians, required some compromises to follow his story in different locations, I regard Luke’s chronology as likelier than Lüdemann’s hypothetical construct about Pauline chronology based on what I would consider more limited evidence than Luke would have had available. (To test Luke’s chronology where we possess concrete information, see the discussion of Paul’s itineraries in below.) Nevertheless, Lüdemann issues a legitimate warning here: ancient historians chose the historical genre to write about actual events, even when they selected, arranged, and sometimes indeed amplified these events for praise or blame.

Thus when Josephus portrays Agrippa’s death according to tragic conventions and uses the owl as an omen (Ant. 19.346), he takes his liberties as a rhetorical historian (much more interested in Hellenistic rhetorical and tragic conventions than Luke is); but he does not invent Agrippa’s death on that occasion. Clare Rothschild offers a fairly balanced, centrist assessment: historians, who, like orators, claimed that they placed truth over style, varied in their preferences but mostly dealt both in information and in its persuasive presentation.

Amherst classics professor Cynthia Damon likewise suggests that whatever the degree of rhetorical elaboration, “the basic narrative” provided by Roman historians is authentic and discernible. Ancient audiences were experienced in discerning this narrative and its enjoyable elaboration, and sometimes knew rival narratives. One criterion for evaluating recent history was whether the author could have had access to the information. Even much of Caesar’s self-serving narrative meets this criterion, although other elements reflect inferences or commonplaces, and some elements cannot be tested. Little is simply obviously invented.

To claim that “the goal of providing a historically reliable account (in the modern sense) was not an ancient objective” for ancient historians is tenable only if one places a heavy emphasis on “the modern sense.” Most novels are completely fictitious, with a few using historical characters; ancient historical works on the whole constituted a genre completely distinct from the sort of mixture we find even in the rarer novels about historical characters. Although nearly all ancient historians exhibited both a degree of literary freedom and edifying agendas unacceptable to many modern (albeit perhaps less so to postmodern) historians, denying that most of the events they report derive from their sources is easily refuted by comparing them with their extant sources where both cover the same ground (e.g., Luke using Mark; see further p. 106). Historians could exercise flexibility on details to provide a coherent rhetorical presentation, but such flexibility did not normally entail the wholesale creation of events (and not necessarily even of all details when details were available).

Using ancient historians’ practice of “adaptation” to deny them any historical value may read our contemporary (here postmodern) milieu’s agendas of radical perspectivalism into the ancient writers no less than the pure “historicizing” approach does. In a sense, it allows the rejected historicist paradigm to continue to set the agenda: if a text does not correspond at all points with history as strictly defined today, it is unreliable as a substantial historical source. Perspectives shape the selectivity of modern history and its sources as well, but this does not mean that the particular configuration of facts produces political fictions in the same sense in which novels are fictitious. The genres remain discrete even when some exceptional texts (such as historical novels) straddle the categories. Whatever other approaches may yield useful insights, those who read ancient historians primarily as novelists, dramatists, and the like fail to read them as what they identified themselves as: tellers “of true tales about the past.”

Hard comparisons among ancient biographers and historians illustrate the degree of overlap among them far more clearly than do sweeping generalizations. When I wrote The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, I wrongly wrote as if most of my audience had read enough ancient historians to recognize the difference between historical genres and novels. In a subsequent article I remedied this deficiency by comparing two ancient biographies and an ancient history, with a summary chart roughly ten pages long. Here I will simply list some shared features in these authors’ accounts of Otho’s death, taken from that article.

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Hist

Otho

^*Differences between Suetonius and the others here could reflect differences between inclusive and exclusive means of reckoning years. On inclusive reckoning, see Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 2:102.

Comparisons among the accounts do yield differences, which the article also addresses, but the degree of overlap among the accounts is striking. Overall (not limited to the death accounts), I discovered in Suetonius’s work of perhaps twenty-eight paragraphs nearly fifty correspondences with each of the other two works (a history and another biography) with which I compared it. My point in these comparisons is not to resolve questions of sources; one of the three accounts could have served as one of the sources for the other two, although this assumption is not necessary (they could all depend on earlier sources). What is clear, however, is that these authors are not engaging in free invention the way novelists typically would; at least two of these authors are bound to their sources, and they at least assume that the same is true of the third. Where we can test them, biographies and histories of recent figures plainly adhere to different conventions than novels (despite their common narrative form). Actual empirical comparisons would temper many of today’s claims on both the right and the left: ancient historiography is neither identical with modern historiography nor is it mostly novelistic.

At the same time, one cannot simply lump all ancient historiography together with respect to historical accuracy; even among historians, there were degrees of reliability, with some historians valuing accuracy more than others. Luke, as a “popular” historian, is more interested than many historians in the personal adventures of his main protagonist (although he hardly need have invented them, 2 Cor 11:23–33) but exhibits less class bias than some of his contemporaries did. His sources for some earlier periods in Acts may be less complete than for his later narratives, but he writes closer even to the events as a whole than many of his contemporaries did and probably with comparable access to oral sources for recent events.

Where Luke can be checked against other known history, we find more proposed signs of literary freedom especially in the places where we would expect them in an ancient history (e.g., in Gamaliel’s private speech at Acts 5:36–37), but substantial accuracy in the places where we would expect to find more of it in ancient histories (e.g., the correct titles of officials in various localities and an itinerary that corresponds well with that found in the Pauline letters). (See fuller discussion in and below.)

The precise nature of Luke’s history eludes consensus. Proposals include ethnographic, institutional, tragic, and other sorts of history. Some proposals are compatible and address different sorts of questions. For example, “apologetic” history addresses motive; labels like “ethnographic,” “political,” or “military” history address focus; and “tragic” or “dramatic” history refers to style. One could thus write a dramatic, ethnographic apologetic history, for instance.

Greek historiography developed over the course of many centuries and, in the broadest sense, subsumed a range of smaller identifiable categories. Following earlier theorists, Fornara suggests five genres within the broader category of ancient historiography. Although many scholars today regard these categories as artificial and anachronistic, they may at least help us to survey the range of works often included in ancient historiography in the most general sense. The first category he treats is “genealogy or mythography,” which “records heroic tradition and seeks to bring coherence to the sometimes contradictory data of legend, myth, and aetiology.” Such works tend to treat the distant, mythical past, which most historians recognized was less easily documented than history closer to their own period. Ancient writers sometimes noted that poets had greater license to use myth (and analogous language for writing about gods) than did historians and prose writers. The primary criterion for distinction among the narrative categories “mythical,” “historical,” and “lifelike” was verisimilitude. (Noting the importance of verisimilitude does not, of course, prove that a plausible narrative was fabricated.)

Another kind of writing often classified under this larger rubric was ethnography; lacking a general name for this category, Greeks titled specific ethnographies according to the localities they addressed, such as Berossus’s Babyloniaca. Ethnographies provided a primary model for monographs in the early empire. But ethnographers, unlike most extant historians of Luke’s period, could publish even unconfirmed accounts of incredible events, especially when writing of exotic places too distant to confirm; not truth per se but that the report had been supplied by an informant was the critical matter. As will be noted in below, ethnographic histories written by members of the peoples concerned (e.g., Josephus’s Antiquities) could prove more dependable and historically oriented (by our narrower definition of history) despite their sometimes apologetic intent. They fall under the narrower definition of ancient “history” below.

Focus on a specific people (which can be history proper) differs from ethnographic explorations of various peoples. Although Acts covers a great deal of geographic ground, its focus is not on narrating exotic customs of foreign peoples; in fact, it often takes knowledge of localities for granted. Thus it is closer in genre to the model of history proper (treated in – below), even if Luke writes history with an ethnographic focus. But is Luke’s focus ethnographic, or is this at most a secondary element? That is, is Luke writing especially about the church as a people or about God’s mission extended to all peoples?

Just as historians sometimes focused on the histories of specific peoples, some scholars argue that Luke may extend the biblical account of God’s people in his account of early Christians in the empire. Acts may be like an ethnographic history to the extent that it resembles the history of a people (the remnant within Israel), but the history of the church is not its focus so much as the deeds of some primary heroes and, still more, their driving mission (although histories that focused on a particular people could also include their divine mission).

Others argue that Luke is writing institutional history, in this case that of the early church (if one views the church as an institution rather than as a people), but this perspective of Luke’s focus on the church suffers from the same limitations as the ethnographic focus. If Luke had intended to write a history of the church instead of focusing more narrowly on its cross-cultural expansion through select leaders, we would have a very different book.

Returning to Fornara’s classification, another category is local history, what the Greeks called ὡρογραφίαι (horography). One kind of local history was local cult history, preserved at times in inscriptions. Romans traditionally cast their local history in the form of annals, a year-by-year narration form that Roman historians such as Tacitus later applied also to history proper. Many have argued that early Roman historians tended to be annalists, starting with early history and progressing to their own era; chronicles based on the pontifex maximus’s records (which included prodigies, religious and military events, etc.) were called annales maximi. This category need concern us no further, since Luke-Acts is clearly neither local nor annalistic, and neither Luke’s purpose nor his sources would have permitted such an approach.

Still another kind of history in the general sense was chronography, “a system of time-reckoning, international in scope, permitting the calibration of events taking place in different parts of the civilized world.” Historians traditionally dated events in part by the appropriate year in the magistracy in which they fell, although less recent history sometimes required a larger scheme. Despite some chronological indicators (Luke 2:1–2; 3:1–2), Luke-Acts clearly does not fit this approach.

Finally, there is “history” proper. This category in its most basic sense described human “‘deeds,’ or praxeis (Aristotle Rhet. 1.1360A 35)”; it entailed “‘the narration of deeds’ (Quintilian 2.4.2).” That early Christians called Acts by this title (πράξεις) is significant (and need not be based on later “acts”; see the discussion in above); its focus on deeds places it in this category, and even the Gospel of Luke (which is biography), when conjoined with Acts, fits this historical genre (Acts 1:1). Histories in the narrow sense traditionally included war monographs such as Thucydides; Hellēnika, or histories of Greece; and universal histories. (In Luke’s day, universal histories were probably more common, at least among histories written in Greek.) Histories could be written as monographs, focus on contemporary events, or seek to narrate the history of the world; what they held in common was describing human actions. But whereas the other related categories “collect data and report them,” history alone “is mimetic.” It provides a realistic and coherent narrative.

Greek historians preferred to write about places other than their own city-state whereas, for Romans, history was, above all, “the deeds of the Roman people,” a source for patriotic lessons. Because Acts chronicles the genesis of a social-religious movement, it resembles the political approach of many histories, as in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and some of Plutarch’s interests. Thus Dionysius and Josephus both treat changes in their respective national subjects’ “constitutions” after the deaths or departures of their “founders,” just as Luke is concerned with the church after Jesus’s departure. But as noted above, Acts’ focus is not a history of the church (neither ethnographic nor institutional in a narrower sense) but the expansion of its message to the heart of the empire. Although some passages highlight the political element, the narrative’s larger thrust concerns especially the mission. That is, despite many valuable analogies, there are also important ways in which Luke’s interests differ from those of most extant historians. Luke’s monograph has a distinctive focus because of its distinctive topic, limiting the need for defining it by means of tighter classifications within historiography.

Perhaps more relevant for Acts, given its focus on leading characters (e.g., Peter rather than all the Jerusalem apostles), is Fornara’s discussion of histories that emphasize “leading individuals” (see comments on above), a natural emphasis given history’s focus on notable deeds. This approach moved historiography in a more biographic direction; thus “the Greco-Romans of the first century, chiefly prompted by the Roman habit of thinking in terms of models, . . .  extended the definition of history by adding the life and character of famous men to speeches and deeds as the proper subject of history.” Some scholars distinguish this approach from pure biography in terms of their distinct purposes. (In light of the discussion in above, the primary distinction here is not biographic focus but whether the work is limited to a single character.)

Such histories often tended to be “encomiastic,” magnifying heroes. This approach does not of course make them fictitious; even in biographies, most writers felt free to record negative as well as positive features of their protagonists when appropriate. Thus, for example, although Suetonius’s Vespasian is mostly adulatory (a striking contrast to his biographies of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian), he reports Vespasian’s pecuniae cupiditas, love of money. He also reports Nero’s good deeds first “to separate them from his shameful and criminal deeds, of which I shall proceed now to give an account.” That Suetonius did not praise everyone also indicates that he did not view his task as the bestowal of indiscriminate praise but as the assignment of praise and blame on what he viewed as the preponderance of positive and negative actions; that is, he based his opinion of individuals on an interpretation of, rather than the free creation of, information.

Some historical novelists, such as Pseudo-Callisthenes (whom some modern writers prefer to classify as a novelistic historian-biographer), were more interested in rhetorical effect and praising their protagonist, but this was hardly the desired norm for history (see below). Yet Pseudo-Callisthenes differs significantly from genuine Alexander histories and biographies, for example those by Arrian or Plutarch, despite the liberties such ancient narrators took. (It should also be noted that Pseudo-Callisthenes wrote somewhere between 460 and 760 years after Alexander’s death—a situation quite different from Luke’s.)

Ancients were well aware that their affection or respect for a person could bias their judgments, but also recognized that such affection could be based on sound evaluations (Pliny Ep. 3.3.5). This is likely the case in Tacitus’s encomiastic biography of his father-in-law, Agricola; certainly, bias would influence presentation if one was praising an emperor’s virtues, even if one avoided telling any untruths (e.g., Pliny Ep. 6.27.1–2). Naturally, a writer would omit negative perspectives if he genuinely viewed the protagonist favorably (mostly the case in Tacitus’s Agricola) or even as divinely authoritative (the Gospels; later, Iamblichus’s On the Pythagorean Life). These emphases and omissions are normally cases of perspective, however, rather than of deliberate distortion (see below).

Although Luke is interested in the story of the church as a movement (hence the parallels with political histories and perhaps ethnographic or institutional histories) and in some leading individuals (hence the parallels with more biographic approaches to writing history), the thread of his narrative is ultimately the mission laid out in Acts 1:8. We can compare this interest with the use of divine providence in histories to support a variety of other interests (e.g., Dionysius’s political interests or Josephus’s apologetic, ethnographic ones), but the centrality of the mission of Spirit-empowered, cross-cultural expansion seems to be a contribution from Luke’s distinctively Christian worldview. In other histories Rome had a divine mission, ambitions drove various individuals, and so forth; Luke defines the goal differently and (though constrained somewhat by the length of his monograph, the demands of the genre, and the adventure-loving character of his ideal audience) never moves far from it.

Probably we can learn from several of the above proposed historical approaches; the very range of diverse interests among ancient historians permitted Luke to go his distinctive way with his own pattern. If writers could mix larger genres (as noted in above), they could certainly mix subgenres. Acts may include elements of political, institutional, or ethnographic histories without these elements constituting Luke’s central purpose; his history of the movement’s expansion from “Jerusalem to Rome” need not belong to any of the more common subtypes by topic. Thus these categories provide some helpful analogies without exhausting or defining Luke’s own approach. That Luke employs his history, whatever its particular form, for apologetic purposes like some other writers (notably Josephus) is quite probable. (For further discussion of apologetic history, see and below).

No extrinsic requirement compels us to limit our analogies to a single subgenre of history; just as Luke feels free to weave together biography (his Gospel) and history (Acts) into a single work, he would not feel constrained by external limitations of genre any more than many of his contemporaries. Although Acts is closest in form to a historical monograph, Luke does not focus on the usual political or military events “but trials, jail episodes, missionary encounters, a farewell speech, and a sea voyage with a requisite shipwreck scene.” Paul’s letters attest that his life indeed did fit this pattern, but by including so much of this pattern, Luke provides a more intriguing and readable work.

In addition to considering the focus of various common topics in ancient historiography, one can also distinguish works of history (in the narrower sense) by their narrative modes. Scholars have sought to distinguish various “types” of historiography in the Hellenistic period although these categories were always fluid: rhetorical histories (e.g., those authored by Ephorus, Theopompus, and Anaximenes); “tragic” historiography (striving for realism but often devolving into sensationalism); and “pragmatic” historiography (Polybius). ( below discusses some of these tendencies more fully.)

Some scholars have suggested that Acts is “a particular type of Hellenistic historiography here, the style of the tragedy/pathos-centered historiography.” Acts is a fairly popular work, full of adventure and fast-moving action, yet it does not at all fit Polybius’s negative stereotype of “dramatic” history. Luke includes scenes with some pathos (e.g., Acts 20:36–38; Luke 19:41–44; 23:27, 48), but nothing of the sort Polybius complained about in Timaeus’s work: no bloody depictions, graphic descriptions, or even (in contrast to rhetorical historians or even Polybius) extensively described scenes (see the discussion in below). Luke lacked the space required to be so expansive, even if he wanted to be. Nevertheless, his history is at a fairly popular level, lacking both the rhetorical flourish of some writers and the careful documentation of sources or acknowledgments of academic skepticism found in some others. Scholars debate whether Acts is at a popular or a literary level; which designation proves more accurate, however, surely depends on the standard of comparison. Against such works as the Life of Aesop, apocryphal acts, and Mark’s Gospel, Luke-Acts is a highly literary work; when compared with Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, or Tacitus, however, it is quite popular. Luke writes for an educated urban audience (see below) but not for the true social elite. Thus I have chosen to call Luke’s historiography “popular” because of the standard I have chosen for comparison (the elite form of literary history, which is the dominant and nearly only kind to have survived to our day, although it was not necessarily numerically dominant in antiquity).

Luke writes a historical monograph with an apologetic purpose (among other aims), narrating the spread of the “word” from Jerusalem to Rome. This focus is closely enough related to the history of the movement itself to allow close comparisons with political and ethnographic history (the latter often coinciding with apologetic historiography, as in Josephus’s Antiquities). Nevertheless, as noted above, such categories do not exhaust its content, since Luke narrates the expansion of the “word” more than that of an institution per se. It is the story of a people (ethnographic), however, insofar as it grounds the Gentile mission in the story of Israel, so that the narrative movement of Acts is the movement from heritage (epitomized in Jerusalem) to mission (epitomized by Rome).

Acts is history, probably apologetic history in the form of a historical monograph with a narrow focus on the expansion of the gospel message from Jerusalem to Rome. Luke’s approach focuses on primary characters and their deeds and speeches, as was common in the history of his day (allowing overlap with the biographic genre noted in above). Stating that Acts is history rather than a novel affects how we should read it. The following chapters examine the character of ancient historiography more generally and of Acts in particular.

Sallust’s monographs offer our earliest historical material from a Roman in the period of the empire, besides Livy, and imitate Thucydides (Hose, “Historiography: Rome,” 423).

Even scholars who explicitly distinguish the two senses in their introductions and in whose work context makes clear which they mean are nevertheless sometimes criticized by others who acknowledge the viability of only the former sort of category, i.e., what people write about history (cf. here Wright, “Response,” 246). Marguerat, “Wie historisch?,” contends that the answer to the question of Acts’ historicity depends on the definition of “historicity.”

On this issue I will argue that signs claims need not be excluded from the earliest layers of tradition. That is, whatever our various philosophic or theological explanations for such phenomena, eyewitnesses could (and do) experience phenomena that they interpreted (and interpret) as signs. At greater length, see Keener, Miracles.

Dibelius, Studies in Acts, 123–37; Cadbury, Acts in History, passim.

For Acts (or, in some cases, Luke-Acts as a whole) as history (often including the more specific proposal of historical monograph), see Palmer, “Monograph (1992)”; idem, “Monograph (1993)”; Schmidt, “Influences,” 59; Plümacher, “Luke as Historian,” 398; idem, Lukas, 33–38 (comparing mission speeches), 137–39; idem, Geschichte, 1–32; idem, “Cicero und Lukas,” 772–73; idem, “Monographie”; idem, “Historiker”; Fuller, “Classics,” 189 (addressing George Kennedy’s comments); Petersen, “Genre”; Bovon, Theologian, 5; Johnson, Acts, 3–7; Stagg, Acts, 17; Wall, “Acts,” 12–13; Fitzmyer, Acts, 127; Cross, “Genres,” 404–6; Tuckett, Luke, 29; Ehrman, Introduction, 133; deSilva, Introduction, 349–51; Schwartz, “Trial Scenes,” 117; Balch, “ΜΕΤΑΒΟΛΗ ΠΟΛΙΤΕΙΩΝ,” 141–42, 149–54 (political history); idem, “Genre,” passim, esp. 11–19; idem, “Gospels (forms),” 948–49; Barnett, Birth, 195–96; Marguerat, Histoire, 49 (though noting overlap with biography); idem, “Pionnier”; Eckey, Apostelgeschichte, 20–31; Jervell, Apostelgeschichte, 77–78; Flichy, Oeuvre de Luc; idem, “État des recherches,” 28–32 (reviewing recent research); Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 296; Guijarro Oporto, “Articulación literaria”; Litwak, Echoes, 36; Kisau, “Acts,” 1297; Riesner, “Zuverlässigkeit,” 39; Malina and Pilch, Acts, 6; Peterson, Acts, 8–10; Shauf, Theology (e.g., 59–60, 82–83); Dormeyer, “Gattung” (esp. 475); cf. Hemer, Acts in History, 220. Sterling, Historiography, 318n39, lists as supporters also Conzelmann, Acts, xl; Hengel, Acts and History, 14, 36–37; Schneider, Apostelgeschichte, 1:122; Pesch, Apostelgeschichte, 1:23. For political-historical conventions, see, e.g., Balch, “Genre”; cf. idem, “Acts as Historiography.” See now even Pervo, Acts, 15 (though warning that this says nothing about reliability and [18–19] finding parallels with fiction).

Johnson, “Luke-Acts,” 406. Penner, Praise, 4, likewise summarizes that most scholars hold “the most obvious generic identification for” Acts, namely, “ancient historiographical writing.” Even in 1985, Callan could write, “It has long been almost taken for granted that Luke-Acts is a historical work” (“Preface and Historiography,” 576, noting that Talbert’s biography proposal had reopened the question).

Penner, “Discourse,” 66–67. The survey in Phillips, “Genre,” also emphasizes historiography (and views this as the consensus, though anticipating a shift toward a more hybrid position).

Gilbert, “Propaganda,” 235 (with, e.g., Cadbury and Plümacher; for historical monograph, Conzelmann and Hengel).

Ibid., 236 (including two examples for epic).

Hengel and Schwemer, Between Damascus and Antioch, 11. They complain (15) that most NT scholars cannot handle the primary sources well enough to discern accurate from inaccurate scholarship and that “it is easier to keep hawking round scholastic clichés and old prejudices pseudo-critically and without closer examination, than to occupy oneself with the varied ancient sources which are often difficult to interpret and remote.”

Sacks, “Historiography,” 716. Further on Luke’s Hellenistic character, see Plümacher, Lukas, 30–31.

Rebenich, “Historical Prose,” 311–12. Among Romans, Sallust (among extant sources) pioneered the use of the monograph rather than the annalistic form, though the latter continued to be used (e.g., in Tacitus; Pelling, “Historiography,” 717). Sallust’s lost Histories, in contrast to his monographs, was annalistic (Levene, “Roman Historiography,” 282).

Plümacher, Geschichte, 6–9. A longer historical work could be divided into historical monographs (e.g., Diodore, who has two volumes; Plümacher, Geschichte, 9–13). On Acts as historical monograph, see further Plümacher, Geschichte, 1–32; idem, “Cicero und Lukas”; idem, “Monographie”; Palmer, “Monograph (1992)”; idem, “Monograph (1993)”; Bovon, Theologian, 5 (on Luke-Acts as a whole); Guijarro Oporto, “Articulación literaria” (though focusing on a proposed structure); Klauck, Letters, 420 (“historical monograph with some novelistic features”); and many sources noted above. See concise discussion in Eckey, Apostelgeschichte, 20–21 (who also addresses tragic or mimetic history, 25–28, and a theological/historical monograph, 28–30); Dormeyer, “Gattung,” 457–59.

Specialized focus was also relevant to an introduction for a scientific or artistic topic, though these are not histories and are of varying length (Favez et al., “Isagogic literature”).

See also Schmidt, “Influences,” 59–60.

Johnson, Acts, 3–5; Hengel, Acts and History, 61.

Plümacher, “Luke as Historian,” 398.

See Plümacher, “Mission Speeches,” 251–66; as in idem, “Missionsreden”; idem, “Historiker,” 3–5; idem, “Luke as Historian,” 398; Horsley, “Speeches,” 613. Novelists usually preferred livelier narration.

Pervo, “Direct Speech,” notes very limited direct speech in biographies (287) and differences from historical monographs (290–92), though monographs generally contained more orations proportionate to their size than did longer historical works (292). He emphasizes the proportion of direct speech in novels (296–97; see esp. the charts on 300–301). Novels did generally include speeches; see Anderson, “Second Sophistic,” 347–49, noting much more in Achilles Tatius, Apuleius, and Heliodorus than in Longus; cf. forensic speeches in, e.g., Fernández-Garrido, “Stasis-theory.”

Pervo, “Direct Speech,” 302. For example, Susanna (Dan 13 LXX) has 46 percent direct speech, yet no speeches (Pervo, “Direct Speech,” 298). Pervo’s argument that the high amount of direct discourse fits works with popular ideal audiences (see 303) is less objectionable; I agree with Pervo that Acts is on a more popular level than the vast proportion of extant ancient historiography. That a historical monograph of Sallust contains less direct speech outside of major speeches (290) and far more space devoted to opposition speeches (291) may indeed reflect Luke’s more popular level, at least in part. My point here is that his case does not necessarily undermine the value of Luke’s speeches for the work’s characterization as history; Luke’s actual orations remain comparable to many historical works.

Pervo, “Direct Speech,” 290. The estimates of speech in Burridge, “Genre of Acts,” 15, come to roughly 25 percent.

If we ask why Luke’s level is popular, it may be partly because he was not rhetorically capable of a more rhetorically sophisticated work (see Padilla, “Παιδεία”), but his largely popular audience undoubtedly also played a role.

On Luke’s prologue as fitting for historical works, see, e.g., Porter, “‘We’ Passages,” 550; Fuller, “Classics,” 189 (addressing George Kennedy’s comments); Aune, Environment, 80; Callan, “Preface and Historiography”; van Unnik, “Once More Prologue”; Johnson, “Luke-Acts,” 406–7; Penner, Praise, 219–22; Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 93–94; Flichy, Oeuvre de Luc; Plümacher, “Historiker,” 2.

Alexander, Preface, 42–101; idem, “Preface”; Le Cornu, Acts, 2. Luke’s preface resembles scientific prefaces in structure and similar linguistic usage, although some other features lack parallels in the scientific-preface tradition (Alexander, Preface, 147).

To modestly suggest Luke’s scientific background (see below) or that Hellenistic schools provide an important type of setting for reconstructing Luke’s usage (Alexander, Preface, 211–12) is not problematic on the thesis that Acts is a historical work. Genuine technical treatises did seek to deal in information, not fiction (cf. idem, “Formal Elements,” 23–24). They were not very restricted in topic (covering medicine, physics, sports, oratory, ethnography, and other topics; see Sallmann, “Technical Literature”).

Adams, “Preface,” 177–78, warns that given the scarcity of extant examples, the scientific prefaces we have might not be representative. Moreover, Adams argues (181–83) that Alexander’s argument from preface length depends on Thucydides as representative for history whereas Luke’s falls within the usual historical prefaces (as a proportion of the entire work).

Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 371, points out that parallels are equally close, including some specific wording, in Plutarch Dinner of Seven Wise Men, which is not scientific.

With Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 577. For topics in prefaces, see Alexander, Preface, 31–34.

Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 370.

Aune, “Prooimion” (though focusing more narrowly on Plutarch Dinner of Seven Wise Men).

Alexander, Context, 16.

Alexander, ibid., 12–13 (though she believes that Acts also contains fictional elements that ancients would have recognized as such, p. 13). She does not believe that the preface, by itself, must identify Luke-Acts as historiography, though it certainly distinguishes it from genres such as epic (21–42).

Ibid., 17–18. This observation would fit Sterling’s observations about minority apologetic historians.

Luke lacks annalistic dating as in many historians; this may be a sign of his popular audience, but it need not indicate lack of interest in genuine information. In contrast to those with access to annals, most of Luke’s information is oral and hence less apt to provide dates (on the general exclusion of dates from eyewitness recollection in memory studies, see Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 333).

Alexander, Context, 41–42.

Ibid., 41. For Luke’s training in technical or scientific approaches, see also Padilla, “Παιδεία,” 435–36.

E.g., Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 93–94; Penner, Praise, 219–22, and others noted above.

This is a conventional expectation; see also Rhet. Alex. 29, 1436a.33–39; Polyb. 3.1.3–3.5.9 (esp. 3.1.7); 11.1.1–5; Dion. Hal. Lysias 24; Thuc. 19; Cic. Or. Brut. 40.137; Virg. Aen. 1.1–6; Sen. E. Controv. 1.pref. 21; Dio Chrys. Or. 38.8; Aul. Gel. pref. 25; Soranus Gynec. 1.intro. 2; 1.1.3; Philost. Vit. Apoll. 7.1; 8.1.

Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 577; cf. similarly Hemer, “Alexandria Troas,” 98.

Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 577.

This is “Luke’s own explicit statement of purpose” (Aune, Environment, 136).

Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 578, also noting that Herodotus just says that he wrote so that the past may be remembered (Hdt. 1.1); Thucydides does not specify (Thucyd. 1.1.1). For the quest for truth in historical works, see also Adams, “Preface,” 186, and sources he cites.

Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 579, citing Polyb. 1.1; Livy pref. 10; Sall. Jug. 4.1–6; Diod. Sic. 1.1–2; Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. 1.1–2; 1.2.1; 1.6.4; Jos. Ant. 1.3–5, 9, 14; perhaps Tac. Hist. 1.3; also (curiously, since it is hardly history) Let. Aris. 2, 5, 7–8.

Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 579–80, citing Sall. Catil. 4.2–3; Jos. War 1.6 (cf. Ant. 1.3–4); Tac. Ann. 1.1; Arrian Alex. pref.; Dio Cass. 1.2; Hdn. 1.3. Cf. even Jos. Ag. Ap. 1.3.

Chronological typology cannot afford to be as strict as Callan seems to suggest, with works of Sallust falling into both “categories.” Both reporting truth and being useful constituted important purposes for histories; Luke states the former, but the genre of Luke-Acts probably also implies the latter. In the second century C.E., Lucian advises that historical prologues note the usefulness of the work (Hist. 53).

A writer could have more than one objective (e.g., Jos. Ant. 1.4, citing two objectives). Thus 2 Maccabees abridges a larger work (2 Macc 2:23, 26, 28) to provide a more pleasurable narrative (2:24–25; cf. 2:27) and to profit readers (2:25).

Moessner, “Arrangement,” 158, emphasis his.

Ibid., 159–63. These elements may be common rhetoric and less strictly distinctive to historiography.

Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 67–69 (among the elements found in various historical prologues; I have listed those relevant to Luke, that is, most of them).

Penner, Praise, 219–21.

With, e.g., Johnson, “Luke-Acts,” 406; Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:383. In a different form, legal documents could also be dated by rulers’ period of rule (e.g., P.Tebt. 104.5–8).

Witherington, Acts, 808–9.

See Mealand, “Historians and Style.” Although Luke shares some LXX verbs, the stylistic level of his verbs falls between a high level of Koine and Dionysius’s atticizing (idem, “Verbs”).

Cited by Bruce, Acts³, 33, and others. Local color is worthy of note in the commentary because of its cumulative effect for a historical estimation but also for its rhetorical effect (relevant whatever its genre).

On local color not guaranteeing historicity, see also White, “Oration,” 62n2. Visiting orators would appeal to local color in a well-known city (95). Vividness likewise does not guarantee historicity, being a common rhetorical activity; to make vividness demonstrate reliability is to fall into the “referential fallacy” (see Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 399).

Rosner, “Biblical History,” 81, after noting (65–81) the common features. See discussion of historiographic tendencies in the LXX in Meiser, “Tendenzen” (though the LXX is translation literature, 77).

Jervell, “Future,” 110–11; idem, Apostelgeschichte, 78–79, 104–5; on Luke-Acts as salvation history, see also Thielman, Theology, 113–16. Whatever scholars’ evaluation today, Luke would surely have regarded the OT historical narratives as historically reliable—at least in the sense that Greco-Roman historiography was. Other Jews in Hellenistic environments distinguished their Scripture from myth (Let. Aris. 168; Philo Creation 1–2, 157; Jos. Ant. 1.15; on Philo, see also Feldman, “Death of Moses”), in contrast to the evaluation of pagan critics (Cook, Interpretation, 129); though some Jews employed “myth” in a neutral sense (Sib. Or. 1.33), more rejected it (Sib. Or. 3.226; Let. Aris. 137). Some Greeks thought myth acceptable so long as it honored deity (Diod. Sic. 4.8.3–5; though truth did this better, 1.2.2; cf. Max. Tyre 4.3–5) or depicted true values (Theon Progymn. 3.2; Hermog. Progymn. 1, “Fable,” 2; Aphth. Progymn. 1, “On Fable,” 21S, 1R; Nicolaus Progymn. 2, “On Fable,” 6); but others insisted on truth rather than gossip (Polyb. 3.20.1–5). And edifying myth remained myth, distinct from claims to truth (Trigg, “Tales”). By this period, when hearers considered the credibility of old stories, the label “myth” could be used to challenge an account’s reliability (cf. Bettini, “Mythos”).

Even if we were to accept Conzelmann’s scheme of epochs, some Romans schematized Rome’s history accordingly (in Sen. E., historical frg. 1, on the analogy with human life stages).

Cohen, Maccabees, 194; cf., in general, Attridge, “Historiography,” 326; cf. Eisman, “Dio and Josephus.” Egyptians and Babylonians likewise sought to present their history in Greek in the period of Hellenistic cultural dominance (Bartlett, Jews, 7). For some suggested differences (related to Jewish literature’s apologetic interests) relevant to Acts, see Padilla, Speeches, 237–40. For specific comparisons with 1–2 Maccabees, see Schwartz, “Maccabees and Acts.”

Johnson, Acts, 5.

That is, authorial agendas and problems in the transmission of reports may account for many differences, but the similarities, which are too great to be attributed to coincidence, indicate a significant quantity of information and a significant interest in utilizing information.

Johnson, Acts, 6–7.

Others, including Hayden White, recognize history as “factual truths . . .  handled ‘rhetorically’ in the sense of ‘dramatically,’” but Woodman, Rhetoric, 199, warns that even this approach does not sufficiently credit the role of free invention. Penner, Praise, 107, notes that A. J. Woodman and T. P. Wiseman have argued that ancient historians invented even events (though conceding the resistance of most classicists to such claims; one might also wonder what group of scholars better than classicists would be most qualified to judge this case). The statement may be true in some cases, but our evidence suggests that it was hardly the norm. Both approaches to ancient historiography—rhetorical studies of the documents themselves and mining them for some historical information—remain represented today (Marincola, “Introduction,” 3–4). They need not be played off against each other as if one precludes the other (see Feldherr, “Introduction,” 8). I provide a ten-page chart in Keener, “Otho,” comparing some information in Tacitus, Suetonius, and Plutarch, and demonstrating in some detail that despite differences, such writers depend extensively on prior information.

Thus Dibelius, Studies in Acts, 136–37, compares Luke’s freedom on details with that of other ancient historians. Woodman, Rhetoric, 93, 199, gives rhetorical inventio a heavy role in ancient historiography, but Damon, “Rhetoric,” 440, distinguishes inventio, which demands plausibility, from pure invention. Inventio had to be plausible and believable even in forensic speeches, because opposing speeches would be heard (441); likewise, the danger of refutation constrained writers of contemporary histories (442–43).

Alexander, “Fiction and Genre,” 385–91.

W. Miller, “Introduction,” viii, also takes Xenophon’s Cyropaedia as historical romance, including history but allowing “many liberties with the facts of history,” yet (p. x) he notes that it provides much valuable history and culture.

Bosworth, “Pseudo-Callisthenes,” opines that genuinely historical material in Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance is minimal, though some of his fictitious material precedes him; so also Zambrini, “Historians,” 211. Virtually no informed reader would see Pseudo-Callisthenes as historical in the way normal Alexander histories were, despite their normal historiographic liberties (cf. the distinction also in Zambrini, “Historians,” 211).

His own romantic description of Darius’s death (Plut. Alex. 43.2) is missing in Arrian Alex. 3.21–23 but was evidently not his own invention (Bernadotte Perrin in Plutarch: Lives, LCL, 7:352n1, cites Quint. Curt. 5.13, 28; Diod. 17.73).

See McInerney, “Arrian and Romance.” Moralistic agendas in historiography were common; see below. Nevertheless, Arrian is clearly adapting history, not simply composing fiction about historical characters; unlike Luke, he also writes about a character several centuries earlier.

Fornara, Nature of History, 136–37n57. Nevertheless, Dio Cass. 1.1.1–2 does complain that some of his predecessors have compromised accuracy for rhetorical style. Woodman, “Cicero,” and idem, Rhetoric, 76–98, even argues that Cicero welcomed rhetorical invention in historiography (citing De or. 2.51–64); he contends (Rhetoric, 77) that De or. 2.51–54 distinguishes a “hard core” from elaboration. But Northwood, “De Oratore,” warns against misinterpreting this passage (esp. 2.63). See the further critique in Lendon, “Historiography,” 50–53.

See 1 Clem. 5.4; for Peter’s stay in Rome, probably Ign. Rom. 4.3. Tradition claims that he was crucified (Tert. Scorp. 15; Euseb. H.E. 2.25.5–8), probably upside down (Acts of Peter; Origen according to Euseb. H.E. 3.1; for crucifixion in this posture, see also Sen. Y. Consol. 20; references from Talbert, John, 262).

Alexander, “Fiction and Genre,” 381. In antiquity, Lucian particularly perfected this technique (although in a way that no one would mistake for history). Alexander accepts Acts as a work of historiography, but she believes that it contains some elements that ancient readers would have viewed as fictitious (Context, 12–13).

Alexander, “Fiction and Genre,” 382–85.

Ibid., 392–94. Many novels used known centers such as Ephesus or Tyre, but much of (later) Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story and Antonius Diogenes’s Wonders beyond Thule fits Alexander’s point here. Of course, such exotic claims appear in some widely read histories (e.g., the gold-digging giant ants in Dio Chrys. Or. 35.23–24 probably allude to Hdt. 3.102–5).

E.g., Longus is a countryman who knows the correct fauna of Lesbos, though much of his knowledge would apply to any eastern Mediterranean setting (and he apparently lacked firsthand acquaintance with trapping techniques; Arnott, “Realism,” 211).

E.g., on cities (Saïd, “City,” noting that some novels that were interested in cities used widely known information).

Alexander, “Fiction and Genre,” 394–95.

Ibid., 396.

Ibid., 396–97.

Ibid., 397. Casting the net more widely, one may compare the exordium of speeches (cf. Klauck, “Rhetorik: Exordium”).

Alexander, “Fiction and Genre,” 398–99.

Alexander, Context, 251, also recognizes the heavy influence of the LXX on Luke.

Marguerat, Histoire, 19–20, 25; idem, Historian, 12–13. The comparison in Lendon, “Historiography,” 57, to the contrast between a respected newspaper and a modern novel, may be hyperbolic, but it highlights the excesses of extreme relativism; genre does matter.

See Pervo, Profit, 5.

As is often noted, e.g., Marguerat, Histoire, 19–20. Biblical scholars, including conservative scholars, also note this caveat concerning ancient Israelite history (e.g., Dillard and Longman, Introduction, 23–25; Arnold, Samuel, 23; cf. Konkel, Kings, 30, 328).

On the divergence of ancient genre categories from their modern namesake descendants, see, e.g., Hunter, “Genre.”

Often they assume that Luke’s historical purpose must be identical to ours, an assumption rendered unlikely by an examination of other ancient historical works. Judge, First Christians, 249–51, explains that rhetorical conventions shape the publications of modern historians no less than ancient ones, but we must recognize what the rhetorical conventions of a given era are when we interpret the work.

Cf. Tac. Agr. 10, where Tacitus assumes that his predecessors embellished details precisely where they lacked accurate information. This approach to writing about history is not defective, just different from our own; modern historians simply take account of it when reading ancient historians, so as to reproduce their essential information in ways more amenable to modern approaches. As Witherington points out, although Luke normally edits genuine sources, Acts 25:14–27 is “not the sort of material Luke would likely have access to”; thus he “may be following the advice of his predecessors in making the speakers say what was appropriate to the occasion” (Acts, 119–20).

Josephus can infer (or guess) what was said in private on the basis of what happened in public (e.g., War 2.319). Sometimes historians report characters’ thoughts and emotions (Dewald, “Construction,” 97). Even Tacitus, perhaps the historian of the early empire most respected today, sometimes indulges in reporting characters’ thoughts and fears (e.g., Hist. 2.74); he probably does so more often than Luke, precisely because Tacitus is more rhetorically sophisticated than Luke. For plausibility and probability, as well as accuracy, as criteria for good ancient history writing, see Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 62; cf. Damon, “Rhetoric,” 440.

In the disputed case of Acts 21:38, Luke was not present, and discourse material, in any case, could invite greater creativity. The case of 5:36–37, more often cited, is of a conversation that took place much earlier and to which none of the Jerusalem church would have been privy (though one could argue that Paul would have known the content of the speech). Acts 25 is the strongest case for assuming Luke’s reconstruction of a scene based on inference and plausibility.

Meister, “Historiography: Greece,” 421.

For one discussion of modernity’s frequent dependence on ancient thought, see Judge, “Ancient Beginnings,” esp. 482. For the influence of ancient historians on modern political theory, see Fontana, “Historians.”

Cf. Lüdemann, Acts, 22, 218, 363, although he manages to critique Acts without greatly changing the nature of ancient historiography.

Hengel and Schwemer complain (Between Damascus and Antioch, 6–7) that in modern NT scholarship, “the real danger in the interpretation of Acts (and the Gospels) is no longer an uncritical apologetic but the hypercritical ignorance and arrogance which—often combined with unbridled fantasy—has lost any understanding of living historical reality.” For another argument against the usual unreliability of ancient historiography, see, e.g., Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 330–34 (noting, 333, that most of the critiques offered against ancient historians apply to modern historians as well).

I elsewhere draw on his useful insights in approaching the use of rhetoric in history.

Penner, “Discourse,” 72–73 (critiquing Witherington and the historic approach of Fornara; other NT scholars have also made much use of Fornara, e.g., Collins, Mark, 25n63, 35–37, 39n172, 40, 41n183). He argues rightly that ancient historia was paideia, meant to teach citizens about proper citizenship (Penner, “Discourse,” 73–77); yet most historians sought to offer their edifying lessons based on existing stories. Similarly, he treats some historiography as “pure panegyric” (idem, Praise, 175); yet even Phylarchus and Timaeus apparently deal in real events, however embellished! He claims that the “real dividing line” between history and novel is not accuracy but “function,” in that the latter cared only about pleasure (6); yet what the former cared about surely includes some information!

If Penner means such statements in their fullest sense, Bock, Acts, 10, is right to critique him for creating “false oppositions” between creativity and historical information.

As Penner points out (Praise, 77–78), historians reinforced power grids of society, reflecting political philosophy. But while this was true of elite historians, apologetic historians such as Josephus could seek to advance the cause of their minority (in his case, his fellow Jews, though with special sympathy for other aristocratic males).

Penner, Praise, 179, views ancient historians’ narratives as an interpretive, “intentional literary creation.”

Penner, ibid., 217, correctly emphasizes the centrality of plausibility and arrangement, but he goes too far when (179) he suggests that “completely fabricated accounts may in fact be better historia” than accurate ones, insofar as they fulfilled their rhetorical function. The genre included a factual as well as a rhetorical component and could be judged by both standards. A modern historian may ask, “How far from the truth does truth-like take us?” (Damon, “Rhetoric,” 440); the answer may vary by author, sources, and distance from events.

Dibelius, who regarded Acts’ author as a historian and even Luke the physician, felt that Luke had little to work with except popular stories (summarized in Neil, Acts, 38–39).

Penner, Praise, 179, recognizes that “some historians like Thucydides may have attempted to reflect actual occurrences and personages to a higher degree than other writers such as Josephus or Livy” (although even here, Josephus and Livy were not so much creating events or persons as embellishing them).

Ibid., 335.

Penner, “Discourse,” 103. In view of his more guarded statements, I may be pressing too much rhetorical force into this one.

Shauf, Theology, 66–84, as summarized and critiqued in Bock, Acts, 4. Despite my response to this phrase, Shauf himself does not rule out all historical information. Rather, “The historian selects and shapes material from the scraps that remain of the past” and frames them together as a story fitting the historian’s perspective (Shauf, Theology, 74), an agenda quite different from free creation as in most novels.

Lüdemann, Acts, 22. Of course, ad hominem arguments about motives are risky in academic discourse, especially when Lüdemann, too, has agendas (Lüdemann [p. 383] condemns the fanaticism of Christianity, which, in his reading, has led to perhaps twenty million deaths; Christian apologists like Dinesh D’Souza have returned the charge against atheism).

Lüdemann, Acts, 363; on this mixture, see also idem, “Impropriety.”

Lüdemann, ibid., 397 (regarding especially the chronological framework as less reliable than the one he believes he has reconstructed solely from Paul’s letters).

Ibid., 22.

Ibid., 218.

One may well wonder about the frequency of nocturnal woodland creatures in large public theaters during daylight! Because this omen provides a probable connection with Jos. Ant. 18.195, it could easily be Josephus’s addition to provide cohesiveness to his narrative, the way Luke, who usually follows Mark’s sequence, departs from it for his Nazareth pericope.

Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 69.

Damon, “Rhetoric,” 446.

Ibid., 450.

Moreland, “Mythmaking,” 294 (lumping virtually all narrative genres together: “histories, epics, biographies, and novels”). Many acknowledge that Acts contains both historical and imaginative elements (cf., e.g., Hummel, “Factum et fictum”; Francis, “Truthful Fiction”), but it is important to use terms such as “history” and “fiction” consistently. Despite variations in some subgenres, ancients knew the difference between history and fantasy and valued accuracy in history (with, e.g., deSilva, Introduction, 350).

Penner, Praise, 107, prefers postmodern critics’ approach to the traditional classicist approach, which he complains has been too resistant to the postmodern critique (perhaps because of the discipline’s “conservative and traditional nature”). For one postmodern reading of Roman historians, see Batstone, “Theory.” While postmodernists may be correct that written histories are imaginative constructs, the material from which they are constructed differs from pure imagination without substantial historical referents (cf., e.g., Dewald, “Construction,” 90–91, 101; Porciani, “Enigma,” 333); indeed, most postmodern historians’ challenge involves frameworks more than individual facts. For a critique of the radical postmodern skepticism regarding historiography (without rejecting all its elements), see Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 15–24; see also Licona, Resurrection, 71–89 (noting that most historians are critical realists, 79, 86, 89); especially Tucker, Knowledge, 254–62 (cf. idem, “Future”); Lendon, “Historians.” (Somewhat impatiently, Lendon also suggests [42] reading the postmodern skeptics by the same standards they apply to ancient authors.) Earlier, Laistner, Historians, 36–37, differentiated between merely contending that Caesar’s works “were composed from Caesar’s point of view” and maintaining “that they deliberately falsified history” (though Caesar may not be the best example of this principle).

Otherwise, we would have to relinquish attempts at historical claims, unable to arbitrate, e.g., between genuine histories of the Nazi Holocaust and the unfounded and dangerous claims of Holocaust deniers. Deconstruction underscored the limitations of language, but while language is incomplete, anthropological studies (Grunlan and Mayers, Cultural Anthropology, 75, 95, citing Chomsky, Structures) show that it is adequate for communication. Likewise, historical understanding may be incomplete without being completely vacuous.

Lendon, “Historians,” 41; cf. 60: “what the historians themselves thought they were doing, narrating events that really happened in the past.”

Keener, Historical Jesus, 71–125.

Keener, “Otho.”

Keener, “Otho,” 338, 348–51.

For a helpful bibliographic survey of philosophic debate on the nature of historical representation in general, see Green and McKeever, Historiography, 91–94.

For earlier forerunners of such historiography, see Frahm, Jansen-Winkeln, and Wiesehöfer, “Historiography: Ancient Orient.” Although distinct from historiography more generally, collections of antiquarian facts also circulated (Bravo, “Antiquarianism,” 516), such as Varro’s work (524).

Felix Jacoby established these modern categories, but his developmental sequencing of them has invited serious criticism (see Marincola, “Introduction,” 5–7; Rood, “Development,” 147–48).

Fornara, Nature of History, 1–2. For detail, see 4–12; this approach was “demythologizing” in the sense of trying to reconcile contradictory traditions of genealogies (6).

Cf. ibid., 9; Bowersock, Fiction as History, 1–2; Laistner, Historians, 79, 91; on the association of epic with the distant past, see also, e.g., Nicolai, “Place of History,” 15; for myth in the early period of local histories, see, e.g., Harding, Androtion, 4, 78. See further, e.g., Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. 1.8.1; information in Keener, Matthew, 19; idem, John, 20–21. Distinguishing between purely mythical elements and legends is not always possible at this remove, though ancient historians had better sources for the early republic than for Rome’s origins (Lintott, Romans, 15).

So Men. Rhet. 1.1, 333.31–334.5. Cf. Pliny Ep. 6.21.5: poets should praise virtue but need not stay with facts.

Fornara, Nature of History, 10; cf. Woodman, Rhetoric, 26–28. This criterion did not guarantee truth; invective, for example, preferred plausibility to accuracy (Watson, “Invective”; cf. Arena, “Invective,” 158).

See Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 81.

Fornara, Nature of History, 12–16, esp. 12. For the sometimes ambiguous relationship to the category of “local histories,” see, e.g., Harding, “Local History,” 186–87. Although ethnography predates Herodotus, his influence brought this approach into the discipline of historiography (Dench, “Ethnography,” 493–94, 499).

See Rebenich, “Historical Prose,” 296, focusing on Arrian’s Indica.

Though not their primary focus, Persica (accounts of Persia) written by Greeks, for example, sometimes included “sensational tales” (Lenfant, “Historians,” 208; cf. 204); Ctesias’s tales of India (in his Indica) quickly earned him the reputation of a liar (Lenfant, “Historians,” 203; Brown, Historians, 77–78). Pliny E. N.H. 5.1.12 complains that, when traveling, he discovered that some popular equestrian opinion had passed on spurious information about locations instead of the equestrians admitting ignorance.

Fornara, Nature of History, 15. Then again, a “pure” historian or biographer such as Suetonius (and, to a lesser extent, Tacitus) is happy to report any negative accounts he has of the despised Nero or Domitian.

Witherington, Acts, 28–29, 35, emphasizes that in contrast with typical ethnic histories, Luke specifically emphasizes that his story crosses ethnic boundaries.

Its focus is not even on the known places it relates; epideictic travel narratives praised (or reproached) locales (see Men. Rhet. 1.2–3, 346.26–367.9). See also our discussion in below.

Aune, Environment, 139–40. To the extent that this is true, Greeks would view this as “Asian historiography” (with Balch, “ΜΕΤΑΒΟΛΗ ΠΟΛΙΤΕΙΩΝ,” 152–53, 186).

Various categories of history could borrow from the others, while remaining basically discrete (Fornara, Nature of History, 2).

It also resembles peoples’ apologetic for themselves and their antiquity vis-à-vis the larger society; see the argument of Sterling, Historiography, in the discussion of apologetic historiography in below.

Cancik, “Institutions”; idem, “Institutionsgeschichte” (comparing, e.g., Pythagoras’s school on 531–32); this is denied by Jervell, “Future,” 110–11; also by Reasoner (“Theme”), who stresses the focus on divine necessity rather than on an institution; parallels with histories of philosophy also prove limited (as noted by Heil, “Arius Didymus”). One could argue (in conjunction with foundation stories noted in , above, under “Epics”) for a history of beginnings, as some have (Marguerat, Histoire, 50–53); but this is a function, not a genre per se (51). Marguerat, “Pionnier,” views Eusebius as the church’s first extant institutional historian, and Luke as historian of the movement’s beginnings (cf. idem, Actes, 29).

Fornara, Nature of History, 16–23. Although epics made use of such local history and more than three hundred authors are known to have written local history, mostly only fragments remain (Meister, “Local chronicles,” 783), of which the Lindian Chronicle is an example (Meister, “Lindian Chronicle,” 607). The category appears fairly diverse (see Harding, “Local History,” 187, citing, e.g., idem, Androtion, 8–51; for Attic histories, see, e.g., Androtion, 1, 3; for its chronological arrangement, 7), but is relevant to ancient historiography (Bravo, “Antiquarianism,” 516, 520).

Dillery, “Sacred History.” Philost. Hrk. passim suggests the oral preservation of various local cultic traditions. Acts is not written in either manner but would be a “sacred history” more in the style of the LXX or providential histories such as those of Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Josephus.

Fornara, Nature of History, 23–28, esp. 27. For annals, see briefly Cornell, “Annales maximi”; idem, “Annals.” Thucydides took it seasonally, occasioning later rhetorical critics’ disapproval. Brown, Historians, 5, warns that (against Jacoby) not all local history was in the form of chronicles.

See Kierdorf, “Annalists”; Laistner, Historians, 24–29 (noting their historical value). Ancients also accepted kinds of history that were not annalistic, year-by-year reports (Aul. Gel. 5.18.6–7). The division between Roman “history” and “annals” can be arbitrary (see Marincola, “Introduction,” 8), and the basis in Cic. De or. 2.51–53 is now often questioned (Beck, “Roman Tradition,” 261); for one discussion of the “prehistory” of Roman historiography, see Wiseman, “Prehistory.” Sallust wrote an annalistic history (Levene, “Roman Historiography,” 282), but Cato had already moved beyond pure annals (Gotter, “Origines,” 121).

Kierdorf, “Annales maximi.” This source was extremely limited, lacking developed literary form (Cic. Leg. 1.6). At the same time, Livy’s details of events by year suggest dependence on an annalistic source, however much the fuller literary units may have been embellished (Lendon, “Historiography,” 45–46). Some argue for various memory traditions in the Republic alternative to written history (Flower, “Alternatives”); moreover, some Roman traditions that appear in Roman writings only later are attested earlier in Greek sources about Rome (cf. Dillery, “Roman Historians,” 77).

Fornara, Nature of History, 2.

See further Grafton, “Time-reckoning,” 1528. Despite synchronized dating in Luke 2:1–2 and 3:1–2, this is far from Luke’s usual form; dating by rulers also appears in biblical prophets (e.g., Isa 1:1; 6:1; Jer 1:2–3; Ezek 1:2; Hos 1:1; Amos 1:1; Mic 1:1; Zeph 1:1; Hag 1:1) and history (e.g., 1 Kgs 6:1; 14:25; 15:1, 9, 25, 28, 33; 2 Chr 13:1; 15:10; 16:1, 12, 13; 17:7; Ezra 1:1).

See Fornara, Nature of History, 29–46. For a survey of first-century C.E. Roman sources, see Hose, “Historiography: Rome,” 423.

Fornara, Nature of History, 1–2.

See Rebenich, “Historical Prose,” 306–7.

Fornara, Nature of History, 29–32 (war monographs), 32–34 (Hellēnika), and 42–46 (universal histories). Polybius complains about the narrowness of typical war monographs (Rood, “Monograph,” 148–53), though he sometimes appears to demean alternatives to better market his own work. On continuous histories, see Tuplin, “Hellenica” (questioning the appropriateness of the title); on so-called universal histories, see Marincola, “Universal History.”

Meister, “Historiography: Greece,” 420 (although Dionysius, whom he lists, focused more on Rome). On the development of (Greek-centered) universal histories in the Hellenistic period, see Sacks, “Historiography,” 715; for the first extant universal historian, see Meister, “Ephorus”; Laistner, Historians, 3. Despite Ephorus’s lack of historical insight, he preserves useful information (Brown, Historians, 114).

Fornara, Nature of History, 3.

Ibid., 29. Cf. Gray, “Mimesis.”

Fornara, Nature of History, 41.

Balch, “ΜΕΤΑΒΟΛΗ ΠΟΛΙΤΕΙΩΝ,” 149–66; on the definitions, see esp. 149–54.

Ibid., 146n23 (citing Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. 4.41–85; 6.22–8.62; Jos. Ant. 6.31–67).

Fornara, Nature of History, 34–36, contending that this genre started with Alexander of Macedon. In fact, Theopompus already had constructed a history around Alexander’s father Philip (Laistner, Historians, 4). The Jewish work Biblical Antiquities of Ps.-Philo focuses on “major figures” (a feature D. J. Harrington compares with Luke-Acts; “Pseudo-Philo,” 867).

Fornara, Nature of History, 29–46. Homer, too, focused on characters rather than major events (Hermog. Method 33.450, citing Homer Il. 24.725–803).

Fornara, Nature of History, 116; noting this focus in Sallust, Tacitus, and Suetonius, see Laistner, Historians, 55 (also 59 on Sallust; 81 on Livy; 108 on Velleius). For overlap between biography and history in this period, see, e.g., Ash, “Tacitus,” 434.

Fornara, ibid., 185, distinguishes primarily by noting that biography used only the features of history relevant to expounding character whereas “characterizing anecdotes . . .  were unsuitable to history.” Cf. also some typical distinctions in Talbert, Acts, 252–53. Biography became more like history in early second-century works such as Tacitus’s Agricola and Suetonius’s Lives (Fornara, Nature of History, 186). For helpful comparisons between portrayals of ideal leaders in Luke and the Agricola, see Lang, “Dux.”

By the third century C.E., some philosophic “biographies” included information on lives of a philosopher’s disciples as well as himself, but this may have followed Christian models (Dillon and Hershbell, “Introduction,” 25–26), such as Luke-Acts.

Fornara, Nature of History, 36. At times this approach could produce distortion, but it need not do so (64–65).

E.g., Arrian Alex. 4.7.4; 4.8.1–4.9.6; Plut. Cim. 2.4–5; Corn. Nep. 11 (Iphicrates), 3.2; much more fully, see Keener, John, 16 (cf. idem, Matthew, 51n157).

Likewise, Suet. Jul. 52 (like much of the work) is full of scandal about Julius, but Jul. 53 praises him. After recounting his noble deeds (e.g., Jul. 73–75), Suetonius concludes that his negative actions “so turn the scale, that it is thought that he abused his power and was justly slain” (76.1 [LCL, 1:99]).

Suet. Nero 19.3 (LCL, 2:115).

See Fornara, Nature of History, 64–65, 72.

Distinguishing Pseudo-Callisthenes from genuine historical works, see, e.g., Zambrini, “Historians,” 211; Bosworth, “Pseudo-Callisthenes.” Though no longer extant, sources extant in antiquity concerning Alexander included works by “actual eyewitness historians (like Ptolemy, Aristobulus, Chares, Nearchus, and Onesicritus)” and historians such as Cleitarchus who probably interviewed some of his companions, as well as “imaginative romance and politically oriented fictitious pamphlets” (Baynham, “Barbarians,” 289).

Others also note Luke’s distinctive approach (e.g., Heil, “Arius Didymus”). Ancients recognized that history could be written in a range of different styles (Fronto Ad verum imp. 1.1.2).

See also Phillips, “Genre,” against narrowing the categories of historiography too far.

Richard, “Author,” 18. An episodic approach to history, highlighting crucial scenes of dramatic incidents more than larger historical context, fits Livy’s adaptation of his sources and a particular kind of historiography (Plümacher, “Griechischer Historiker,” 255–61 [esp. 257–58]; idem, Lukas, 80–136 [esp. 111–26]; as noted in Shauf, Theology, 75–76). Fitting its apologetic emphasis, Acts includes more trial scenes than the five “canonical” Greek novels put together (Schwartz, “Trial Scenes,” 118).

Interestingly, Dio is more impressed with Thucydides’s style than Theopompus’s (which he rates second), and he finds Ephorus’s style tedious (despite his useful information; Dio Chrys. Or. 18.10).

Meister, “Historiography: Greece,” 419. In fact all elite historiography employed rhetoric and emotion; it is simply that some believed that others used them in excessive ways (Marincola, “Audiences,” 22).

Plümacher, “Luke as Historian,” 400; idem, “Fiktion und Wunder.” But Luke does not “fit into a single type of Greco-Roman historiography” (idem, “Luke as Historian,” 401).

Trobisch, “Narrative Welt,” rightly notes that Luke produced a readable, literary account, not a diary or annals. Pervo, Mystery, 56, rightly emphasizes the lively pace of popular narratives, including Acts.

Tyson, “History to Rhetoric,” 37–38, summarizes views of Acts ranging from a popular work (including L. Alexander and R. Pervo) to a literary work with deliberate echoes of other literary works (a larger number of the contributors in Penner and Vander Stichele, Contextualizing Acts).

Most extant histories come from the elite, but even most novels may have circulated among fairly educated clienteles (Bowie, “Readership,” 452–53; Stephens, “Who Read Novels?,” 415).

As often noted, Acts provides a window into nonelite perspectives rarely available in most extant literary sources; see, e.g., Toner, Culture, 170.

In contrast to the situation of some other genres, the preponderance of elite works in the genre of historiography probably would have overwhelmed most competition. As some others have noted, however, Luke may blend features of genres, in the sense that he writes a historical monograph (a genre proper, focused on historical content, as illustrated in our introduction, –) with a popular, less rhetorical approach.

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