2. Proposed Genres for Acts
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Genre provides the culturally conditioned, conventional expectations according to the guidelines of which a work should be read. Although, as categories, genres are fluid and overlap, they are not always completely artificial; ancient writers could adapt them, but conventions did provide ranges of definition for those who chose to follow them.
Various proposals have been offered regarding the genre of Acts. Although Acts is part of a two-volume work, not all scholars define both volumes according to the same genre (see the discussion of biography in this ). This discussion will survey the following genres proposed for Acts: travel narrative, biography (at greater length), novel (at substantial length), epic (briefly), and “acts” (also briefly).
I will finally conclude, in agreement with the majority of scholars, that Acts fits the ancient genre of history (a conclusion articulated and elaborated more fully in –). Specifically, it is (as other scholars have noted) apologetic historiography in the form of a historical monograph and written for a fairly popular audience. Other proposals offer elements of truth or valuable perspectives (even the proposal that it is a novel correctly draws attention to Luke’s literary techniques and popular audience), but the implied genre (suggested, e.g., by the use of speeches) is history, and the degree of correspondence with external historical data (even when we limit these data to the most certain cases) suits especially a work of history.
Ancient readers were aware of various categories of genre; indeed, technical rhetorical works often defined specific genres of letters and speeches more strictly than an empirical survey of actual works would allow. Ancient editors divided Pindar’s poems according to the kinds of hymns and songs they were, thereby arranging them into books. Observers recognized different genres, and of various models for genre criticism in antiquity, Aristotle’s prevailed the longest.
Scholars have placed Acts in various generic categories that were available in its day. Many of these proposals contain an element of truth; in the end, Luke probably mixed genres, as ancient literature often did. But no matter what else Luke-Acts may be, no one disputes that it is obviously a narrative (διήγησις, Luke 1:1). Narratives of various sorts were useful for securing audiences’ attention and had long been a standard early component of speeches. And what characterizes narrative in general will also characterize Acts in particular. Whatever its particular generic elements, a larger narrative work invites readings different from those invited by occasional documents such as letters. It could be carefully conceived, especially if it was intended as a foundation document. As Charles Talbert points out,
Foundation documents like the canonical gospels (and Acts) seem more analogous to systematic theology, albeit in narrative form. That is, they attempt to set forth the Christian position not only in light of problems present and pressing, but also real but past, and real but potential. Such narrative theology tells the story of the community’s founder (and in Acts, of the early church) in a way that expresses the values of the group in a balanced way, not just in response to one or more immediate issues that clamor for attention in the community’s present.
General narrative considerations remain important for the primary generic category most scholars now recognize for Acts, namely, a form of ancient historiography. Even elite historians included morals for their readers in their works (see , below). They also often examined “foundations” in a way that encouraged and solidified loyalties or convictions, whether in the form of Livy’s valedictory history of Rome or, more to the point, through apologetic histories of marginalized peoples (by Josephus and others). To require an unimaginative choice between literary strategies and narrative cohesiveness, on the one hand, and substantial genuine information, on the other, is to impose categories unworkable in ancient historiography.
But beyond basic principles for interpreting narrative, pointing out that Luke-Acts is a narrative is not much more helpful than it is profound. What kind of narrative is this work?
From an earlier generation, W. L. Knox suggested that Acts is a travel story. As he defines the genre, it can appear in either “true or fictitious” literature but “appealed to the popular taste by providing a variety of scenes and adventures with plenty of marvels thrown in.” Thus Luke could follow the basic outline of Paul’s life while spicing it up with signs and adventures.
Knox offers a valuable comparison here; signs and adventures would have attracted popular readers. Such a popular work need not be identified with novels; Paul’s own writings suggest to us that Luke could have had plenty of historical signs (2 Cor 12:12) and adventures (2 Cor 11:23–27) to draw from if he wished. Knox’s proposal of Acts’ genre is problematic, however, because Luke’s travel adventures do not cover Acts as a whole but only Paul’s “missionary journeys,” as they are popularly called.
A more serious problem with this category’s adequacy is the question of how to define genre. Travels could be fictitious, as in the Odyssey, much of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, and ancient romances (including those by Petronius, Chariton, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Apuleius). But travels also appear in historical works. Herodotus and others could use them for history, and more significantly, the most relevant travel narratives for Luke’s audience are the biblical accounts of Elijah and Elisha, which Luke, like most ancient Jewish interpreters, presumably took to be historical. Still more to the point, travel offers the literary framework for Jesus’s Perean ministry in the Gospel of Luke. This travel focus does not dictate historical questions; travel literature was entertaining but ranged “from the fantastic journey” to authentic travel reports. Because readers enjoyed travel narratives, Luke made good use of this mode, but it also served a historical and theological function, as a vector of missionary strategy.
Further, Paul’s writings attest that he did travel to most of the very locations Luke mentions, in roughly the period he mentions; minor tensions notwithstanding (e.g., Acts 17:14–16 and 1 Thess 3:1–2), the features that Luke and Paul’s firsthand information share suggest that Luke adopts a form far closer to biography or history than to novelistic travel narratives. Even if Luke provides narrative structure where his sources are incomplete (as probably in the Gospel), such detailed correspondence with extrinsic sources at such numerous points (see below) is virtually unheard of in novels.
Does a travel narrative constitute a distinct genre like history, biography, and novel or merely a narrative device (such as Luke’s use of symposia in Luke 14:1–24)? To the extent that genre can be defined on the basis of extrinsic analogies, we should note that ancient writers, though often using this narrative device, did not employ it as a generic category. If we employ it, we must allow it to overlap with other generic categories, as Knox himself does.
More compelling and useful is the category of biography, probably the most common proposal, next to history, for what genre Acts is. The greatest virtue of this proposal is to retain for Acts the same genre usually assigned to the Gospel of Luke. Luke, like the other extant first-century Gospels, mostly fits the category of biography, as numerous scholars have argued. Graham Stanton regards as “surprisingly inaccurate” the older views of Rudolf Bultmann and others that the Gospels were not biographies; the argument of Richard Burridge is so compelling that one reviewer claims that it ought to end any further dissent about the matter. To claim that the Synoptics (and apparently John) are biographies is not to ignore the distinctiveness of their portrayal of their chief character, Jesus (that distinctiveness being sometimes the basis for denying a connection with the broader genre of ancient biography), but to contend that biography is the most obvious category for an ancient audience approaching a volume about a single historical individual.
Some scholars deny that Luke’s Gospel is biography by asserting that it is instead a historical monograph involving one person, focusing on events such as Jesus’s words and deeds rather than recounting his entire life. But historical monographs involving a single person could be seen as a form of biography (e.g., Tac. Agr.), and biographies, like histories, often focused on words and deeds (with philosophic biographies, as in Diogenes Laertius, concentrating especially on words, and political biographies, as in Cornelius Nepos, on events and deeds).
To many scholars, extending the Gospel’s genre to the second volume seems a logical step. Acts, as a continuation of Luke’s Gospel, provides parallels of Peter and Paul with Jesus, as one might expect in the ancient genre of parallel lives or in ancient double biographies (see the discussion of the unity of Luke-Acts in below). Full histories, unlike biographies, sought to treat their subject exhaustively (Plut. Alex. 1.1–2). Luke, however, does not do this; that is, he does not reproduce all of his sources in the Gospel (Matthew includes far more of Mark’s pericopes than Luke does) and perhaps is even more selective in Acts. Certainly the Gospel, and therefore Acts, falls in the correct length range for ancient biographies. But length does not require us to adopt exclusively the biographic genre here; single-volume historical monographs were shorter and more focused than fuller, multivolume histories, and the length range of biographies also fits an appropriate length for such monographs.
Whether Luke writes two volumes with the same genre or one volume is biography and the other is history, the overlap between these genres is substantial. (George Kennedy, indeed, classifies biography “as a subdivision of history.”) Although biographies could serve a wide range of literary functions, ancient biographers intended their works to be more historical than novelistic. As David Aune notes, “While biography tended to emphasize encomium, or the one-sided praise of the subject, it was still firmly rooted in historical fact rather than literary fiction.”
Nor were biographies generally uncritical glorifications of their subjects, although partisanship was rife. Honoring subjects could, but need not, produce distortion of what a writer reported. Most biographers critiqued even their heroes’ shortcomings, and most biographies mixed some measure of praise and blame. One could tell a less than flattering story even about one’s own teacher, although one was apt to report especially favorable matters about him. One could also criticize some activities of other figures whom one regarded highly. Granted, some teachers were regarded as exceptional and thus as meriting unmixed praise; Xenophon has only good to report about Socrates (Mem. 4.8.11), and it is hardly likely that the Gospel writers would find flaws in one whom they worshiped (cf. later Iambl. V.P. passim). But normally disciples respected their teachers enough to preserve and transmit their teachers’ views accurately even when they disagreed with them, rather than distort their teachers’ views to fit their own. We should not, then, expect the respect that Jesus’s disciples had for their teacher to lead them to extensively fabricate his teachings.
Nevertheless, we may note some distinctions between biographies and histories. First-century historiography often focused on notable individuals, but biography focused on a single character whereas history included a broader range of characters and events. History thus contained many biographic elements but normally lacked the focus on a single person and consequently displayed somewhat less emphasis on characterization. (Although Luke focuses on major characters such as Peter, Paul, and [sometimes implicitly] God, he is less interested in character development than in the plotline focused on spreading the good news.) Biographies were less exhaustive, focusing more on the models of character they provided (Plut. Alex. 1.1–3).
Ancient biographies differed from their typical modern namesakes. For example, they often began with their subject’s adulthood and were not constrained by chronological sequence. (Matthew is arranged topically; Luke’s Gospel follows Mark’s sequence more closely. But Jewish interpreters sometimes even doubted whether the biblical story of Moses was fully chronological.) Historians, by contrast, though not able to reproduce sequence at all points, laid a greater emphasis on chronology. That Luke usually follows Mark’s sequence (except at rare key points such as his programmatic reworking of the Nazareth synagogue scene) might suggest that Luke views his biography of Jesus as part of his larger project of writing a history.
Like historians (see the discussion below, especially in ), biographers frequently sought to teach moral lessons from their stories; one biographer claimed, indeed, that biographers focused on the virtues of their subject more than historians could. Biographers also wrote at times for apologetic and polemic purposes. Some ancient biographers emphasize moral lessons in their stories more than others, and some writers, such as Plutarch, vary in their moralizing even from one biography to the next. (As will be evident in , , below, however, historians also emphasized moral lessons.)
Although extant first-century Gospels such as Luke betray LXX literary influence, it is not easy to compare them with contemporary Jewish biographies that were not Hellenistic, precisely for the reason that such biographies are hard to come by. Events, rather than the public lives of leading characters, dominate Job, Ruth, Judith, Jonah, Esther, Daniel, and Tobit in the Greek Bible; hence, most do not view these works as biographies in the strict Greek sense. By contrast, scholars often argue that biographic treatments in Josephus (both retaining history and adapting it in a way more intelligible and amenable to a Hellenistic audience) reflect Greek literary conventions, and other Hellenistic Jewish historians probably used these conventions as well. (Philo’s essays on biblical personalities are more philosophic yet also reflect some Greek biographic influence, and the pseudepigraphic Lives of the Prophets resembles Greek lives of poets, drawing on not only canonical accounts but also a subsequent history of legendary developments. But Philo applies to pentateuchal narratives the philosophic penchant for allegorizing old myths, and his focus on characters of the distant past allows him more freedom than most biographers about more recent figures.)
Among Greek and Roman biographies, numerous examples exist from a few decades after the Gospels (e.g., those of Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius and Josephus’s autobiography), and others (e.g., Cornelius Nepos in the late second century B.C.E.) much earlier. Other works related to biography appear even earlier, but the more historically oriented works, such as the biographies from roughly the Gospels’ era, may provide the most fruitful comparisons regarding genre.
From a Hellenistic-Roman perspective, the Gospels (as accounts of a sage) seem most comparable in subject matter to philosophers’ bioi (lives), which honored founders of philosophic schools and reported their teachings. Charles Talbert rightly and influentially argued for biography as the Gospels’ genre before this became the current consensus; not surprisingly, he is probably also the leading advocate of the position that Acts’ genre is biography. That one would compare Acts to the same category as the Gospel is only logical if the second volume of Luke’s work matches the same genre as the first. This matching of genres between the two volumes is what we would expect unless, as the case might be here, the evidence points in a different direction (or suggests mixed genres with different elements dominant in each volume).
Despite many biographic elements, however, the second volume self-evidently does not constitute a biography of a single figure. In fact, it “seems less interested in sketching vivid portraits of past heroes than in tracing the spectacular development of ‘the way.’” Certainly Acts focuses on major characters as the Gospel focuses on Jesus, but Acts does not focus on a single character. Even Paul, its dominant and climactic example, functions as an agent of the work’s driving theme, the gospel’s expansion; Acts closes not with his death but with his proclamation in Rome. Despite its biographic emphases, Acts thus functions as historiography carried out partly in a biographic manner.
Ancient historians such as Livy might follow the life of a famous general or other hero (often interspersing other information where relevant chronologically), but such biographic elements did not change the basic genre from history to biography. Dionysius of Halicarnassus has biographic sections in his larger history, such as that about Tarquin (Ant. rom. 4.41–85), but his work remains a multivolume history. The Gospel of Luke is a biography when taken by itself, but when fitted into the larger work of Luke-Acts, it also functions as a biographic part of a larger history, a history that promises to narrate events (Luke 1:1; cf. Acts 1:1).
Some scholars have argued that “the Hellenistic school tradition” has a similar social matrix to Luke’s, preserving “isolated anecdotes about famous teachers.” Yet despite Paul’s probable adoption of the school model in Acts 19:9, little of Acts consists of such isolated anecdotes (which better suit the Gospel); Acts instead provides a continuous, forward-moving narrative. Talbert identifies a type of biography in which philosophic biographers commented on the founder’s followers after treating his life. But especially when it is more than “a simple list of successors,” this feature is atypical, appearing in only six of Diogenes Laertius’s eighty-two lives. Talbert responds that the question is not how widespread a genre was but whether it occurred. There is some truth in his objection. (As below will explore, the genre of parallel lives, perhaps an even closer analogy, is quite relevant to Luke’s work, even though this analogous characteristic does not determine the “genre” of Acts in the larger sense.) But Diogenes Laertius’s succession narratives also are often much briefer than those in Acts and difficult to compare in form. They are more comparable in function, which may be Talbert’s more substantial contribution here (see the discussion of succession at Acts 1:9–11).
In the final analysis, Acts is not merely a continuation of a biography in Luke but a full volume in its own right. Together the volumes function as something more than biographies or a biography followed by successors; as Gregory Sterling points out, “The narrative unity of Luke-Acts is far greater than the sequential lives of the individual figures of the philosophic schools in Diogenes.” Thus, although we may learn a great deal from Talbert’s comparison, we should not use it too firmly to predict what to expect from Acts. As Talbert has also shown, “succession” material appears in various genres in antiquity, a pattern certainly relevant in Luke-Acts whether or not it is biography. Further, the conjunction of the Gospel and Acts in a single work does at least suggest a biographic emphasis in much of the larger historical project. One might even make an argument for Acts as “a biography of the early church” analogous to Dicaearchus’s “On the Life of Greece,” although this is not very different in practice from viewing Acts as an ethnographic or institutional historical monograph. (I shall also argue below that Acts is not about the early church per se, but about the early Christian mission.)
It is not necessary for each volume on its own to belong to the same genre. When the two volumes are taken together, Luke may mix elements of two genres (such as parallel lives and historical monograph). Many scholars suggest the value of approaching Luke-Acts through the lens of multiple genres, and this approach is most fruitful regarding biography and history, genres that apparently Luke has creatively synthesized in a fresh manner. The popular level of most biography probably affects the popular way in which Luke writes his history, in contrast to more common models extant.
Ultimately, however, the two-volume work reads most fully as history when both volumes are read as a whole, because it sets forth Jesus’s life (a biography when taken by itself) and the story of the early church’s mission within the broader framework of Israel’s history. (In contrast to Luke’s preface, which promises to narrate events, biographic prefaces typically specified that they would focus on a particular person’s life.) Luke appears to presuppose that his ideal audience has some grasp of this broader framework of salvation history, but he underlines it explicitly and repeatedly (e.g., Luke 24:44–45; Acts 3:18, 21–26; 7:2–53, esp. 7:52; 13:17–47; 26:22).
Whereas a biography focuses on a single individual, a “monograph concentrates on a particular situation, war, or period.” A writer could mix these foci in a single book; for example, Diodorus Siculus, though generally annalistic, devotes to Alexander an entire book (Diod. Sic. 17) that has “many features of βίος.” Luke’s Gospel offers a comparable biographic unit in a larger historical work, albeit one much briefer than that of Diodorus.
Thus Walaskay is right to observe how function controls form in this case: “Biography (Third Gospel) becomes history (Acts of the Apostles), a provincial sect grows into a world-wide mission, and the particularistic message of Jesus and the Jerusalem Jewish-Christians develops into the universalistic message of salvation for the gentiles.”
Jesus is one figure on whom Luke must focus; Luke could hardly ground the story of early Christian mission in Israel’s story without connecting it to Jesus’s story. Since a single canonical version of this story did not exist, it would have made sense to treat Jesus even if he wished to focus primarily on Paul’s mission. After completing Jesus’s bios, he turns to history, albeit approaching history biographically much of the time. The focus on a few main characters made the work readable for a popular audience that liked heroes, and histories could focus on select central characters (as noted below). This focus allows us to gain considerable insight from Talbert’s parallels without abandoning the more essential generic category of history for Acts.
A substantial minority of scholars have compared Acts to ancient novels. Although this genre should be rejected as an overarching classification for Acts, it does offer some fruitful literary comparisons. Luke-Acts addresses the sort of popular readership shared with novels rather than the more rhetorically sophisticated, more elite readership of common multivolume histories, so the traditional storytelling techniques in popular novels remain relevant regardless of the difference in historical truth content.
Some literary techniques were simply good writing, and whatever Acts’ genre, we can learn about its storytelling techniques from various kinds of ancient narratives. For this reason, scholars who do not accept the novel as the genre for Acts can still discover some useful insights in the writings of some of this view’s advocates. Thus, for example, novels typically included many hardships yet a happy (often comic) ending (e.g., Achilles Tatius; Heliodorus). Acts likewise concludes relatively happily (by stopping well before Paul’s execution).
Novels could also employ suspense. Following a technique at least as old as Homer, Greek writers sometimes started stories in the middle and then recounted earlier happenings by means of storytelling within the stories. They might reveal a bit of what happened earlier but save the full revelation for later. Luke likewise interrupts his narrative at strategic points (e.g., Acts 9:30–11:25; 11:30–12:25), although this technique is part of his normal historiographic method of grouping his material (see this commentary’s comments on these passages). More clearly, Luke builds suspense by foreshadowing and announcing the dangers that await Paul (20:22–25; 21:4, 11–13) and perhaps even by waiting to announce Saul’s identity as Paul until 13:9, although even most of Luke’s first-time, real Diaspora Christian hearers (and certainly the more informed center of Luke’s target audience) had probably guessed it by that point.
Yet suspense was good rhetorical practice, hardly limited to novels. For example, Polybius’s history leaves off with Carthage ready to destroy Rome at the end of book 3, then shifts to an account of Greece during the same period, returning to Rome only later. Although this strategy fits the needs of chronology, it also creates suspense. Similarly, foreshadowing appears in other historical works.
Pervo has argued that we should examine Acts in light of the genre of the novel. As noted below in this chapter, his comparisons of novelists’ narrative techniques are useful for understanding Acts (though probably less so when using later derivative acts), even for the majority of scholars, who, for good reason, reject his genre classification. He rightly observes that novels could use historical characters, and even provides some examples of historical novels (though some of his suggested examples are questionable). Yet the most obvious non-Christian examples of novels employing historical characters (Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, much earlier than Luke; Pseudo-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance, later than Luke; probably Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, significantly later; and some lesser-known works) are considerably rarer than novels using both fictitious characters and a fictitious story line. All these works are also significantly later than the historical characters on which they focus, in contrast to Acts (which is much closer to the events depicted even according to Pervo’s later-than-usual dating). Offhand I know of no historical novels composed within a generation or two (or even a century) of the chief characters depicted in them; if they existed, there were not many.
A more important point is that “historical novels” are much rarer than the far greater number of works focused on serious (if, in some writers, sensationalized) history or genuine biography. Further, the scenes in these novels tend to be fleshed out with far more copious details than is possible in Luke’s barer focus on events (excepting his speeches, which fit some primary expectations for ancient historiography). As will be shown in subsequent chapters of this commentary, the vast majority of novels offer nothing close to the numerous correspondences between Luke’s narrative, on the one hand, and, on the other, preexisting Jesus tradition (the Gospel) and the real world of Paul (Acts).
The apocryphal acts later assigned to the NT apocrypha (Pervo’s strongest examples) include “faked documentation and other devices used in ancient fiction to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude.” Indeed, most scholars recognize that the apocryphal acts bear various similarities to ancient novels. As argued below, however, it is anachronistic to read later apocryphal acts (that may have used Acts as a prototype) into Luke’s work. More significantly, apocryphal gospels and acts are not comparable to “historical novels” in the narrowest sense, which would be closest to (though still quite different from) Acts. Novels using some historical characters (as the apocryphal gospels and acts do) were rare enough, but the few historical novels that drew fairly heavily on a historical story line are much rarer still and are quite different from second-century apocryphal gospels and acts. Such “apocryphal” works as these gospels and acts lack the detailed parallels with extant historical information found in Acts (see and below for details).
Yet even if one were to limit the comparison to historical novels in the narrower sense (to a work such as Pseudo-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance), the detailed, concrete parallels with historical information in Acts are more appropriate in historical works than in novels, even in the few historical novels that straddle the categories. As we shall note, historians fleshed out scenes (some more than others), and many did so far more than Luke (usually because of their greater rhetorical interest and skill). Granted, Luke shares with novels a more popular audience focused on adventure, and this affects his storytelling style. The information content, however, is closer to ancient historians’ elaborating and taking rhetorical liberties than to novels recycling earlier traditions while creating new stories.
The existence of some novels using historical characters hardly demonstrates that any particular work dealing with historical characters fits this generic category. Mere use of historical characters is a far cry from historical research and use of sources (such as Luke’s use of Mark and Q in his Gospel). Indeed, most novels focused on fictitious characters and, when using genuine characters, had little knowledge about events in a genuine character’s life.
This procedure contrasts starkly with historical works, which used real characters and events but sometimes embellished their sources (to varying degrees) with educated guesses about what was probable and with a view to what was edifying and entertaining. As comparisons of Acts with Paul’s epistles will demonstrate (see below; see also for other external history), Acts is far closer to history than to the novel on these points.
Some elements of Acts tell us more about the social level of Luke and much of his audience than about its genre. Luke was educated but not part of the elite who produced the sort of multivolume histories still extant. Novels, like Acts, “are stylistically and linguistically simple.” Novels include many religious themes, but many Roman historians include annual lists of prodigies and some reports of supernatural phenomena. If Luke is more readable and more supernaturalistic than some historians (though he is more restrained than later apocryphal gospels and acts), it probably says more about the social class of many early Christians and the supernatural expectations of a movement whose chief hero was a miracle worker than about his works’ genre.
As ancient biographies suggest, a popular historian could appeal to the same dramatic techniques that novelists did, while still maintaining the thrust of his sources (even elite, rhetorically trained historians such as Tacitus can betray significant dramatic influence when they provide more detailed scenes). But novels do not reveal the research, dependence on sources, and lengthy parallels to externally attested data (such as sometimes minute correspondences with Paul’s letters) that we find in Acts; few novelists would have been interested in such detailed correspondences.
Most generic features that Pervo and others find in novels also appear in other genres; most of his criteria are thus so broad that they also apply to most historical works. As Daniel Marguerat objects, “The narrative devices that Pervo puts forward do not allow one to draw any distinctions between a novelistic writing and a historiographic one, as both of these genres use them interchangeably in Hellenistic culture.” Likewise, Clare Rothschild shows that features often attributed to Luke’s theological adjustments fit standard historiographic rhetoric and do not call into question the historical genre of Acts. And Marion Soards complains that many of, and possibly all, the “novelistic” features Pervo identifies in Acts appear in “ancient historians whom Pervo basically ignores.”
Among the works by scholars who have drawn parallels between Acts and ancient novels is the careful study by Abraham Smith. Although the parallels he cites help his larger argument and approach (rightly attending to Luke’s careful narrative design as we would to an ancient novel’s), which are valuable, it must also be observed that most of these parallels also appear in histories and/or biographies.
Smith notes, for example, that novels often focus on the eastern Mediterranean world. This claim is true, but most extant novels do so because they are Greek (a Roman writer such as Petronius includes the west) and by this period even Romans (at least educated Romans) had imbibed the heritage (both mythical and historical) of the Greek East. Greek historians such as Polybius (often), Xenophon, Herodotus, and Thucydides likewise focus on the East when the arena of action they report occurred there.
Acts had good reason to devote most of its narrative to the East, where its likely primary audience was located and most of its action historically took place (who can deny that this was the place of the church’s origin and, given the testimony of even Paul’s letters, the bulk of Paul’s ministry?). But Acts also climaxes and concludes in Rome, and much of its narrative (and all of its trial narrative) lies under the shadow of Rome, quite in contrast to the idealized Hellenism of most Greek novels. (For that matter, Luke’s setting diverges from many of these same typical Greek novels by being relatively contemporary rather than set in the classical Greek past.)
Location is thus not a compelling criterion of genre. In fact, the location of some of Luke’s narratives may point in the opposite direction. Novels often preferred glamorous, well-known cities or distant, exotic locations. (Lucian parodies old poets and philosophers who recount wonders and myths, often about places to which they had never traveled.) Why would Luke, if a novelist, use several small towns in Asia’s interior (and bother to travel there to get right their locations on key roads)? (Conversely, it makes sense historically that Paul would start in small towns before achieving success in a major metropolis.) If Luke intended to be believed as a historian (which is how he presents himself), how could he simply exploit a recent figure for a fictitious framework yet provide such clear geographic connections for the figure as would easily discredit his work if it circulated in those regions? (Paul’s letters do in fact confirm connections with most regions that Luke mentions, even leaving aside the contemporary debate about North and South Galatia.) And if Luke felt free to invent Paul’s successes, why would he not have made Paul’s carefully designed speech in famous Athens more fruitful, culminating in the establishment of a local church there rather than just a handful of converts (Acts 17:34; cf. 1 Thess 3:1)?
Novels use “recapitulations” and “recognition scenes,” but so does Genesis, which (whatever its original function) was not construed as a novel by most first-century Jewish hearers. Plutarch’s double biographies may shape the story to make it cohesive and may prefer traditions that offer parallels, but they do not simply create events from whole cloth the way that novels do. Novels allude to previous narrative worlds; likewise Luke depends on the LXX, but so did nearly all early Jewish works (most of which, as already suggested, regarded the biblical story as historical; see esp. Josephus’s Antiquities, an apologetic history).
Pervo sees Acts as mostly “a series of escapades, from nearly all of which the leading characters escape great danger.” But does not our historical information reveal that Paul did consistently face and (except on the final occasion) survive dangers of this sort (1 Cor 4:11–13; 15:32; 16:9; 2 Cor 1:4–11; 2:14–16; 4:7–16; 6:4–10; 11:23–33)? (Paul’s lists, in fact, suggest that Luke omitted many “exciting” stories to keep the action moving in a way relevant to his plot; note especially 2 Cor 11:23–27.) One of the most striking escapes in Acts (Paul let down from the wall in a basket, Acts 9:23–25) is independently corroborated in Paul’s writings (2 Cor 11:31–33)—and Luke does not even elaborate it in a detailed way. Acts even lacks the usual fare of pirates and bandits (even though Paul indeed was at risk from them, 2 Cor 11:26). (Moreover, my own limited experience with the “story” value of genuine historical encounters with danger predisposes me to be very skeptical of using elements such as suspense and action to ascertain historical content.)
Nearly all the features that Pervo rightly associates with novels (such as rowdy mobs) also appear in historical works, from which novels borrowed many of their motifs and dangers. Likewise, sea storms and shipwrecks appear in historical and eyewitness reports as well as in novels (although novels certainly provided a model for their elaboration in ways that interested readers). The supposed literary convention of sea voyages never existed as a specifically novelistic device. (Further, no source shares all the parallels Pervo finds with Acts’ shipwreck narrative, many of which parallels are simply required to tell about a shipwreck.)
Some other features (such as “humor, wit, irony, and pathos”) reflect the pervasive use of rhetoric in both Acts and novels; Acts, however, includes lengthy speeches usually more characteristic of histories than of novels. Further, entertaining elements do not control Luke’s plot; as Sterling asks, “Was Acts intended to entertain or to inform in an entertaining way?” (Some later novels were employed for purposes of religious propaganda, but this function was the exception for novels, the primary function of which remained entertainment.)
Acts includes many features of action and entertainment, which it shares with novels. But Josephus’s Jewish War and Life are also full of movement because of their focus on a war, and dramatic elements appear regularly in historical writers. Whereas novels were intended primarily for entertainment, historians believed that they could entertain without abandoning historical truth. (It was novels that borrowed elements from history and other earlier genres, rather than the reverse.) Thus Maximus of Tyre, though believing that philosophic lectures are the most entertaining pastime at banquets, also finds history pleasurable (Max. Tyre 22.5). Likewise, the author of 2 Maccabees notes that he employed many possible sources but that his document was also written in such a way as to be enjoyed and easily remembered (2 Macc 2:24–25). And Tacitus apologizes that the period he covers offers less intriguing stories than histories of earlier Rome. Although some historians were quite “austere” and others lavish with fantastic accounts, most historians believed that readers merited some relief from the serious material they studied; readers found various forms of pleasure in histories, whether the pleasure of knowledge or that of being able to pity others’ misfortunes.
Pervo is right that the Gospels and Acts reveal coherent plots and hence may be examined in light of techniques learned from studying “other narrative works shaped by plot structures—that is, novels.” (Acts, with its movement toward Rome, indeed exhibits a more coherent plot than the more episodic narrative of many apocryphal acts.) This observation does not, however, define genre; historians also sought to provide internally consistent narrative worlds and cohesive narratives with their events connected logically. It was such cohesive narrative that distinguished history from mere annals. Luke-Acts, like Plutarch’s parallel lives, is full of narrative connections among its main characters (see below); but Luke, again something like Plutarch, is constrained to some degree (indeed, as argued later in this commentary, to a significant degree in Luke’s case) by his sources (see – below). Thus, for example, neither Peter nor Paul faces a test by Satan exactly like that of Jesus (Luke 4:2–12), although both face tests (cf. 22:31–34; Acts 5:9) and encounter Satan’s agents (Acts 5:3; 13:10). The end of Acts may bear slight resemblance to Jesus’s passion, but not to the degree an explicit death and resurrection would.
Beyond general cohesiveness, large historical works might also display something like a plot or at least an overarching unity around cohesive themes (such as a nation’s providential greatness). More relevant to Acts, literary unity and specific emphases characterize historical works on particular subjects, such as Quintus Curtius’s History of Alexander and historical monographs (on which see the discussion in below.) Educated historians were most often trained primarily in rhetoric, and readers expected cohesive narratives from them. Lucian and some other rhetoricians articulated rules about continuity in historical accounts, and Luke’s earlier account fits these rules. A single-volume historical monograph could achieve such unity and plot development more easily than could a multivolume history of Rome such as Livy’s, although even such histories have driving theses (such as Rome’s destiny). The influence of popular biography would increase even more the expectation of plot unity. The popular level of Luke’s work (where the literary insights of Pervo and others prove helpful) may allow for more plot cohesiveness than we expect in most extant biographies or histories, but literary connections appear even in such works (see our introduction, ).
Whereas Pervo dismisses as inappropriate to histories Luke’s perspective on “providence,” it was an issue of intellectual discussion, not mere comic entertainment, in antiquity. David Balch notes that “the influential Stoic Posidonius” treated it as “a serious philosophical issue, argued with precisely the terminology found in Acts. Luke’s work engages the discussion; does divine providence favor the ‘growth’ of the Roman empire or the ‘growth of the word’ of the gospel?” Historians such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Josephus highlighted what they believed to be divine providence in history (see the discussion in , below); the topic, in fact, belonged more to ancient historiography than to ancient novels. ( below will treat the question of historians’ Tendenz more fully.)
Pervo complains that Luke often ridicules his opponents by how he portrays them, noting that “this is popular theology at its most primitive level.” This complaint faults Luke, however, for not being more charitable to those he perceives as persecutors. Granted, some ancient historians, like most modern ones, expected their colleagues to be as evenhanded as possible; for example, one writer complains that Thucydides focuses on Athens’s failings because it exiled him. Ancient historians often provided antagonists who were round characters, reporting, for instance, fears and motives on both sides of a conflict (to increase suspense, praise for the victor, and tragic pathos). Such rounding, however, was often a dramatic technique (and often itself entailed imaginative reconstruction) and not itself necessary for a work to fit the genre of history.
However impolite it might seem to educated moderns, ancient rhetors regularly employed wit, including jokes at opponents’ expense; the only limitation was that of dignity (rather narrowly defined)—of keeping wit from becoming ridicule, for example, at another’s suffering. Given the overlap between rhetoric and historical writing, those who wrote about opponents closer to their own period might include more rhetorical hostility, especially if they felt they had reason to do so. Tacitus is certainly not friendly toward Domitian, nor is Polybius toward his historiographic rival Timaeus, but this does not mean that Tacitus or Polybius was writing a novel. Paul’s writings reveal much genuine conflict in a period when Christians were those being persecuted (cf. Rom 15:31; 1 Cor 16:9; 2 Cor 1:8–10; 1 Thess 2:14–16; 2 Thess 3:2), and the conflict indeed seems fresher in Paul than in Luke. Some scholars do debate Luke’s fairness in the way he writes about Judaism (see discussion in below). For the present issue, however, it suffices to point out that even when a writer could be charged with bias for portraying negatively those regarded as opponents, this charge did not transform the genre of the work from history to novel.
Finally, Luke presents a more rounded picture of various groups of Jews and Roman officials than Pervo’s generalization about Luke’s negative characterization of these groups suggests (see and below).
Ancient historiography at times included varying degrees of inference. Rhetorical tastes demanded a complete narrative and so sometimes invited historical reconstructions and hypothetical amplifications on points for which evidence was missing (e.g., the details of a speech given on some occasion). One could develop existing data into a scene based on inferences about probability and verisimilitude.
But excessive use of such amplification was deemed to violate the canons of historiography, and developing a mere fiction to entertain one’s readers was judged “culpable” even by ancient historical standards. Ancient historical scenes’ details may contain some elements that modern historians would consider fictitious, but the genre of ancient historiography is a far cry from that of ancient novels, even the rarer “historical” novels. Large-scale fictionalization in narratives with historical flavor was limited primarily to “fantastic tales, Homeric revisionism, tragic or romantic novels, and comic or satiric novels.” As already argued, none of these categories is easily confused with historical monographs, including Acts.
Most scholars believe that Luke made some historical mistakes (the most often cited and persuasive cases are Luke 2:2, in the much earlier reign of Herod I, and Acts 5:36–37, although a minority of scholars offer arguments debating even these examples). Yet such mistakes or deliberate embellishments would hardly make his work fiction. Even if Luke was wrong on every point where a plausible case can be made that he was wrong (an unlikely premise, since in many or even most proposed cases, excepting the strongest obvious ones, a more plausible argument can be made that he was right), he would prove little different from Josephus in this regard, and Josephus was writing ancient historiography, not novels.
Indeed, more than Luke where he adapts Mark, biblical stories in Josephus’s Antiquities differ from Josephus’s source in Scripture at many points (and he did not seem to mind anyone noticing these obvious departures, by which he displayed his rhetorical talent). Yet we do not for this reason presume that Josephus was writing a novel, because we understand that his approach lay within the bounds of ancient historiography. Nor do we dismiss Josephus’s value for reconstructing history and resort to historical agnosticism because we cannot be certain regarding his every claim. Despite his rhetorical flourishes, we can still reconstruct much of the outline and substance of the biblical record (though rarely the wording) from Josephus. In view of such comparisons, treating Acts as a pure novel and consequently inferring that early Christian history is completely unknown (and hence available for any speculation by which NT scholars might wish to reconstruct it) run the risk of appearing historically irresponsible.
The most trusted of ancient scholars sometimes misstate themselves on some points—for example, the encyclopedic elder Pliny, who schedules the Isthmian Games every four years (instead of two, N.H. 4.5.18), and his nephew the younger Pliny, who apparently confuses Prusias ad Mare with Prusa (Ep. 10.58.5; 10.81.6). As matters stand, however (and as argued more fully below, in –), Luke’s historical accuracy fares sufficiently well compared with that of other historians of his era (and, for that matter, with modern historians and NT scholars, who also make our share of inadvertent mistakes).
Almost no one simply dismisses the ancient historians, on whose reports we largely depend for the events they treat, when they conflict on matters of detail (e.g., Tacitus and Josephus differ on some matters of fact that should have been clear, such as Felix’s full name). But even substantial historical inaccuracies would not make a writer with historical intention a novelist, just a poor historian. Those who (generally on a popular level) dismiss a writer’s accuracy wholesale when they can provide clear evidence against only a small number of points, like those who refuse to acknowledge the existence of any evidence that could challenge their support of a document’s reliability, may indulge in an all-or-nothing approach readily suited to vulgar and vitriolic forms of polemical religious discourse but inappropriate for the more sober evaluations expected in historiographic investigation.
The ancients recognized that differences between factual and fictional discourse should exist, even when elements of one might intrude in a work more characterized by the other. When Lucian parodies and lampoons those who claim their fiction to be true, he complains, “What did surprise me was their supposition that nobody would notice they were lying.” Nor would anyone mistake his parody for fact (or link incredible reports in historians, e.g., lists of portents, with such parody). In A True Story Lucian reports that the people on the moon (1.11) tried to colonize the morning star, provoking war with the sun people (1.12). He describes spiders larger than islands (1.15), mushrooms used as shields (1.16), and hands tied by spiderwebs (1.18). All moon people are male, being wives before age twenty-five and husbands thereafter; they bear children dead from their leg calves but hold them up to the wind with open mouths to bring them to life (1.22). Because they drink only air, they do not need to relieve themselves (1.23); they wear glass clothing and insert their eyes only when they need to see (1.25). Another city, in the air, has lamps loitering about (1.29).
Nor are these all of Lucian’s fabulous adventures. A ship, swallowed by a whale (1.30), finds a land of hills and forests (1.31, 34) as well as hostile tribes of men-crabs and other composite creatures (1.35–36), which the heroes decimate (1.38–39). By starting a forest fire, they manage to kill the whale in thirteen days (2.1), then sail from its mouth, camp three days on top of it, and dig a cave in the frozen sea (2.2). Afterward they slide the boat across the ice as if sailing (2.2), discovering a sea of milk (2.3). In the place of the dead (2.10), they witness a war between the damned and the blessed (2.23), and punishment for a boy having an affair with Helen (2.25–26); later Odysseus secures hospitality for the travelers with Calypso (2.35). If some scholars have been inclined to appeal to A True Story to argue for fantastic narratives written as if true, they should instead recognize that Acts does not belong even to the sort of work that Lucian parodies.
Many experts would agree with the cautiously worded appraisal of Christopher Tuckett: “Luke is at times remarkably accurate in some of the details he records of the cities of the Empire,” yet makes mistakes regarding Quirinius’s chronology and some other details (e.g., when compared with Paul’s letters). Yet it is unfair to demand perfect accuracy of Luke or any other historian, and certainly not one in antiquity; given the passage of time between the events and Luke’s narration of them, “almost certainly Luke was striving for accuracy at this level; and almost certainly he may not have achieved perfection.” Tuckett thus regards it as “scarcely surprising that one or two details have been accidentally confused” or that “he may have had a slightly less than perfect grasp of the relative chronology of” Quirinius and others. Even if many would count up more mistakes (and some others would prefer fewer) than in this wording, probably most scholars would agree with the basic point: arguments for inaccuracy on some points do not require us to doubt Luke’s historical purpose or his work’s historical genre.
Romances (one of the best-attested and most indisputable forms of ancient novels) focused on two lovers who persevered in faithfulness, with eros playing a leading role—a story line that plainly contains no similarity to that of Acts. This plotline appears even in apocryphal acts; if Pervo claims that he appeals to less generically distinctive, nonromantic historical novels, he cannot rest much of his genre argument on comparisons with the later apocryphal gospels and acts. Other ancient novels also involved a private individual, perhaps mimicking biography but not history, whereas Acts shifts from Peter to Paul. When novels did pose as history, they were nevertheless almost completely fictitious—which is incompatible with the numerous connections with extrinsic history found in Acts (see and below). Despite its positive conclusion, Acts does not conclude with a full and happy resolution or final reunion as in most ancient novels (or even a grisly one as in Acts of Peter). Many characteristics of Acts can fit ancient novels (and, in nearly all these cases, other genres as well), but in the end too many standard features of novels are missing in Acts.
Pervo’s critics rightly complain that he too readily dismisses the argument based on Luke’s historical prologue, a feature not found in novels, that Luke’s work is history. Such prefaces fit many genres, Pervo argues, including medical writings, and prefaces also appear in novels. The specific examples he cites, however, do not make his point; most are in works whose genre is obvious with or without a prologue—for example, a conspicuous parody on history (Lucian’s True Story). In at least one case (Longus proem 1–2), the preface does not claim that the work is historical; it can be read as explaining why the writer made the story up. Such prologues, which could not be mistaken for historical, hardly serve the same function as Luke’s (Luke 1:1–4; Acts 1:1), which mention sources (Luke 1:1–2), investigation or knowledge (1:3), and confirmation of shared information (1:4). The issue is not whether a work has a preface but whether a work has a preface indicating factual content (with no markers of parody somewhere to subvert it).
More telling, although Pervo’s comparison of Luke’s Acts with later apocryphal acts is critical to his argument, these later acts probably adapt the genre of Luke’s Acts as their paradigm whereas the reverse is chronologically impossible. In contrast to Luke’s Acts, the apocryphal acts date from the period of the heyday of the Greek romances. At least some of them, most obviously the Acts of Paul, appear dependent in content on Luke’s Acts. Just as later apocryphal gospels diverge further from Palestinian and Semitic traits in the early strata of the Jesus tradition, so these apocryphal acts often diverge much further from the undisputed epistles’ portrait of Paul than Luke’s Acts does. As Stanley Porter points out, Pervo’s appeal to later “texts that are self-evidently derivative in order to assess the primary source” is “circular and anachronistic.”
Further, Acts more closely resembles historical monographs than it does the later fictitious apostolic acts. Adolf von Harnack, a noted student of the early Christian sources, concluded after his study of Acts, “The Acts is an historical work that has nothing in common with the later ‘Acts of the Apostles,’ and is not to be judged by the standard nor criticised by the method which suits these.” Acts contains little hagiography compared with the later stories. Luke does not substantially embroider his portrait of OT characters (see comment on Acts 7:20–22, the closest possibility) or Jesus (by elaborating Markan narratives in any typical haggadic manner), and so we have little reason to expect this approach in Acts. Perhaps no less tellingly, as noted above, Acts lacks the romance theme, which provides the undercurrent for the later acts (despite their emphasis on celibacy, their understanding of chastity evokes contemporary romances).
A leading Roman historian indeed argues that even the new novelistic form developed in imitation of the popular work Acts. (If this thesis is true, it might not shed light on Acts except to suggest that ancients found its style of narration sufficiently exciting to imitate.) This proposal may be questioned, as at least a form of novel predates Luke. Still, as a rule, novels were certainly more popular after rather than before Luke’s time (especially if Chariton’s romance belongs after the mid-first century). Many novels allude to customs from the second century C.E. or later, and they seem to cluster especially in the late second and early third centuries. Even if all the novels existed in the first century C.E., however, they would have offered a somewhat less ready model for Luke than historiography did. Despite its length and price, the ancients apparently owned copies of Herodotus’s history (predating Luke by many centuries) as often as all novels (from all periods) put together, and they owned Thucydides (also predating Luke by many centuries) nearly twice as often as these novels.
Even more important from the standpoint of genre, there is simply too much history in Acts to discount (see and below); history is not characteristic of the vast majority of novels. Novels might correctly present details of geography and local culture, but only very rarely were they as sensitive to historical details (and then not consistently). One may dispute differences of detail when comparing Paul’s letters with Acts, but the substantial overlap between the two sources is difficult to deny. For example, with the debated exception of Galatians, Paul’s letters coincide with where Acts reveals that he started churches; the chronology and itinerary coincide in the vast majority of details. And Acts provides the correct titles and names (Gallio, Felix, Festus) for local officials in the appropriate years (see the commentary ad loc.).
Few novels would care to include so much accurate historical information; novels, in fact, generally reflected the milieu of their readership more than that of their characters. David Konstan, a scholar who (like Pervo) has published much on ancient novels, notes, “History differs from fiction in that it is about what really happens or has happened, even if at times, or perhaps in the main, it gets things wrong. Herodotus may of course have been mistaken about events in the Persian War; the point is that there is something for him to have been mistaken about.” Novels, by contrast, were largely nonreferential. When Pervo argues that Acts was an ancient novel based on elements that some deem inaccurate, he does so by contrasting such novels with history, but his critics charge that, in so doing, he uses modern definitions of “history” and “plausibility,” not ancient ones.
In the end, most scholars reject the characterization of Acts as a novel. Ancient readers knew the genre of the novel but, in the overwhelming majority of cases, could distinguish between the narrative genres of history (where facts are important to the genre) and novel (where they are not). Even when historical works have incorrect facts, they do not become fiction, and a novel that depends on historical information does not become history; what distinguishes the two genres is the nature of their truth claims.
Yet Acts is certainly entertaining history, recounting “a dramatic and absorbing story.” The literary public was not large enough for political and other historians to gain an audience by simply recounting bare events. “The historian therefore had to recount in lively fashion events beyond his reach, and qualify ethically the personalities involved.” Interest in lively narration might be greater at a popular level, but by itself cannot identify the ancient genre. Such interest was not a matter of social class per se; even if novels were popular in style, their primary target audience may have been educated. As seen later, Luke writes at a more popular (though less rhetorically elaborated) level than most elite historians, as one might expect from the biographic component in his work.
Acts is not, then, strictly speaking, a novel, but literary comparisons with novels may retain some value. Ancient historians and biographers readily borrowed literary techniques from dramas and novels, and Luke is no exception. Acts is brief and focused enough to provide more narrative artistry and unity than found in historians such as Polybius or Livy. Acts’ percentage of asides supplying information necessary to its story line is comparable to that of the romances. And Luke at least twice reports conversations behind closed doors (Acts 5:34–39; 25:14–22) without clarifying whether information was leaked or whether these conversations are his summary of what must have been said to produce the known outcome.
Those who compare Acts to novels are correct to recognize its sustained movement. Apart from the significant space Luke allots to the speeches, Acts continues the movement and the action with little interruption. Even the speeches, which provide theological reflection, are usually brief (Acts 7 being the most notable exception) and feature most extensively the narratio, that is, the speeches’ narrative elements. Granted, Luke’s selected stories are “edifying” action, but they are action nonetheless, meant to hold attention. We should not overexegete or allegorize the purpose of recounting action scenes.
Why, for example, did Luke need to include the number of soldiers sent with Paul en route to Caesarea (23:23)? All questions of the number’s specific accuracy aside (see comment ad loc.), the number is useful to Luke, whatever his source. First, it may underline the importance that Paul the prisoner has acquired in the eyes of his Roman captors; this is important to Luke’s apologetic about Paul’s status despite his chains. Second, it emphasizes the extent of opposition the Roman commander anticipated, and thereby builds suspense, just as we would by selecting the most interesting aspects of our own adventures or travels when recounting them today and just as, in different ways, journalists (or their editors) and the more popular historical writers of our day would. Third, this detail in Acts invites Luke’s audience to consider God’s protection of Paul. Yet even if the information implied no “theology” in the most traditional sense (and certainly no pure logical discourse), it is part of good storytelling, whose techniques are as useful for recounting stories of actual events to a popular audience as they are for relating fictitious tales.
Further, as a selective writer, Luke probably uses models of the Hellenistic hero (as well as that of the sage and biblical models) to shape his presentation of information in Acts (e.g., 14:8–18; 17:16–34). But as Luke Timothy Johnson warns, literary artistry does not mean fiction: “All historical writing . . . demands a selection and creative shaping of materials, and all great histories have a large component of imagination.” Few modern historians would dismiss the historical value of Josephus or Suetonius simply because they include “gossip and exaggeration” or of Tacitus because he uses tragic motifs to tell his story. On the other hand, excessive dramatization drew ancient criticism; Polybius criticized “tragic historians,” who “improperly combined fictional drama with factual history.” (Different historians did draw lines in different places; see discussion in )
Thus one may disagree with Pervo’s thesis without dismissing out of hand the value of his work and that of other novel-oriented interpreters. Their literary work often remains insightful, and those of us who emphasize the historical genre of Acts may profit from many of their more specific observations.
Novels provide valuable comparisons for understanding the literary approaches used by ancient writers, especially on a popular level. In terms of genre, however, Acts much more closely fits the category of the historical monograph (see below) than that of the novel.
Contrary to what some scholars have claimed, such distinctions between historically substantive works and compositions relatively free from such constraints are hardly a uniquely modern, Enlightenment concern. Although interest in accurate information about the past marked the Enlightenment, it had also marked the Renaissance (and hence the Reformation) emphasis on the recovery of classical learning and revisited distinctions among genres already emphasized in antiquity (see discussion in below).
Sometimes these distinctions served polemic or apologetic purposes, but this was precisely because many thinkers believed that the nature of foundational claims mattered. “The distinction between myth (or fiction) and history” became one crux in early Christianity’s debates with its detractors. “Celsus describes the Gospels as fictions (πλάσματα) and viewed them as largely unhistorical,” one scholar notes, and Christians took the same approach toward Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius. Porphyry and Julian likewise claimed that the Gospels were fictions, fabricating stories and not history, and they apparently assumed “that one needs to show the falsity of the sources (e.g., the biblical literature) of the Christians’ message before one can stop the religion.” The detractors treated these works as fiction not because the works did not make historical claims but precisely because the early Christians appealed to the claims about history found in these documents.
Ancients, like moderns, recognized that one could communicate truths through fictitious stories, whether Jewish sages’ story parables, Greek fables, or philosophers’ illustrations. But the stakes changed once authors made claims about history, thereby inviting falsification. Early Christians and their critics recognized the genre of the Gospels and Acts as offering public claims in the arena of history (cf. Luke 1:1–4; 2:1–2; 3:1–2; Acts 26:26) and proceeded in their debate accordingly.
Some scholars have also compared Acts to epics. This comparison has been less common than that to novels but bears mention. Like novels, traditional epics are an essentially fictitious genre (despite typical use of past traditions, in contrast to novels). Scholars often cite this proposal in connection with Marianne Palmer Bonz’s comparison of Acts to Virgil’s Aeneid, a proposal to which I shall shortly turn. First, however, I should note the work of Dennis MacDonald, who argues that Luke seeks to evoke Homer in a manner that his audience would recognize. I am mentioning separately MacDonald’s work, which is always intriguing even when one disagrees with it, because his proposed allusions to Homer, the most widely read author of Greek antiquity (see comment on Acts 17:28), call for examination regardless of the question of genre on which this chapter focuses.
MacDonald establishes criteria, such as density, sequence of parallels, and distinctive traits, to identify Homeric allusions. But not all the features he identifies as distinctive in the NT texts he analyzes were rare enough in ancient literature to be genuinely distinctive of Homer. Moreover, nearly all of Luke’s marked citations, plus many allusions, are to the Jewish Bible, and none are clearly to Homer. Although Homer is part of Acts’ larger Greco-Roman context, most critics find MacDonald’s emphasis on a pervasive allusion to Homer unconvincing, especially because of his search for a single decisive “hypotext,” an emulation that is “not recognized,” and in this work neglect for the more explicit “OT intertextuality” in Acts. Because Hellenistic Jewish writers could draw on elements of Greek as well as traditional Jewish culture, OT and Greek intertextuality need not be mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, Luke does not display Hellenistic allusions to anything like the degree found in, for example, Philo or the Sibylline Oracles, and so the overt Jewish-biblical echoes must count more heavily than less overt Hellenistic ones.
If Homeric allusions offered at least an initially plausible hypothesis for the eastern Mediterranean, Marianne Palmer Bonz’s comparison of Acts with Virgil’s Aeneid might be relevant for a Roman audience. Nevertheless, this Latin classic seems a less obvious model for a work in Greek probably addressing an eastern Mediterranean audience for whom Roman citizenship bespeaks significant status. Even in elite Roman works from the early empire that contain some language identical to phrases in Virgil, some scholars deny that these echoes (as opposed to larger quotations) are intentional. Some others accept the echoes as deliberate yet doubt that the literary allusion affects the meaning. Luke’s language, which often quotes and even more often evokes the LXX (especially early in the work), lacks even such clear phrases from Virgil.
Moreover, Loveday Alexander warns that Luke’s prologue does not fit conventions expected in epic. More significantly, the most obvious difference between Acts and ancient epics, which most clearly disqualifies the work from this category, is that it is written in prose. This difference does not disqualify us from comparing Acts, to some extent, with epics as functionally analogous “foundation documents,” but it does limit the extent to which we push the comparison to epics, in contrast to a comparison to histories. That is, Luke’s genre simply is not epic; Greek and Roman epics were metrical poetry, generally in hexameter verse, a far cry from Luke-Acts.
Epic poems could address mythical beginnings (most commonly) or the more recent, historical period (as in Lucan’s Civil War or Silius Italicus’s Punica); the writers of the latter kind took the same literary liberties granted to all epic poets, but elaborated historical rather than mythical events. Their liberties, however, suit a poetic genre to which Luke-Acts does not belong. Writers putting recent history into epic form turned it, by definition, into poetry, not simply interesting prose. Early Greek historians distinguished themselves from epic poets not only by using prose but by explicitly identifying themselves and the limits of their knowledge.
Among others, Alexander has critiqued Bonz’s thesis for these and other reasons. Those who call Acts an epic view it as a “prose epic,” but such a genre (in the narrow, conventional sense of epic) did not exist. By employing prose, one chose to write in a genre distinct from epic poetry, often retaining heroic ideology but avoiding mythology. Alexander rightly notes, “At the surface levels of discourse and narrative management, Acts is not an epic, and no ancient reader would suppose that it was.”
If Luke created a new genre along the lines of a “prose epic” (not generically recognizable to his contemporaries, in contrast to what could be expected for a putative poetic progenitor), we might think of Acts in terms of foundation stories. Some scholars compare, for example, Luke’s portrayal of the early Jerusalem community to typical ancient foundational mythologies. It has also been argued that Luke employs literary strategies in key passages such as Acts 10:1–11:18 comparable to those in other foundation documents.
But once we distinguish foundation stories from epic, we should no longer expect in them the poetic license characteristically attached to the poetic genre of conventional epic. Scholars who view Acts as a prose epic seem to classify it not in terms of conventional epic but according to a broader literary definition assigned to a transcultural function of a foundation story. This classification, however, is a matter of function rather than genre, and illuminating as it might be to read Acts (or earlier biblical history) alongside such epics for their analogous “foundation” functions, these analogies reveal nothing about genre or clear imitation.
The comparison may thus be fruitful insofar as we think of Acts as a “foundation story,” but foundation stories are identifiable more by their function than by their form; ancient audiences would not treat all foundation documents as mythical. Foundation stories do not of themselves require us to expect mythical elements—and certainly not when they appear in histories (a genre explored in – below) dealing with the recent past. Historiography could draw on epic literary strategies and interests. Histories did not self-consciously create foundation myths the way Virgil did; Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus believed that they did their best to narrate truth about Rome’s origins, though acknowledging that early origins were shrouded in myth because they were so many centuries in the past (see the discussion below in ). Even in the mainly mythical period of their foundation stories, the historians follow sources, which is why they overlap with one another heavily; the problem is simply that the sources stem from long after living memory of eyewitnesses. Still more relevant is that Josephus’s and Luke’s audiences regarded the biblical story as accurate and hence would not expect foundation stories to be necessarily mythical. Foundation stories were normally traditional even when mythical, not simply exercises in literary creativity. This is a significant point when we consider that Luke reports recent events, which were the domain of contemporary historiography rather than of mythography (see the discussion in , below); Luke’s sources would not be shrouded in legend the way stories of many centuries past would be.
Bonz and MacDonald, however, mean more than simply analogous foundational function; they mean that Luke consciously evokes Virgil (Bonz) or Homer (MacDonald). Bonz’s claim that literary allusion to Virgil is “an epic feature” is a non sequitur; as Alexander notes, most echoes or even quotations of Virgil “fall a long way short of genuine imitatio,” and few who merely echoed or quoted Virgil intended to be understood as writing in the epic genre. Suggestions of large-scale imitation of Virgil or Homer rightly draw attention to the prominence of these authors in Luke’s world, but these theses look to models far less important to Luke and his Christian audience than Scripture was.
Luke’s conscious imitation of the LXX, by contrast, is widely acknowledged, although scholars differ on the nature of imitation. Most would include LXX influence at least in matters of style and theme and in the development of some narratives; Luke’s work also abounds in marked quotations of the LXX. Early Christians valued their Scriptures as foundation narratives in a manner that was even more central than Homer was for the Greeks.
Another possible genre is suggested by the second-century title: “Acts.” An appropriate title would stem from a work’s purpose or subject (Porph. Ar. Cat. 57.15–19). Our current title for Acts appears widely by the end of the second century, and it does fit the proliferation of apocryphal acts in second-century Christianity (closely related to the novelistic genre treated above). Such a correspondence with later Christian interests could be thought to risk an anachronistic reading of the evidence, but conversely, we need not suppose that the second-century church completely misunderstood the purpose of Acts.
The title of Acts designates “a specific Greek literary form, a narrative account of the heroic deeds of famous historical or mythological figures.” Such extended narratives of deeds might function epideictically (though with greater literary value) as something like an expansion of lists of exploits or achievements, or, especially for philosophers, peristasis catalogues (affliction lists). To some degree they might overlap with aretalogies, a listing of signs that a few scholars have compared to the Gospels or their sources. (As brief narrations or lists of divine acts, however, aretalogies cannot provide adequate analogies for finished literary works; aretalogy was not even a clearly defined genre.) Like the travel narrative, the category of “acts” can overlap with others. Fitzmyer, for example, takes this genre as fitting for a historical monograph.
But whatever the value of comparing other recitations of “acts” or “deeds,” the title Acts of the Apostles is certainly a misnomer. Even if we read Acts as biography rather than as history, it reports especially the acts of Peter and Paul; other figures who are somewhat prominent (e.g., Stephen, James, Silas, Apollos, and Priscilla and Aquila) are not named as “apostles,” and Paul (along with Barnabas) receives the designation in only one passage. The prominence of apostles in early chapters of Acts may have caused real readers to overestimate their significance for the book and thus contributed to the book’s second-century title.
Another objection proves more telling against the value of identifying Acts as belonging to a genre labeled “acts.” Because the designation is so nontechnical, Aune complains that it fits any narratives depicting “the accomplishments of noteworthy individuals or cities (whether mythical, historical, or fictional)” and hence “offers little help in determining the genre of Acts.” This disagreement raises the question of how we define genre, which may be a question of semantics. At the least the category of acts helps us understand the repeated use of particular narrative techniques. These techniques also characterize novels, but Acts shares them with novels because, like novels, it is popular literature and not because it is, strictly speaking, novelistic. Yet the category of acts is too broad to guide us in what to expect in the work (the purpose for defining genres), was not a clearly accepted distinct category in the first century, and must yield to accepted ancient genres that provide more specific direction for the interpretation of Acts.