Conclusion

Conclusion

Various proposed genres include elements relevant for the interpretation of Acts. Like a novel, it is an entertaining work on a popular level; like epic, it may function as a foundation document; and like a travel narrative (a theme found in various genres), it contains narratives driven by the theme of travel. Far more important is that, like biography, Acts focuses on particular characters (a focus still clearer in Luke’s previous volume, a biography about Jesus). Yet all of these elements may be found in ancient historiography, the most commonly proposed genre category for Acts. It is to this genre proposal that I now turn.

Cf. Shuler, Genre, 25–28; Hirsch, Interpretation, 68–126. Although genre categories cannot be applied rigidly, deconstructionist dismissals of their value are also misplaced (see Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 318–20).

Aune, Environment, 23. In spite of elaborate classifications, mixed genres were common in the early imperial period (idem, “Problem of Genre,” 10–11, 48; idem, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 307 [s.v. “Mixtum compositum”]; Burridge, Gospels, 33–34, 56–61; cf. Selden, “Genre,” 39–40), and continued later as well (e.g., Rohrbacher, “Digressions,” 470).

E.g., Quint. Inst. 10.1.36; Max. Tyre 26.4; 38.4. Admittedly, perhaps often not on the practical levels noticed by modern critics; see Conte and Most, “Genre.” Rhetoricians distinguished various categories for literary forms (e.g., Theon Progymn. 2.5–33). The library at Alexandria may have played a role in emphasizing genre for library classification (see Fuller, “Classics,” 189, summarizing George Kennedy’s oral contribution).

See, e.g., examples in Malherbe, “Theorists.” Different genres of speeches invited different styles (Dion. Hal. Demosth. 45–46);

Race, “Introduction,” 1.

Burridge, Gospels, 27–29.

For another summary, see Powell, Acts, 9–13.

See Spencer, Acts, 13–14; Marguerat, Actes, 24; Parsons, Acts, 15. Barrett, Acts, 2:lxxviii–lxxix, finds similarities to history (citing Plümacher), biography, and historical monograph, incorporating also elements of apology and Hellenistic romance.

Later rhetorical handbooks often define διήγησις as a larger story that may include component elements (Hermog. Progymn. 2, “On Narrative,” 4; Aphth. Progymn. 2, “On Narrative,” 22S, 2R; the fifth-century Nicolaus Progymn. 3, “On Narrative,” 12; cf. also Tannehill, Luke, 10; Aune, Environment, 116). By definition, ancients expected “history” to be narrative in form (Feldherr, “Introduction,” 3n4, citing Isid. 1.41.1 and Lucian Hist. 55).

E.g., Dion. Hal. Lysias 9. Sometimes (e.g., Or. 7; 19) Dio Chrysostom narrates a lengthy story (with himself inside it, perhaps true) to draw in the audience, then expounds his subject. A narrative introduction can characterize even dialogues (e.g., Tac. Dial. 1–3).

Talbert, “Chance,” 230; idem, Acts, xxv–xxvi. Others also view Acts as a “foundation story” (e.g., Pao, Isaianic Exodus, 3).

E.g., Letter of Aristeas is a διήγησις (so Let. Aris. 1; with, e.g., Bartlett, Jews, 11), and so is Josephus’s historical work (Ant. 11.68; 12.137; 20.157; War 7.42, 274; Life 336; cf. also 2 Macc 2:32; 6:17); but the two works have fairly little in common, and Sirach employs the term for discourse more generally (Sir 6:35; 9:15; 22:6; 27:11, 13; 38:25; 39:2). A cognate verb can apply to a novel (Char. Chaer. 1.1.1) or an oral narration (Char. Chaer. 2.2.6).

Knox, Acts, 55, citing parodies of fictitious travel literature in Lucian True Story 1, 3; a summary in Peregr. 9ff.; and true travels in Dio Chrysostom. He is not thinking of later “itineraries,” which lacked such narrative interest (on these see Purcell, “Itineraries”). Cf. Smith, “Understand,” 52–53. Malina and Pilch, Acts, 7, emphasize the ethnic (more than geographic) component of Luke’s “travel” narrative.

Much of Luke’s Gospel, too, is built around travel narratives (cf. Aune, Environment, 39, comparing the travels in Exodus through Deuteronomy but noting the difference of focus).

Pliny E. N.H. pref. 12–13, 16 notes (and may complain about) the popular taste for marvels rather than research.

Although Paul seems reticent to narrate many signs in his letters (cf. 2 Cor 12:5–6), he may have done so when the need warranted for defending his gospel (Gal 3:5; Acts 15:12), and others in his churches would have recalled especially those they saw (2 Cor 12:12).

Elsner, “Geography,” thinks that Philostratus uses Apollonius’s travel not simply as a narrative device but as part of his development into divinity. Elsner’s comparison with Acts’ use of Paul’s travels for “hagiography,” however, overstates Paul’s role in the book of Acts.

For travels of Elijah and Elisha, often in the same territories as Jesus, see 1 Kgs 17:9–10; 18:1, 46; 19:3, 15, 21; 21:18; 2 Kgs 1:3; 2:1–8, 18, 23; 3:11; 4:8–9, 25, 38; 6:1–3, 13, 19, 32; 8:7; cf. Samuel in 1 Sam 7:16). Even if these events were dischronologized because of the uncertain placement of individual events (though Luke generally reproduces the sequence of his sources, in contrast to Matthew), Luke avers that his sources are true (Luke 1:1–4).

Krasser, “Reading,” 554, citing Euhemerus, Iambulus, Lucian, and Antonius Diogenes.

Ibid., citing for travel reports Licinius Mucianus and periegetic texts such as Pausanias. Engels, “Geography,” 546–47, notes that periploi (based on sailors’ near voyages) served as precursors for later geographic and historical approaches. Thus Alexander, Context, 85, notes that one may compare Acts and novels on voyaging (the voyage may function as a plot, 70–75) so long as one keeps in mind that (85) “romance does not have a monopoly on voyage-narratives” (a point also emphasized in Marguerat, Histoire, 368, who thinks Acts closer to exploration narratives and narratives about settling colonies than to novels; in English, cf. Marguerat, Historian, 256).

Marguerat, Histoire, 368, emphasizing also its acknowledgment of the empire (pace many novels, which preferred earlier Hellenistic settings) and vindication of universalism. I regard as less secure his view that Luke writes in view of a decline of missionary travel in his day (368), since I believe that Luke intended his work to provide a missionary model as well as history.

For symposia, see, e.g., Aul. Gel. 7.13; Smith, Symposium, 49–56, 253; idem, “Fellowship”; Aune, Environment, 122.

See Talbert, “Monograph,” 58–72; Robbins, “Prefaces” (esp. parallels in prefaces in 95–100); idem, “Prefaces in Biography”; Porter, “Genre and Ethics,” 9. For parallels in prefaces, see Burridge, Gospels, 195.

See, e.g., the summary in Johnson, “Luke-Acts,” 406 (although he rejects this view, 406–7).

As often noted, e.g., Porter, “Genre and Ethics,” 8–15.

See Talbert, Gospel, passim; Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 128–34; Aune, Environment, 46–76; Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth, 117–36; Robbins, Jesus the Teacher, 10; Burridge, Gospels, 109–239; idem, “People,” 121–22; idem, “Biography, Ancient”; Cross, “Genres,” 402–4; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium als Biographie; Plümacher, Geschichte, 13–14; Keener, Matthew, 16–24; idem, John, 11–37; Ytterbrink, Biography; Crossan, “Necessary,” 27. Kee, Origins, 144–47, argues that Luke combined Mark with Greco-Roman biography; but Mark was itself already biography.

Stanton, New People, 63–64; idem, Gospel Truth?, 137, reversing his own earlier skepticism in idem, Gospels, 19.

See esp. Burridge, Gospels.

Talbert, “Review,” 715; cf. also Stanton, New People, 64.

Biographies of divine men appear only later, probably largely because the concept of divine men is later; see discussion in .

I leave aside the issue of novels, which I address separately in sect. 4 below (esp. showing their differences from Luke-Acts). For my argument regarding the Gospels as biographies, see also Keener, Historical Jesus, 73–84; idem, “Assumptions”; idem, “Biographies”; for my discussion regarding the character of biographies of recent figures in the early empire, see idem, “Otho.” Gospel synopses yield results comparable to these biographies. Some respondents to “Assumptions” questioned whether my characterization of ancient biographies of then-recent figures would apply to biographies about miracle workers, but this question confuses genre with subject, and might possibly presuppose views about miracle-working sages that are also open to challenge (see of this introduction; idem, Miracles). Put somewhat differently, I used for comparison the only sort of biographies from the period that were of recent figures, but there is no reason to expect subject to change comparability, especially as among historical Jesus scholars Jesus is widely agreed to have been a sage (we have abundant parallels for the preservation of sages’ teachings) as well as a miracle worker.

Witherington, Acts, 15–20. For history’s focus on events rather than on persons, see Lucian Hist. 7; biographical writers sometimes sought not only to recount deeds but to sketch the protagonist’s personality by his words and actions (Xen. Symp. 1.1). Talbert, Acts, 251, an advocate of biography, rightly notes that the boundary between biography and “a historical monograph about a single individual” is often difficult to discern. Collins, Mark, 33, notes affinities with didactic and historical biography; noting further that the distinction between historical biographies and historical monographs is a matter of degree, she prefers the latter emphasis without neglecting insights relevant to the former approach.

Without claiming that Acts is a biography, Klutz, Exorcism Stories, 13, emphasizes Luke’s audacity in combining a life of Jesus with a work focused on Paul.

At the least, Acts bears some resemblance to a double biography (concerning Peter and Paul; Berschin, “Biography,” 653.

Horsley, “Speeches,” 613; see, on the Gospels, Burridge, Gospels, 118, 141, 199. For length in distinguishing genre, see, e.g., Arist. Poet. 24.4, 1459b.

We are tempted to underestimate the expense entailed in producing multivolume works in antiquity; only the truly elite could afford such works, and this qualification would eliminate the vast majority of Luke’s potential audience in this period.

In this section, I am adapting and considerably augmenting my summary in Keener, John, 12–13, 15–16 (having followed Burridge’s now widely accepted view on the genre of the Gospels). Despite differences, ancient biography influenced modern forms (see, e.g., Mossman, “Plutarch and Biography”).

Certainly, boundaries between imperial biography and history weakened by the late first century (Hose, “Historiography: Rome”) because emperors, like Peter and Paul for Luke, were central to the historical action. Ancients did distinguish the genres (Feldherr, “Introduction,” 3n4, citing Plut. Alex. 1.1–2; Corn. Nep. Pel. 1.1). Although especially biographies, the Gospels also include historiographic elements (Byrskog, History, 45, noting esp. Cancik, “Gattung”), a point now sometimes noted even for the Fourth Gospel (esp. Bauckham, Testimony, 19–21, 93–112; idem, “Historiographical Characteristics”).

Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 136. Other classicists also recognize the close relationship (e.g., Bravo, “Antiquarianism,” 516); the boundaries between these two genres are quite “fluid” (Stadter, “Biography,” 528). For one recent examination of the level of historical content in biographies of then-recent characters, see Keener, “Otho.”

Burridge, Gospels, 149–52, 185–88. For the divergence, see further Barr and Wentling, “Biography and Genre,” 81–88, although I would not regard all their examples as biographies. Ps.-Callisthenes (treated below under novels) does not belong to the mainstream of this genre; Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 139, more accurately cites Plutarch and Suetonius (both from close to the Gospels’ period) as the prime examples of biography.

For substantial overlap between the biography and history (as well as other) genres in antiquity, see Burridge, Gospels, 63–67. Although biographers might “tweak” their sources and select the most useful, we should not downplay their mimetic function too much (cf. the comparison with artistic representation in Kaesser, “Tweaking”). Satirical elements appear in autobiographies of satirists (Keane, “Satiric Memories”).

Aune, “Biography,” 125. On its epideictic character, see, e.g., Penner, Praise, 135; this was also true of Jewish apologetic historiography (229–35). Against Shuler’s portrayal of the Gospels as encomiastic biography, see Collins, Mark, 30.

Ancients did, however, permit biography more freedom to be one-sided in praise than academic history (so Polyb. 10.21.8, contrasting depiction of someone in his history with an earlier biography he had written about the same person; cf. also comments about this approach to biography in Baynham, “Reception,” 294).

Fornara, Nature of History, 64–65.

E.g., Arrian Alex. 4.7.4; 4.8.1–4.9.6.

E.g., Plut. Cim. 2.4–5; Corn. Nep. 11 (Iphicrates), 3.2; Suet. Dom. 3.2. For Plutarch, see Lavery, “Lucullus.”

Philost. Vit. soph. 2.21.602–3. One might be thought biased when writing about close friends (Philost. Vit. soph. 2.33.628), but Tacitus wrote well of his father-in-law because he genuinely believed his virtues (Tac. Agr.). One pupil reportedly did omit some of his teacher’s sayings, but because they were rhetorically inappropriate (Philost. Vit. soph. 2.29.621).

Eunapius Lives 461 (on Iamblichus, who is supernatural in 459); Plut. M. Cato 5.1, 5; 12.4; for writers’ style, Dion. Hal. Thuc. 1. One could also disagree with the dominant view of one’s school (e.g., Sen. Y. Ep. Lucil. 117.6).

See, e.g., Sen. Y. Ep. Lucil. 108.17, 20, 22; 110.14, 20; Mus. Ruf. 1, p. 36.6–7 (Pythagoras’s disciples differed, but this was considered noteworthy—Val. Max. 8.15.ext. 1). Occasionally pupils could even turn against their teachers (Eunapius Lives 493), but in such a case, they would no longer claim his authority for the source of their teaching.

Fornara, Nature of History, 34–36, 116.

Lucian Hist. 7; also Witherington, Sage, 339, citing Plut. Alex. 1.1–2.

See Fornara, Nature of History, 185, perhaps overstating the contrast. Fleshing out character traits also appears in drama (e.g., tragedians expanding on Homeric characters) and practice orations (e.g., Dio Chrys. Or. 61, on Chryseis). Nevertheless, characterization does appear significantly in histories (Pitcher, “Characterization,” esp. 103–4, 106, 117; Vasaly, “Characterization,” esp. 245, 259), though sometimes indirectly (Pitcher, “Characterization,” 105, 107–10), through actions and words (110–12; speeches in Marincola, “Speeches,” 119) or other characters’ observations (Pitcher, “Characterization,” 107–8). Likewise, character development does appear in both history (e.g., Pitcher, “Characterization,” 115–17; see also, e.g., Tac. Ann. 6.51; cf. Tacitus’s clarity on characters in Hadas, “Introduction,” xiv–xv; e.g., Agrippina in Tac. Ann. 4.54; character changes in Vell. Paterc. 2.18.5; 2.25.3; 2.28.2) and novels (for one attempt to trace character development in Callirhoe, see Temmerman, “Beauty”; for some realism in this novel’s characterization, see idem, “Revisited”; for suggested character development in a mythic narrative in Apuleius, see Morwood, “Cupid”). Characterization methods in rhetoric may be useful for narrative (see Temmerman, “Rhetoric”). Even a single writer like Plutarch could hold both static and developmental approaches to character simultaneously (see Duff, “Models,” though attributing one to his philosophic and the other to his biographic approach).

For a discussion of some characters (especially divine and composite characters, such as God, Christ, Christians, Israel, and Gentiles), see Gaventa, Acts, 27–49.

Contrast, for example, Luke’s portrayal of Peter and Paul primarily as divine agents for spreading God’s word with Caesar’s politically charged depiction of Ariovistus (Caesar Gall. W. 1.31–54; Vasaly, “Characterization,” 247–51), Sallust’s hyperbolic depiction of Catiline (Sallust Cat.; Vasaly, “Characterization,” 251–55), and other characters starkly delineated as characters. Luke’s interest is more in the mission than in the individuals through whom it was being executed, though they are not as flat (cf., e.g., Peter’s development in Luke 5:8; Acts 10:28–29) as some of the characters (including Sallust’s uniformly evil Catiline) noted above.

For character traits in biographies, see, e.g., Corn. Nep. 4 (Pausanias), 1.1; Feldman, “Jehoram.” Sometimes biographers wrote for more leisurely, less technical audiences; see, e.g., Corn. Nep. 16 (Pelopidas), 1.1. If Luke writes both biography (the Gospel) and historical monograph (Acts), we may expect his audience to be more popular than that of some histories (but more technical than that of some biographies).

E.g., many political biographies (such as Plut. Caes. 1.1–4); the Life of Aesop (Drury, Design, 29); or Mark or (after his prologue) John.

Cf., e.g., the accidental repetition in Plut. Alex. 37.4; 56.1. This contrasts with the more chronological practice of historians (e.g., Thucyd. 2.1.1; 5.26.1), although even most historians tended to follow events to their conclusion, and not simply strict chronology (Dion. Hal. Thuc. 9; Pomp. 3); the writer of 4 Maccabees is aware that the mother’s speech should occur at a certain point in his narrative, and says so (4 Macc 12:7; cf. 2 Macc 7), but chooses to recount it later. Cf. topical digressions in Vell. Paterc. 1.14.1; 2.38.1–2.40.1; 2.59.1–6 (esp. 2.59.1). Topical arrangement suited episodic narratives about a person (Hemer, Acts, 74), and recollections were often random (Sen. E. Controv. 1.pref. 4).

Topical forms were much more common (Aune, Environment, 31–34, 63–64; Stanton, Jesus, 119–21), and Augustine did not expect the Gospels to be fully chronological (Harm. G. 21.51; for Mark, see Papias in Euseb. H.E. 3.39).

See 4Q158; Wise, “Introduction to 4Q158.”

Burridge, Gospels, 150; cf. Dihle, “Biography,” 367–74. One could learn from past teachers by proxy, as “disciples” of their recorded teachings (Robbins, Jesus the Teacher, 110–11).

Corn. Nep. 16 (Pelopidas), 1.1.

Burridge, Gospels, 151, 180; for apologetic autobiography, cf., e.g., Jos. Life 336–67; 2 Cor 11:8–33; Gal 1:11–24. Autobiographic writing in some form appears as early as ancient Egypt (Simpson, Literature of Egypt, 401–27), though honor conventions created some problems for it in Republican Rome (see Riggsby, “Memoir”; Cic. Fam. 5.12.8). For autobiography as a type of biography, often with apologetic or propagandistic purposes, see Stadter, “Biography,” 530.

Burridge, Gospels, 68–69.

See much fuller discussion in Keener, John, 25–29.

Stanton, Jesus, 126; Aune, Environment, 37. Jewish haggadic expansions of pentateuchal characters (on which cf., e.g., Fisk, “Bible”; Harrington, “Bible”) are not close. The suggestion that ancient Near Eastern models provided the later Greek emphasis on individual characters (cf. Dihle, “Biography,” 366–67) is overstated. Nevertheless, this is not to deny the possible influence of ancient Near Eastern biographic forms as mediated through Judaism (cf. Collins, Mark, 29, on 30 also noting Dormeyer, Evangelium, 168–73); it is only to keep in mind that the Gospel writers, and especially Luke, apparently wrote in Greek for Mediterranean audiences.

See, e.g., Begg, “Elisha’s Deeds”; idem, “Jotham”; idem, “Rape of Tamar”; and other sources in the bibliography.

See, e.g., Van Veldhuizen, “Model of Philanthropia,” 215–24; Höffken, “Hiskija”; Feldman, “Jacob”; idem, “Jehu”; idem, “Joshua”; idem, “Samson”; idem, “Saul”; idem, “Solomon”; idem, “‘Aqedah”; idem, “Concubine”; Begg, “Zedekiah”; the multiple articles by Feldman and Begg in this commentary’s (which lists only a sampling); and further discussion on Josephus below. Some particular adaptations are debated (e.g., Roncace, “Portraits”; Feldman, “Roncace’s Portraits”; Roncace, “Samson”).

Cf. Rajak, “Justus of Tiberias,” 92.

Canevet, “Remarques sur l’utilisation.” Philo adjusts figures to suit his idealizations of virtue (cf. Petit, “Traversée exemplaire”).

See Aune, Environment, 41–42.

Biographies of recent figures could reflect substantial information. I found roughly fifty points of significant correspondence between Suetonius’s biography of Otho and Tacitus’s account in his history (not implying that Suetonius invented information where we cannot test him, against the evidence we do have); roughly the same figure applies to correspondences between Suetonius and Plutarch, and I found twenty-eight further points of close correspondence between Plutarch and Tacitus. If we were to expect an analogous degree of correspondences in Mark with contemporary information as we find between Suetonius and Tacitus here, given that Mark is roughly six times the length of Suetonius’s essay, we might have more than 280 points of correspondence (see Keener, “Otho”; idem, “Assumptions”).

Though Nepos is the earliest Roman biographer whose work remains extant, others wrote before him (see Pryzwansky, “Cornelius Nepos,” surveying also scholarship on Nepos), and many Greeks wrote earlier (see, e.g., Collins, Mark, 32, following Momigliano, Biography, 28–30, 36–38).

See, e.g., Culpepper, John, 64–66; so also some of Josephus’s biographies (see Van Veldhuizen, “Moses,” 215–24). Some later examples of this form may borrow the gospel form (see Dillon and Hershbell, “Introduction,” 25, who also suggest that John’s Gospel may well have been available), but Peripatetics displayed special interest in philosophers’ biography as early as the fourth century B.C.E. (Laistner, Historians, 18). “Lives” of divine men might provide the closest content, but these appear especially in the third century; they may depend on the Gospels, and the reverse cannot be true chronologically.

Pointed out by, e.g., Aune, Environment, 77; Peterson, Acts, 11. Many scholars contend that attempts to fit Acts into the genre of biography have not proved satisfactory (Plümacher, Geschichte, 1–4; Penner, Praise, 4).

Juel, Promise, 63.

Cf. Burridge, “Genre of Acts,” 28: “a ‘biographical monograph.’”

Balch, “ΜΕΤΑΒΟΛΗ ΠΟΛΙΤΕΙΩΝ,” 143 (noting also, 143–44, that even Plutarch, who distinguishes history from biography in Alex. 1.1, elsewhere [e.g., Comp. Thes. Rom. 1.2] views his work as “history”). Biographic material does not make a work biography per se (Stadter, “Biography,” 528–29). Although noting some typical distinctions between biography and history, Talbert, Acts, 251, helpfully notes that many histories contain biographic sections (citing Polyb. 9.22; 10.2.2; Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. 5.48.1; Diod. Sic. 17; Jos. Ant. 14–17; Dio Cass. 45–56; 73.11.2–4; Euseb. H.E. 6).

Aune, Environment, 121. If “biography” proper does not describe the work, “biographic history” may work better (see, e.g., Dormeyer, “Gattung,” 461–65, 475, noting the utility of this category for parallels among figures, esp. on 464–65).

Alexander, “Biography,” 56; cf. idem, Context, 43–68. On philosophic biography, see briefly Stadter, “Biography,” 529–30.

Although Diogenes Laertius and others recount anecdotes about philosophers, Eunapius (Lives intro. 452–53) portrays Xenophon as rare for focusing on Socrates’s deeds as well as words. Of the treatments of Socrates mentioned in Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 128–34, Xenophon’s thus is closer to biographic character than the others (though not itself a biography). Schneider, “Zweck,” also compares Luke-Acts with Diogenes Laertius. Later, see especially Iamblichus’s Pythagorean Life (which involves not only Pythagoras; Dillon and Polleichtner, Iamblichus, xiv).

Chance, “Perspectives,” 200 (more fully, 181–201); Aune, Environment, 78–79; Pervo, Acts, 16. (Succession narratives in general, however, are more widespread, as in the Elijah-Elisha cycle; see comments on .)

Talbert, “Chance,” 233–34. He also notes that the asymmetry (most succession lists or narratives are much briefer than the founder’s biography, in contrast to what we find in Luke-Acts) is irrelevant to the question of genre (Acts, xxiii).

See Balch, “Genre,” 6, who also contends that Luke-Acts addresses the issue of succession to promises in the Hebrew Bible, not just to Jesus, and is not focused on “individual, institutional successors of Jesus.” Acts certainly does focus particularly on Peter and Paul, but Balch is right to note the disjunction of form.

Regarding function, Talbert’s parallels to succession narratives or histories for single schools (Acts, xix–xx) may prove most helpful.

Division into volumes sometimes served literary purposes as well as limitations of space (cf. Royse, “Philo’s Division”).

Sterling, Historiography, 319; less relevant to the genre question, he observes that Diogenes’s concern is “who studied with whom” whereas Luke’s is legitimacy (320).

Talbert, Mediterranean Milieu, 19–43; for its appearance in many genres, see esp. 41–43, 50.

Ibid., 43–50.

He regards biographies as the closest formal analogies (ibid., 50–55) but acknowledges that Luke-Acts, as a whole, has adapted the form that appears elsewhere primarily as units within larger works (52).

Burridge, “Genre of Acts,” 28, notes that it is often difficult to distinguish biography, a one-volume genre, from historical monographs (cf. also 9).

Burridge, “Genre of Acts,” 28 (cf. also 7).

Ibid., 28, rightly emphasizes the flexible boundaries between ancient biography and historiography.

See, e.g., Palmer, “Monograph (1993),” 3; Parsons, “Unity: Rethinking”; Pervo, “Same Genre?”; Parsons and Pervo, Rethinking, 20–44 (though overstating the case).

E.g., Penner, Praise, 59 (noting also idem, “Madness”; idem, “Reconfiguring”).

Marshall, “Treatise,” 180; Barrett, Acts, 2:lxxviii–lxxix (also admitting some other less dominant elements); Verheyden, “What Are We Up To?,” 47 (citing Marshall; Hemer, Acts in History, 33–43, 63–100; Barrett, Acts, 2:lxxix). Penner, Praise, 135 (who overemphasizes encomium), suggests that “the line between history, encomium, and biography was becoming difficult to establish firmly.” Dormeyer and Galindo, Apostelgeschichte, 19, regard it as the remains of a declining form of “biographischen, pathetischen Geschichtsschreibung.” Marguerat, Histoire, 49, sees Acts as primarily historiography but notes that this is not easily separated from biography.

Admittedly, the qualification “extant” naturally favors elite over popular historiography.

See Moessner, “Re-reading.” Stuhlmacher, “Genre(s),” carries this too far in playing down the Gospel’s biographic character in arguing against Shuler, “Genre(s).” One approach that would allow Acts to remain a historical monograph while preserving the same genre for both volumes is to treat the Gospel as a historical monograph as well; in fact, some treat the Gospels as fitting the genre of history (e.g., Dihle, “Biography,” esp. 379, 381; see my response in Keener, John, 11). Most notably, Adela Yarbro Collins assigned even Luke’s primary model for his first volume, the Gospel of Mark, to this genre, arguing in part that biography focuses more on models for individual living (see, e.g., Life of Jesus, 40–46; idem, Beginning, 24–27). More recently she has offered a nuanced position that brings together insights from various approaches, and from which I may differ only in emphasis; she notes useful insights in the biography analogy (Mark, 22–33, esp. 33), while preferring more analogies from the historiographic approach (33–42), blending Jewish and Greek cultures to envision an eschatological historical monograph (42–52). I argue below that ancient historiography also provided such models, and would argue that a historical monograph about a person would be read as a biography; but in any case ancient biography was closely related to historiography by this period, so that in a range of positions these are not very far apart.

Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 578 (citing Philo Mos. 1.1 as an obvious example).

Burridge, Gospels, 246. Also noted above is the existence of smaller, biographic sections of histories, e.g., Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. 4.41–85, on Tarquin.

Walaskay, Came to Rome, 59; cf. Aune, Environment, 77 (noting that Luke could be biography but, as part of Luke-Acts, is history). Cf. Bruce, Acts³, 30: Luke writes history and “develops his theme biographically.”

Of course, that he devotes an entire volume to Jesus’s story, following the biographic form already circulating (Mark being one prior example), suggests that his interest is in Jesus’s story as not solely a transitional preface to Acts but a part of Luke’s story in its own right.

Cf. Barr and Wentling, “Biography and Genre,” who appreciate generic similarities with biography without assigning Acts to that genre. They also show the wide divergence in the nature of biographies (81–88), though some examples they cite I would not count as biographies per se. One danger of Luke’s biographic approach to history, analogous to that of some other historians from his era (cf. Laistner, Historians, 108–9, on Velleius), is the omission of other lines of causation.

For application of this comparison also to the Gospels, see, e.g., Mac. Magn. Apocrit. 2.12–15 (possibly by Porphyry); Mack, Myth, 11, 322–23. Fullmer cites novelistic stylistic characteristics in Luke’s source Mark, such as parataxis (Resurrection, 15–16), episodic plot development (Resurrection, 17–22), and lively tempo (Resurrection, 22–26); but parataxis is popular Semitic (and probably Koine) style, and episodes characterize biographies (which often depended on anecdotes). Fullmer’s contrast with elite literature is appropriate, but novels are not the only works written on a popular level. Valuable literary comparisons between Mark and a novel (without asserting that Mark is one) appear in Starner, Kingdom.

For broader use to illumine NT texts’ social world, see also Hock, “Why Read.” Malina and Pilch, Acts, 3–5, argue that the broader emphasis on reading Scripture, other literary works, or human life on the analogy with (modern) novels stems from the Romantic period.

One should beware, however, reading some modern novelistic techniques (such as unreliable narrators) into ancient texts (see Kurz, Reading Luke-Acts, 169–70). Josephus may employ some storytelling devices from novels to develop his biographies of biblical characters (cf. Silver, “Moses and Birds”).

Cf. Troftgruben, “Ending,” 145, 232. On New Comedy as a possible precursor to elements of the ancient novel, see Konstan, “Invention,” 9–10. Cf. perhaps even reuse of names like “Chaireas” (Menander and Chariton).

E.g., Homer Od. 9.37–12.453; Heliod. Eth. 1.1 (the background for this scene is not described until 5.28–33); 2.25–4.21.

E.g., Heliod. Eth. 2.11; suspending action appears also in the Hebrew tradition (cf. Gen 38, interrupting the direct account of Joseph in Gen 37 and 39).

E.g., Dion. Hal. Lysias 13; Cic. Verr. 2.5.5.10–11; Sen. E. Controv. 4.pref. 1.

One could object that we cannot know that Polybius arranged the material deliberately to create suspense, yet the same objection could be raised concerning our ignorance of Luke’s motives where we are tempted to attribute his suspended narratives to a storyteller’s suspense.

E.g., Vell. Paterc. 2.26.1.

See Pervo, Profit, passim; cf. also Praeder, “Luke-Acts and Novel.” Given the sometimes acrimonious debates in which scholars engage, I should preface my further comments by warning that my obvious disagreement with Pervo on the question of genre should not be construed as disrespect for his extensive and informed work on the subject. Nevertheless, it appears to me that despite many valuable literary features in his commentary (Acts, passim), Pervo fairly often questions the plausibility of Luke’s scenes by approaching them with a default setting of suspicion so strong that it would undermine the plausibility of most historical narratives. Rather than pause over every such question he raises (though I answer some indirectly through historical parallels), we may note here that all narratives (including modern eyewitness reports) deconstruct on some level because none supplies the information needed to answer every possible question. The worst cases might simply impugn Luke’s literary skill in those passages. Pervo also frequently offers his negative opinions on Luke’s theology or other perspectives (more than in typical commentaries, though no more than Haenchen). Rather than challenge these opinions piecemeal, I simply observe here that, presumably, some modern readers will share Pervo’s opinions whereas others demur, since I doubt that close attention to the text, by itself, necessarily confers on biblical scholars the status of the best available ethicists, political theorists, etc. Sometimes Pervo also makes correct literary observations, but he assumes that Lukan literary patterning is incompatible with historical substance, an assumption that does not consistently hold for ancient historiography more generally (see our observations in of this introduction). See at somewhat greater length Keener, “Review of Pervo.”

Pervo, Profit, 103. One observes historical figures even in the ancient Egyptian Tales of Magicians (Papyrus Westcar), concerning characters from a millennium earlier (Kitchen, World, 61–62). Typically, however, novels portray historical figures anachronistically, often placing them in the wrong periods (see examples in Morgan, “Fiction,” 554; cf. also Tob 1:2–4; Jdt 1:1, 7). Novels often employ historiographic devices for plausibility, but tongue in cheek, because “both sender and recipient recognize” that it is fiction (Morgan, “Fiction,” 555), playful rather than deceptive (556–57).

Pervo, Profit, 115–31 (including pagan examples, 115–16; Jewish, 116–21, esp. Joseph and Aseneth; and Christian, 121–31, esp. apocryphal acts, 122–31); in Acts, 15, he even calls Joseph and Aseneth and Ps.-Callisthenes “history,” completely eliminating boundaries. Even works outside the narrative genre could include historical data; e.g., Sib. Or. 5.1–50 recites recent history accurately from its author’s conceptual standpoint (i.e., including legends he assumes to be historical) despite some confusion (cf. 5.460–63). One could cite here many Jewish works about biblical characters (see Keener, John, 25–29), but the genre differs starkly from Luke-Acts, which is set in the “real” world, anchored in sources (at least in the Gospel), and connected with history in Acts. Whereas some scholars have suggested that most novels adopted titular forms from historiography (suggesting realism; cf. Xenophon of Ephesus Anthia; Heliodorus Ethiopian Story), others contend that most novels’ titles name the chief characters (e.g., Chariton Chaereas and Callirhoe; Achilles Tatius Clitophon and Leucippe; see Whitmarsh, “Titles”). Wills, “Aesop Tradition,” 224–25, rightly notes the fictitious material in many popular lives, but his examples concern figures of the distant, often legendary past. Granted that there is overlap of elements in many cases (Nicolai, “Place of History,” 18–19), historiography is still distinguishable from poetry (see our – below).

Pervo broadens the category to include some works that are more historical; see Sterling, Historiography, 320n50. Porter, Paul in Acts, 15, is harsher. Marguerat, Historian, 29, notes, against Pervo, that historical novels did not constitute “a literary genre in antiquity.”

Fictitious stories about historical characters long predate Xenophon; see, e.g., Simpson, Literature of Egypt (“Introduction to King Cheops and the Magicians,” 13–14).

Bosworth, “Pseudo-Callisthenes,” opines that “the historical nucleus is small and unusable”; cf. likewise Zambrini, “Historians,” 211, rightly distinguishing this “popular fiction” from Alexander histories. The fictionalizing (or epicizing) of historic events such as we find in Lucan’s Civil War is mainly limited to poetry (cf. Fantuzzi, “Historical epic”).

Using Philostratus as a source for the first century is problematic (Kee, Miracle, 288).

For two fictitious eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War, see Merkle, “True Story,” 183–84; Schmeling, “Spectrum,” 23. Many scholars think that Philostratus’s main “source” for Apollonius’s life, Damis, is a fiction of either Philostratus (Jones, “Passage”; Klauck, Context, 170) or an earlier pseudepigrapher (though cf. Conybeare, “Introduction,” vii).

E.g., Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (though developed from an earlier story also attested in Lucian); Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (developed from an artistic representation); Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe.

Historical novels today (as well as some biographies), such as those of Anne Rice, likewise have detailed scenes quite different from the texture of Luke-Acts. Historical novels have their valuable place as a genre, but Acts is not written like one. Pervo, “Direct Speech,” compares the high degree of direct discourse in Acts to that in novels, but novels do not normally use many orations the way that Luke and other historians do.

I know of no true exceptions, but it was not impossible for a novel to recycle earlier novelistic material: much of the story line found in Lucian’s Lucius appears later in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses.

Pervo, Profit, 130.

Aune, Environment, 151–52; Lalleman, “Apocryphal Acts,” 67; Rebenich, “Historical Prose,” 307–8; Bauckham, “Acts of Paul”; Keylock, “Distinctness,” 210; Krasser, “Reading,” 554; Hofmann, “Novels: Christian,” 846–48; Perkins, “World.” Pervo responds by dating Luke’s Acts to the second century (though before Acts of Paul), but see below. Pervo, “Fabula,” compares the apocryphal acts with the Aesop Romance (Life of Aesop).

For similarities and differences between Luke’s Acts and the apocryphal acts, see, e.g., Bovon, “Canonical and Apocryphal Acts” (the substance of the article also appears as Bovon, “Apostelakten”).

Instead of checking his own assertions with external data (contrast the numerous comparisons with such data in Hemer, Acts in History), Pervo (Profit, passim) often simply treats stories as unbelievable and biased—while simultaneously faulting Luke (64) for simply ridiculing his opponents!

Pervo separates the Gospel from Acts, an approach most scholars today find questionable (e.g., Sterling, Historiography, 320), though we should note that Pervo does not separate them in all respects (see below).

Porter, “‘We’ Passages,” 550, shows that most ancient novels were not historical novels (possibly excepting Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance, neither of which became a standard generic model) and comments, “Thus Pervo is in danger of creating a new and unique genre for Acts.”

Greek and Roman novels typically reflect the milieu of their ideal readers; see Wiersma, “Novel.”

Penner, Praise, 136–37, notes that whereas everyone acknowledges 1 Maccabees as history, the measure of history and fiction in 2 Maccabees is debated. (Third Maccabees is, of course, agreed to be a novel; see, e.g., Johnson, “Fictions”; Hacham, “Polemic.”) Penner, Praise, 138, suggests that many texts belong in the intermediate category of “historical novels”; while this is partly a matter of definition, the category shrinks considerably so long as one recognizes a degree of fictionalization in some history, as opposed to novelists who took a free or (in the rare cases of “historical novels”) a mostly free hand. Droge, “Anonymously,” 515, correctly (if understatedly) notes that “the romances do not purport to be a historical record of facts in quite the same way as Luke-Acts does.”

Luke’s claims in Luke 1:1–4 certainly fit much better in the large number of works whose authors view themselves as writing history rather than historical novels. A prologue like Luke 1:1–4 in a historical novel would appear as deliberate deception, not a literary device.

Ehrensperger, Power, 11, rightly observes that among Jews most intellectual leaders were not economically elite. Smith, “Understand,” 50, also highlights the “popular” audience of Luke-Acts, connecting this with novelists. But even if elite histories were more apt to be preserved (especially in multiple volumes), popular interest in historical (or purportedly historical) figures persisted (e.g., Life of Aesop, though its traditions are mostly from a distant era, hence legendary; on the weakness of Life of Aesop as a parallel for Gospel genre, see, e.g., Wojciechowski, “Aesopic Tradition,” 101–2). That is, the audience level cannot infallibly predict the genre.

Smith, “Understand,” 49–50. Their primary readership, however, was people literate, leisured, and well-to-do enough to afford them (see Bowie, “Readership,” 452–53; Stephens, “Who Read Novels?,” 415). Some find evidence of rhetorical training (Fernández-Garrido, “Stasis-theory”); certainly most extant novels display some rhetorical knowledge (though works from the literate class have undoubtedly survived disproportionate to their numbers).

Smith, “Understand,” 49.

Cf. Hofmann, “Novels: Christian,” 847, noting the later works’ “large ration of the absurd,” such as “talking dogs and competitive displays of magic, sky travels and a miracle competition (Acts of Peter), obedient bed-bugs (Acts of John), baptized lions (Acts of Paul),” and “cannibals (Andrew and Matthew among the anthropophagoi).”

Already Thucydides borrowed narrative techniques from dramatists; see Finley, Thucydides, 322–23.

Exceptions might include, e.g., Lucan novelizing (or epicizing) the Roman civil war, but his poetic form and other factors reveal his generic agendas clearly instead of leading anyone to suppose that he writes historical prose.

See Burridge, Gospels, 245; Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 285; Peterson, Acts, 13; cf. Porter, “‘We’ Passages,” 551–52; for similar literary methods in various narrative genres, Penner, Praise, 137. Likewise, the difference between historians and poets was not their use of narrative devices, but “that historians research and present past realities” (Gray, “Narrative Manner,” 342; cf. similarly Arist. Poet. 9.2–3, 1451b).

Marguerat, Historian, 29.

Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 291–92. Elite readers expected proper rhetorical form for historiography (Cic. De or. 2.64) and expected rhetorically superior historiography to flourish (Cic. Leg. 1.5–7); Acts, which is on a more popular level, survived for other reasons.

Soards, “Review,” 309; see further Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 337–38 (citing Soards [338]). Some reviewers do treat Pervo more favorably (e.g., Edwards, “Earliest Christianity”).

Smith, “Understand,” 49–50. He does note historiographic forms (50n14); he emphasizes novelistic travel narratives (50–53), which I addressed above.

Ibid., 49. For this focus (with only hints of Rome), see, e.g., Chariton, in Schwartz, “Rome in Novel.”

A revival of the popularity of Hellenistic culture in the early second century precedes the majority of extant novels. Some Romans nevertheless continued to maintain a Western bias; cf., e.g., Pliny the Younger (engrossed in Roman public life) in Méthy, “Monde.”

Schwartz, “Trial Scenes,” 109, 117, also notes this contrast between Acts and Greek novels. Alexander, Context, 8, shows that there is little concrete overlap between the toponyms in Acts and those in select novels. Whereas novelists deliberately avoided Rome, Luke offers a more “realistic political landscape,” and one in which (as in Paul’s letters) Roman-named locations figure heavily (111). She suggests (114) that Luke, in fact, reverses the traditional Greek perspective; Syria and Phoenicia are home, but moving into the Aegean region is exploration; the only “barbarians” are in the West (Acts 28:2), and Athenians are called superstitious (17:22). Acts, like novels, lists more coastal locations than do Paul’s letters (118); but Luke includes Paul’s travels, and where he focuses on planted churches, he is much closer to Paul’s own topography.

Schwartz, “Trial Scenes,” 117; Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 320.

Often novels moved throughout the Greco-Mediterranean world and beyond (cf. Konstan, “Invention,” 13). Even what Luke says about the African court official, however, does not fit the “exotic” information found in novels (see Keener, “Official,” challenging the suggestion in Pervo, Dating Acts, 32).

Lucian True Story 1.2. The philosophers in 1.4 probably include Plato.

Lucian True Story 1.3 (e.g., Ctesias on India). Ctesias was distinctively noteworthy for his inaccuracy; far from being a normal historian, his mixture of imagination was often disapproved (Brown, Historians, 77–78, 86).

That there were major (albeit small) Roman colonies there does not mean that these sites were familiar to Luke’s audience; Greek literature celebrated Greece, Macedonia, Ionia, and the Aegean islands, but Lycaonia was much lesser known, and its towns are much rarer in contemporary literature. E.g., whereas merchants from some other Anatolian towns of comparable size were active even in Greece and Italy, few are attested from Pisidian Antioch (Levick, Roman Colonies, 101).

Moreover, Paul must have experienced some success in starting churches; his letters suggest this success no less than Acts (e.g., 1 Cor 4:15; Gal 2:20–3:2; 4:11–14; Phil 1:5, 30; 4:15–16; 1 Thess 1:5–9), although focusing more on subsequent issues in the life of these churches. Further, even if we lacked Paul’s letters, the churches were founded in this period by someone, and this tradition would likely be known to them. Why could it not be Paul, who must have gotten his reputation as a church planter somewhere?

Smith, “Understand,” 50.

See Keener, John, 9–10; see also below.

Smith, “Understand,” 50.

Pervo, Profit, 18. Witherington, Acts, 379, points out that Acts, far from supporting a divine-man portrayal of Paul, explicitly refutes those who hold that view in the story world (Acts 14:15; for Peter, 10:26).

Thus, by contrast, Lentz, Luke’s Portrait, 107, 169, emphasizing Luke’s portrayal of Paul’s status, thinks that Luke probably suppressed some of Paul’s harsh treatments. Acts may include too many Pauline sufferings to sustain Lentz’s thesis and surely contains too few to sustain Pervo’s (cf. also Parsons, Acts, 320, against Haenchen, Acts, 113–14). Trompf, Retributive Justice, 89, strikes the right balance, noting Luke’s approach in the larger context of the moral emphases of Hellenistic historiography.

There are some important differences (see this commentary’s comment on the passage), but the substance of an escape down the wall in Damascus—the heart of the “escapade” element—remains the same.

Although robbers on land remained, the empire had generally suppressed pirates—a fact one would not readily gather from novels, which often relished depictions of piracy (Wallace and Williams, World, 28).

Because I wrote and told fictional stories before seeking to narrate popular but true ones, I had a sense of how to select, arrange, and recount in a more intriguing way, yet without changing facts or inventing information, the true stories of my wife’s survival as a refugee in the Congolese forest, on the basis of her recollections and journals. (The popular liberties we have taken in telling the story include omitting our documentation [date references from her journal, in French] and slightly recasting speech [which usually was not recalled verbatim and often had to be translated anyway] in our own words, without altering the content of the story or speech.) But given the divergent generic markers, no one is likely to confuse my earlier recounting of fiction (had I published it) with my recounting of our genuine experiences.

Pervo, Profit, 105–8, lists “typical features” of novels (without noting their presence in historical works). Cf. Pervo, “Meet Right” (contrasting “good” church meetings with uncontrolled public mobs; see comment at Acts 15:25). Without arguing that novels are the only influence on Luke-Acts’ genre, Ascough, “Technique,” helpfully provides comparisons for Chariton’s novelistic crowd scenes; but despite the organizing use of literary conventions (which could be shared with, or borrowed by, other genres), novels at many points reflected social reality, including about crowds (on which see Rapske, Custody, 121–23; comment on Acts 7:54–8:1a). Whereas Ascough finds few crowd scenes in ancient biography and a limited number in political historiography, one might expect more in a work focusing on public preaching (see below) and its reception.

See Porter, “‘We’ Passages,” 552; Aune, Environment, 80; Witherington, Acts, 377–78. The romances typically do share with Acts travel, imprisonments, storms, shipwrecks, and trials, but they also have erotic romance and typically “kidnapping by pirates, enslavement,” and “attempted seduction by powerful rivals” before the separated lover and beloved are finally reunited (Fusillo, “Novel,” 838).

E.g., Lucian Peregr. 43. See detailed discussion in this commentary on Acts 27.

See, e.g., Porter, Paul in Acts, 18–24, including a critique of Robbins here. See more fully the discussion on Acts 27.

Porter, “‘We’ Passages,” 552.

These are hardly limited to novels (where e.g., Fullmer, Resurrection, 45–46, gives helpful examples of irony). They appear, e.g., in Paul (cf., e.g., Linss, “Humor”) and, more clearly, elsewhere in letters (Cic. Att. 9.25.2; Pliny Ep. 1.21.1–2; though cf. Malherbe, “Theorists,” 17), rhetoric (Cic. Brut. 43.158; Or. Brut. 26.88–90; 40.138; Rabbie, “Wit and Humor”), Cynic attention-getting (Branham, “Humor”), philosophic reasoning (Fronto Fer. als. 3.5), forensic speeches (Cic. Verr. 2.5.10.25), public debate and satire (Xen. Cyr. 2.2.16; Cic. Fin. 4.26.73; Brut. 93.322; De or. 2.58.236; 2.61.251; Plato Sophist passim; Dio Chrys. Or. 31.9–10; Plut. St. Poets 4, Mor. 1058c; Apul. Metam. 3.4–6; Tert. Apol. 40.2), and hostile interpersonal exchanges (Ach. Tat. 6.12.1); more generally, Suet. Vesp. 23.1–4; Pliny Ep. 8.21.1; “Jokes.” Cicero Brut. 292 traces the use of irony back to Socrates’s dialogues in Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines. For Jewish examples in the Greek language, see, e.g., Jos. Life 340; Apion 1.295 (though sarcasm also had a long history in Israelite tradition, e.g., 1 Kgs 18:27). For more nuanced and detailed pictures of ancient irony, see especially Duke, Irony, 8–12; O’Day, Revelation, 12–19; Anderson, Glossary, 39, 108. For the frequency of pathos in ancient historiography, see Marincola, “Audiences,” 21–22.

Witherington, Acts, 377–78; see also Plümacher, “Mission Speeches,” 251–66; idem, “Missionsreden”; idem, “Luke as Historian,” 398; Horsley, “Speeches,” 613; though cf. Pervo, “Direct Speech.” Novels do include speeches; note the judicial speeches in novels in Fernández-Garrido, “Stasis-theory.”

Sterling, Historiography, 320; also Aune, Environment, 79. For the primarily entertaining focus of novels, cf. also Penner, Praise, 6.

E.g., Apuleius’s Metamorphoses; Flavius Philostratus’s Heroikos. Contrast earlier works such as Petronius’s Satyricon; this growing application of narrative may reflect interests sparked by the popular influence of Christian gospels and acts.

Apuleius later apparently adapted the novel format for religious propaganda (although see Murgatroyd, “Ending,” and others noted below), but the content is still distinctly novelistic (and often tongue in cheek) rather than historical, the point at issue here (no one would have taken seriously first-person narration here as autobiographic, given the name and the obvious revision of a known tale earlier adapted also by Lucian). Historical works could also reflect distinctive ideological perspectives (see discussion below).

Apuleius and the apocryphal acts differ from typical ancient romances precisely in their rejection of this world and self-sufficiency (see Perkins, “World”).

“Escapism” was a dominant function (Fusillo, “Novel,” 838). Merkelbach, Mysterium, emphasizes the religious dimension of novels, but many scholars contest this; that dimension is likelier in apocryphal acts (e.g., Perkins, “World of Acts of Peter,” 305). Some today doubt it even for Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (reading it as parody; Hofmann, “Novels: Latin,” 844; Murgatroyd, “Ending”), though I think it likely there (significantly later though the work is than Acts). Aretalogies (cited as a precursor in Merkelbach, “Novel and Aretalogy,” 290) did not constitute a distinct genre with fixed literary characteristics (Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 57). As Merkelbach notes, novels could be used for religious purposes (as for philosophic or other purposes), but (against earlier scholars) they were not coded mystery texts (Hofmann, “Novels: Latin,” 844); they may reflect a social function analogous to that of the Mysteries in the same milieu, evoking the Greek past (van den Heever, “Novel,” 111, 114). Edwards, “Reading” (esp. 33–34, 46), suggests that novels such as Chariton’s provided religious instruction by emphasizing Aphrodite’s activity, but I wonder if such deities did not often function as narrative devices, based on theological assumptions, more than as theological instruction per se. Antiquity (in contrast to modern secular approaches) pervasively assumed divine activity, and (as Chew, “Focalization,” 55, observes) deities in novels serve a literary function of providing narrative order and sense to the events.

Pervo, Profit, passim. Pervo, Mystery, 56, rightly emphasizes the lively pace of popular narrative; this observation applies to Acts regardless of its genre.

See Sterling, Historiography, 320, wondering whom Polybius would have been critiquing “had Pervo’s method been recognized in antiquity”; and Keener, John, 10, esp. n. 76. Though drama set rules for poetic narrative and rhetorical tradition for prose, they had some influence on each other (Scodel, “Drama and Rhetoric”). All works with any rhetorical sophistication should provide “pleasure” (Dion. Hal. Demosth. 47; cf. the goal of pleasure in Gorg. Hel. 5).

With, e.g., Talbert, Gospel, 17. Witherington, Acts, 378, is probably right to think that most readers of novels had more time for leisure whereas Luke’s audience needed encouragement more than entertainment.

Dio Cass. 1.1.1–2; Fornara, Nature of History, 120–33; Palmer, “Monograph (1993),” 3, 29, citing, e.g., Cic. Fam. 5.12.5; Polyb. 1.4.11; 3.31.13; Aune, Environment, 80; idem, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 285; cf. also Dion. Hal. Demosth. 47; Plümacher, “Fiktion und Wunder”; Krasser, “Reading,” 554 (though including Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance too readily in the history category); Penner, Praise, 147 (see esp. sources in n. 116); though cf. the claim in Polyb. 9.2.6. For biographies, see Burridge, Gospels, 149–51. One can write basically factual accounts in the entertaining style of fiction current in one’s day (e.g., Sterling, Sisters, 78, on Harriet Brent Jacobs’s style; cf. likewise Emily Chubbock Judson in Anderson, Shore, 453, 455, 466–67; Hunt, History and Legacy, 208, 239).

Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 321.

Indeed, Lucian can write some satires placed in classical Athens rather than in his own day (e.g., Lucian Tim.; Charon) because, to many intellectuals, classical Athens was of greater interest than their own day (so, e.g., Harmon, “Introduction,” 395).

Tac. Ann. 4.32–33 (lowering expectations, though he elsewhere includes the sorts of intriguing details he here ascribes to earlier historians). Tacitus warns that his Annals will not be pleasurable, but history generally was supposed to be pleasurable (Woodman, Rhetoric, 183).

Fornara, Nature of History, 121; on pleasure in history in general, see 120–33.

Ibid., 133–34, citing Cic. Fam. 5.12.4. Cf. Gorg. Hel. 9 on suffering in others’ failures through poetry.

Pervo, Story, 11. Bonz, Past as Legacy, 21–22, rightly points to the importance of plot and literary unity in epic poetry as well.

See, e.g., Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 3. This arrangement could, however, simply reflect Luke’s literary skill exceeding that of some of his imitators.

See Stibbe, Gospel, 32–34. Any travel narrative could use geographic movement to advance the plot (cf. Alexander, Context, 70–75).

Penner, Praise, 151, citing Polyb. 3.31.7–13. Cohesiveness is important in ancient Israelite historiography (Konkel, Kings, 30), which naturally would provide Luke with a model. Such concern for causal connections is also common to modern historiography. Suetonius even structures his biographies in ways that connect them (see, e.g., Power, “Galba”).

Penner, Praise, 185. Penner compares (185–86, 218) this feature to plot in Arist. Poet. 1459a, though he notes that Aristotle distinguished history as more disjunctive (Bonz, Past as Legacy, 21, emphasizes Aristotle’s distinctions more heavily). In Tacitus and others, history does tend to be more disjunctive than in novels, but even there persons, nations, and agendas provide connections. Cic. Fam. 5.12.5 complains that mere recital of events chronologically reads like “an almanac” (LCL p. 161).

Recounting Paul’s Roman custody, which is surely historical (e.g., Phil 1:13), and a shipwreck, about the historicity of which scholars lack consensus but which cannot simply be dismissed a priori as fictitious, since shipwrecks were sufficiently frequent that Paul had already suffered them on three other occasions (2 Cor 11:25).

E.g., Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. Note also the overarching plot in Josephus Antiquities. The language of “plot” admittedly seems less appropriate for a history than more simply speaking of a “story” (see Schnabel, “Reading Acts,” 265); cf. the concerns in Davidson, “Polybius,” 136, about reading too much narrative unity into Polybius; and Aristotle’s preference for the plot and narrative connections characteristic of drama rather than history (Butcher, Theory, 164–65), though historiography developed rhetorically beyond the form in which Aristotle knew it. Already by the time of Thucydides, however, some historical writing had plot and other discernible literary elements; see, e.g., Finley, Thucydides, 302–3.

With, e.g., Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 218 (s.v. “Historiography,” 215–18).

See Betori, “Strutturazione”; Dupont, “Question du plan.” Polybius also advocated continuity through the chain of causes (Polyb. 3.32.2).

Josephus also accepts Rome’s (divine) destiny, but despite loyalty to his Flavian patrons, he is more attached to his own people (see Stern, “Josephus and Empire,” 78).

Pervo, Profit, 83, 123, 129.

Balch, “Genre,” 10–11.

Pervo, Profit, 64. In Acts, 18, he complains that Luke impugns the opposition’s motives as jealousy, but this exact concern appears in other ancient biographers and historians (e.g., Corn. Nep. 14 [Datames], 5.2; 23 [Hannibal], 1.2; Vell. Paterc. 2.40.4; 2.47.2; Tac. Ann. 16.18) and was a common feature of ancient urban Mediterranean agonistic culture (see comment on Acts 5:17). For Livy’s attribution of motives (in Livy 40.21–22), see Jaeger, “Fog,” 397, 401.

Dion. Hal. Pomp. 3 (contrasting Herodotus’s fairness). Polybius (who is usually evenhanded) condemned civic partisanship that could lead to misrepresentation (Polyb. 16.14.3–8); others also demanded evenhanded avoidance of malice and flattery (Dion. Hal. Thuc. 8), condemning one who ignored diverse sources to consistently present the least favorable interpretation (Plut. Mal. Hdt. 3–7, Mor. 855C–856B). One might even avoid including reports about friends to avoid charges of bias (Philost. Vit. soph. 2.33.628, who usually includes both strengths and weaknesses of each person he treats).

Cf. comments in Keener, John, 216.

E.g., Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. 3 (concerning the Roman conflict with the Albans). Often we may well wonder how the historian knows motives (e.g., Vell. Paterc. 2.35.2; 2.48.4), since historians, unlike poets, could not claim omniscience.

Polyb. 2.56.10 condemns Phylarchus for imaginatively reconstructing his characters’ words (though Polybius certainly does some of this himself).

E.g., Cic. Brut. 93.322; Or. Brut. 40.138–39; cf. Fam. 7.32.1–3; Plut. Cic. 5.4; 27.1; 38.2–6; Demosth. 11.4; Philost. Hrk. 33.8.

E.g., Cic. Brut. 43.158; Or. Brut. 26.88–90.

Claims to be free from bias in reporting recent events may respond to the patronage system (Jos. Ant. 20.154–55; also Witherington, Acts, 49, listing as recent-event claims Tac. Ann. 1.1.3; Lucian Hist. 41.1; Polyb. 12.12.1–3), but these were not claims of neutrality, which was not demanded (Witherington, Acts, 50).

That neither Paul nor Luke explicitly guarded his language to prevent misappropriation of his text in a dominant Christian setting is unfortunate, but to expect this of them is anachronistic.

Fornara, Nature of History, 134–35.

Ibid., 136.

Although Luke sometimes indulges in reporting characters’ thoughts (Acts 19:21; but cf. Rom 15:23–25, 31–32), we have relatively few examples, perhaps fewer proportionately than even some relatively careful, elite ancient historians (e.g., Tac. Hist. 2.74; Ann. 4.38, 39; 12.4). Cultural standards affect the definitions of genres; thus Romantics, loving poetry, tended to write prose with a higher concern for affective effects than for accuracy (Bebbington, Dominance, 162).

“Fictional amplifications” are standard fare in Ps.-Callisth. Alex., e.g., 1.23 (Dowden’s note in Collected Novels, 669n18); but this work is more historical novel than embellished history, and the ambiguity of its generic characterization is rare in comparison with works clearly identifiable as nonhistorical novels or histories focused on narrating historical events.

Bowersock, Fiction as History, 21. He argues that these works became popular especially in Nero’s time (22) and may have been modeled on Christian “fabulous stories” (such as the resurrection) circulating at that time (27, 143). Whereas most NT scholars underestimate apostolic influence on the mid-first-century Roman world, Bowersock may credit it with too much.

Those who relate Acts to “fantastic tales” think primarily of its signs and wonders (though even Tacitus has some of these; but see below on “signs”), but fantastic tales usually refer to unnatural phenomena encountered in exotic (and unverifiable) geographic extremities (cf., e.g., Pliny E. N.H. 7.2.22–34)—quite in contrast with the geographic verisimilitude of Acts. Cf. also collections of unbelievable phenomena (see Rusten, “Paradoxographers”).

Noted, e.g., by Hengel and Schwemer, Between Damascus and Antioch, 326–27; deSilva, Introduction, 369; Conzelmann, History, 30. Wiseman, “Decree,” thinks that Luke’s decree applied only to Roman citizens in 6 C.E. Luke may simply associate his event with a notable one from roughly the same period (cf. Reicke, Era, 135–36; Kodell, Luke, 19).

E.g., deSilva, Introduction, 375. Witherington, Acts, allows for the possibility of a mistake here, though offering alternative proposals (88, 238–39).

For scholars supporting Luke’s accuracy in Luke 2:2, see, e.g., Ramsay, Bethlehem, x, 107–96 passim; Robertson, Luke, 118ff.; Bock, Luke, 903–9 (providing also a helpful survey of proposals, as also in Porter, “Census,” 167–72); Thompson, Archaeology, 376–77; Bruce, Documents, 115; Hayles, “Correct” (esp. part 2); Stuart, “Textual Criticism,” 114 (due to faulty transmission of the name); Compton, “Census.” Some translate πρῶτος as “before” (Turner, Insights, 23–24 [also cited in Sheler, True, 197]; Marshall, Luke, 104), an approach not decisive grammatically but nevertheless plausible (Porter, “Census,” 173–76, 188). Some suggest that this was the “first census” under Quirinius, as opposed to the later one in 6 C.E. (Brindle, “Census”; Thorley, “Census”; Haacker, “Erst”), and his earlier post—whether he yet held his later title—may well have been in Syria (Ramsay, Bethlehem, 227–46; idem, Discovery, 238–300; cf. Danker, New Age, 23–24); yet many find it hard to date Quirinius’s earlier possibly Syrian office to fit Luke (Stern, “Province,” 373; cf. Porter, “Census,” 172–73). The external data do more easily support other aspects of Luke’s narrative (see esp. Porter, “Census,” 187–88); even counting back from 6 C.E. by fourteen-year tax cycles (Ramsay, Bethlehem, 131; O’Rourke, “Law,” 183; possibly seven-year cycles in this period, Bagnall, “Beginnings”) might fit the time of Mary’s pregnancy. Some cite micrographic evidence for Quirinius’s being governor throughout the period (Finegan, Apostles, 5), though his arrival sounds later in Jos. Ant. 18.1 (perhaps since this is where Josephus will stress his role?) and current arguments based on claims of micrographic evidence are open to considerable debate. For approaches to Luke’s literary purpose, see, e.g., Smith, “Caesar’s Decree.”

As often observed, e.g., Walaskay, Acts, 11; Marguerat, Histoire, 19–20, 25; idem, Historian, 12–13. For a comparison of dramatic episodes in Acts with those in Livy, Cleitarchus, Duris (Douris) of Samos, and Curtius Rufus, see Plümacher, Lukas, 80–136.

I employ the term in a modern way, not as an interpretation of his description of his work (see discussion in Doody, “Natural History”).

See comment on Acts 23:24. Vell. Paterc. 2.53.4 criticizes predecessors for being five years off on Pompey’s age—precisely because he wants to forestall criticism of himself erring on this minor detail. McGrew, “Argument,” 598, notes that ancient historians differed over the number of Xerxes’s troops when he invaded Greece; the number of troops in the battle of Pharsalia (Caesar and Florus differ by 150,000); and other details, but no one denies that these events occurred.

Porter, Paul in Acts, 16–17.

Lucian True Story 1.4 (Reardon, 621).

Readers could generally recognize such fictitious work (see Ní-Mheallaigh, “Pseudo-Documentarism”). Some elements that Lucian parodies are more credible than others; e.g., Lucian’s “malleable glass” (ὑαλίνη) clothing on the Moon (True Story 1.25) “is a punning parody on wooden clothing (ξυλίνη), i.e. cotton (Herod. 7, 65)” (A. M. Harmon, in Lucian, LCL, 1:279n1). But most of it is fantastic even before the parody.

The voyagers later stop at the morning star, which is being colonized (Lucian True Story 1.28). Inhabitants of comets, naturally, prefer long hair (1.23).

Tuckett, Luke, 30.

Ibid., 30.

For this plot commonality, see, e.g., Fusillo, “Novel,” 838–39; Konstan, “Apollonius and Novel,” 173; see further this emphasis in Konstan, Symmetry. Fullmer, Resurrection, 50–54, rightly and helpfully emphasizes that not all ancient fictitious literature was strictly romance, but he defines almost any fictitious work as a novel (applying the label according to relation to extrinsic reality rather than a readily identifiable literary form), including testaments (a distinctly Jewish genre not closely related to Acts as a whole), and some forms attested only much later or earlier. Yet as we shall argue in –, Acts (which is not Fullmer’s own subject) bears a quite different relation to extrinsic reality. He also includes some material in Josephus whose fictitious character is open to question; some of his novels also include romance elements besides those he so identifies.

Pervo, “Direct Speech,” 294, recognizes the dissimilarity in content, while arguing for similarity “in the means of exposition,” where the case is much more plausible. On 302 he notes that “no one has ever argued that Acts is an ‘erotic novel.’” No analogy is exact, so it is valuable to explore the points at which Pervo intends the comparison with novels.

Even apocryphal acts and gospels often follow a romance story line, except that the women become devotees of the male teacher in chastity, devoted not to sexual love but to God’s word (e.g., Acts of Paul and Thecla passim and Acts John 53–64, 73–80). Luke-Acts has nothing comparable (the brief treatment of Lydia hardly fills the same kind of role in Acts 16:14–15, and Luke does not develop his mention of women followers in Luke 8:2–3). The contrast is often noted (e.g., Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 338–39).

Balch, “Genre,” 11, offers the same contrast: novels focused on individuals, but “ancient history,” by contrast, “narrated social and political events, as does Luke-Acts.”

Witherington, Acts, 377; Schierling and Schierling, “Influence of Romances.” Liefeld, Acts, 15, notes that Acts, though a historical work, includes most features found in novels but lacks a heroine.

Porter, “‘We’ Passages,” 550; Aune, Environment, 80; idem, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 285; Witherington, Acts, 381; see Callan, “Preface and Historiography”; van Unnik, “Once More Prologue”; Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 339. Granted, Alexander has argued that the prologue would not by itself identify Luke-Acts with history as opposed to ethnography or even a scientific treatise (“Formal Elements,” 23; idem, “Luke’s Preface”)—though virtually no one argues, including Alexander, that the content of Luke-Acts is a scientific treatise. But the language from technical treatises does suggest a claim to accurate handling of the tradition (idem, “Formal Elements,” 24).

Pervo, Profit, 5, 144. Prefaces occasionally appear in fictitious works that pretend to be historical (e.g., Let. Aris. 1–8, though nothing in that proem specifically suggests the work’s historical character). For one broad survey of classical parallels to Luke’s preface, see Talbert, Reading Luke, 7–11.

Longus might contrast his approach with Thucydides (cf. Thucyd. 3.37–48; Cueva, “Longus and Thucydides”; Trzaskoma, “Novelist Writing ‘History’”; engaging “intertextually” with Thucydides, Morgan, “Fiction,” 555).

With Konstan, “Invention,” 6, who emphasizes that Longus’s work is mainly nonreferential, like other novels.

Bauckham, “Acts of Paul”; Witherington, Acts, 335n31; Bowersock, Fiction as History, 139n43; Cerro, “Hechos”; Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 3. The apocryphal acts may be directed toward a more popular audience and are of lower literary quality (Conzelmann, Acts, xlii); still, for specific rhetorical techniques in their speeches (which are important in the romances [Hock, “Rhetoric of Romance”]; the romances may have often assumed education [Bowie, “Readership,” 452–53; Stephens, “Who Read Novels?,” 415]), cf. Pervo, “Rhetoric in Apocrypha,” esp. 805. One should note that Pervo dates Luke’s Acts to the second century; see below.

See Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 322. Perhaps the apocryphal acts originated partly from Christians’ reading romances through Christian lenses and seeing what they could make use of (see Price, “Evolution of Genres”).

Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 10. Pervo, “Hard Act,” sees Acts of Paul not as a sequel to Luke-Acts (against Bauckham, “Acts of Paul”) but as an attempt to correct it; clearly, it rewrites some of Acts’ narratives, but this may be hagiographic development rather than rejection (see Marguerat, “Héritage”; idem, “Acts of Paul”; idem, “Actes de Paul”; cf. idem, Histoire, 369–91). Although some scholars think Acts of Paul dependent only on Galatians (Rordorf, “Conversion,” 142–43, highlighting Acts’ details missing in the later work), most have argued otherwise (e.g., Hills, “Acts and Acts”; Pervo, “Hard Act”; Bauckham, “Acts of Paul”; idem, “Sequel”; cf. Hills, “Acts of Paul”), especially regarding imitation of Acts’ perceived primary subject (not so much its content). Bovon, “Reception,” 69, contends that authors of the apocryphal acts are independent of Luke’s Acts, but allows that they “may have known” it. (Cf. Elliott, “Apocrypha,” 683, on NT apocrypha in general: they often imitate our first-century sources “and in most cases are imaginative writings intended to amplify the first-century events.”) The particular dating of the post-Lukan acts is more problematic; their relative sequence also occasions debate (e.g., MacDonald, “Relationships,” 40; Pervo, “Egging,” 55; Stoops, “Acts of Peter,” 83–84). Thomas, “Canon and Antitype,” even suggests that the earliest version of Acts of Peter lacked direct literary dependence on now-canonical texts, and he attributes signs of dependence to a final redactor; but prehistories of extant documents tend to prove speculative. Gounelle, “État de la recherche,” thinks that the eventual title of Luke’s Acts may have polemicized against some of the second-century acts.

On Paul in the apocryphal acts, see Michaels, “Paul in Tradition,” esp. 692–94. On Paul and Luke’s Acts, see below.

Porter, “‘We’ Passages,” 551; also Porter, Paul in Acts, 17. Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 339, also note that real early Christian audiences did not treat Luke’s Acts like, e.g., Acts of Paul (citing here Dawsey, “Folk-Epic,” 318).

See Hengel, Acts and History, 60.

Harnack, Acts, 272.

Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 3 (on “stereotypical holy men”); Marguerat, Histoire, 62–63; cf. Allison, Jesus, 447–48. Gibert, “Invention,” earlier supposed Luke the inventor of the hagiographic genre—with the same problem of anachronistic circularity.

For a survey of such haggadic techniques in early Jewish texts, see Keener, John, 27–28. Milikowsky, “Midrash,” suggests that the rabbis themselves recognized that midrashic additions were homiletic, distinct from historical reconstructions.

See Hofmann, “Novels: Christian,” 847–48; cf. Aubin, “Reversing Romance,” 260–62 (noting the subversion of conventional gender assumptions); Thomas, “Fluidity,” 277.

Bowersock, Fiction as History, 124, 139, 143 (citing especially the later appraisals of Origen and Celsus). It is not clear, however, how widely circulated Acts was in the first century. Even Bowersock’s larger thesis that the gospel story led to novels as a genre fails to reckon with earlier novelistic works, “but the later ideal romances may well have drunk from the Christian spring for some of their inspiration” (Thomas, “Fluidity,” 277). Tacitus and probably Suetonius do attest that the Christian story was a subject of public discussion in Claudian and Neronian Rome (Reimer, “Biography,” 308), and Chariton’s “early dawn discovery of an empty tomb in which the stone has been rolled away” (309, emphasis Reimer’s) is too close to Mark’s earlier story line for coincidence.

At least the Ninus Romance, now incomplete, is probably earlier (dated from ca. 100 B.C.E. to 50 C.E.; see Bowie, “Novel,” 1049), but this source is less developed than the members of the genre on which Bowersock focuses. One may also cite the Roman author Petronius’s Satyricon (mid-first century C.E., featuring homosexual romance) or Judith as moving in the direction of later romances. Jewish writers produced various fictions, such as Aristeas (Hadas, Aristeas, 54, doubts that its first readers would have understood it otherwise; the later historian Josephus, however, apparently did think otherwise, Jos. Ant. 12.100; Ag. Ap. 2.46–47) and Joseph and Aseneth (of uncertain date).

Witherington, Acts, 378, thinks novels became more frequent in the Second Sophistic than in the early empire.

So Bowie, “Readership,” 442.

Ibid., 443; Stephens, “Who Read Novels?,” 414.

Stephens, “Who Read Novels?,” 415. The Attic revival consigned Hellenistic historians like Polybius to a more limited readership (see Nicolai, “Place of History,” 23).

“Historical novels,” as already noted, were a small minority, and even they often included little more than historical characters and a few events (a far cry from the heavy use of sources obvious in Luke’s first volume).

Even the few historical novels interspersed historical characters and some events with mostly free composition, in contrast to Luke’s close attention to locations, sequence, and sometimes officials; sometimes bare historical detail (usually in itineraries); and the use of either sources or eyewitness testimony (the “we” material).

And even this should not be debated, as classicists such as Barbara Levick and Stephen Mitchell have shown; see the discussion on South Galatia at Acts 14.

See the discussion in below; this commentary’s analysis, passim.

See Wiersma, “Novel.”

Konstan, “Invention,” 5–6 (quote, 5). The recycling of a story line (cf. Lucian’s Lucius and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses) suggests limits to this distinction, but the point is that the novelist cannot be described as “mistaken” about his claims, since (far more than historians and mythographers) the novelist has control over the work’s narrative world.

Balch, “Genre,” 10.

See, e.g., Conzelmann, Acts, xli.

E.g., Lucian Hist. 12, who distinguishes proper biography from falsification and flattery; Plut. Poetry 2, Mor. 16F, who points to fabricated materials in poetry (quite different from how he describes his sources in the Lives). See Lendon, “Historiography,” 43; Mosley, “Reporting,” 26; Kany, “Bericht”; Witherington, Acts, 25–26.

Bowersock’s examples of fictionalized history (Fiction as History, 21) are distinctly novelistic; historical fictions (e.g., Xenophon’s Cyropaedia; Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance, the latter four to eight centuries after Alexander) were exceptional and fairly transparent. (The latter work was completed before its Latin translation in the early fourth century C.E. [Fusillo, “Pseudo-Callisthenes”]; Alexander died in 323 B.C.E.) In contrast to genuine Alexander histories, the “historical value” of Pseudo-Callisthenes “is negligible” (Zambrini, “Historians,” 211).

Carson, John, 64–65, following Sternberg, Poetics, 23–35; see similarly Lendon, “Historiography,” 43.

Rebenich, “Historical Prose,” 307.

Ibid., 289.

Bowie, “Readership,” 452–53; Stephens, “Who Read Novels?,” 415.

Cf., e.g., the borrowing of style from Roman epics in Roman historiography (Rebenich, “Historical Prose,” 312); some scholars find the borrowing of novelistic techniques in LXX expansions (e.g., Boyd-Taylor, “Adventure”).

Though Polybius (3.32.2) also claims to follow a thread of continuity through his forty volumes by noting the chain of causes in history.

For a summary introduction of narrative asides in ancient texts, see Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 312–14 (following esp. Sheeley, Asides).

Sheeley, Asides, 179; he treats asides in romances (41–56) and in Acts (119–35). Though he finds a “slightly lower percentage” in histories, it remains unclear if the difference is statistically significant; further, asides for general information better match most historical narratives (179; for histories, see 56–78).

The closest parallels to this procedure are most often in the brief romances rather than in the longer, technical, and documented histories (see Sheeley, Asides, 179). Private conversations do, however, appear in sober histories, including in Tacitus and Josephus (see comments on the .).

Cf., e.g., the more biographic focus typically preferred in “popular history” (e.g., McGee, People of Spirit, 13).

Johnson, Acts, 5–6.

Suetonius failed to sift his sources and includes much gossip (Cary and Haarhoff, Life, 272).

Johnson, Acts, 7. For one proposed case of Suetonius’s source including a misinterpretation negative toward Caligula, see Woods, “Caligula.” Thus Sheeley, Asides, 181, finding parallels with various genres, concludes that an analysis of asides cannot determine Luke’s genre, because characteristics of various genres overlap.

Without fabricating events, Tacitus certainly stamped many of them with tragic coloring (e.g., Ann. 5.9). Tragic elements had a higher role in poetry (Quint. Inst. 10.1.64).

Aune, Environment, 84.

Cook, Interpretation, 14. For Celsus’s approach to the Gospels as unhistorical, see also 26–27 (Origen Cels. 2.13).

Cook, Interpretation, 336–37 (also noting Celsus again).

Ibid., 337.

The most thoroughgoing is Bonz, Past as Legacy (comparing Virgil’s Aeneid and suggesting epic’s influence on Acts’ structure; cf. idem, “Best and Worst”). MacDonald, “Farewell,” 190, goes further in suggesting “extensive echoes of the Homeric epics.” Some compare Acts’ Rome-ward movement with the Aeneid (Reardon, “Homing to Rome”), but Rome was the heart of its empire, and for immigrants and their cults alike, all roads did lead to Rome (cf. Ramsay, “Roads and Travel,” 376; this commentary’s discussion at Acts 1:8; 28:16).

Bonz, Past as Legacy, 15, counts Homeric epic as “historiographic” in the sense of being bound by past tradition rather than by the free composition characteristic of novels. But one needs genres to distinguish works such as Homer from works such as those of Polybius, and Bonz herself notes genre markers distinguishing epic from history (and novel; p. 21); she emphasizes plot unity (21–22), but such unity also appears in historical works focused on particular characters or agendas (e.g., Quintus Curtius History of Alexander) and which may borrow from the epic tradition but, as prose works, are not themselves epic. MacDonald, “Farewell,” 202–3, allows that both Luke and Virgil preserve historical information, yet contends that Luke’s audience would recognize his stories as “fictions crafted as alternatives to those of Homer and Vergil” (203). But quantitatively (and especially proportionate to length) Virgil offers far less historical information than does Luke. Not only is most of Virgil’s ancient tradition legendary (by anyone’s standards, since it belonged to the distant past); he also plays with it freely.

Even if MacDonald has drawn the net too narrowly by focusing on Homer, at least he has drawn it more widely than many NT scholars and helps us reconstruct one element of Luke’s milieu.

MacDonald, Imitate Homer, 1–6. He emphasizes that even prose writers depended on Homer (1, 151). But while rhetoricians, grammarians, and others used Homer as a textbook, they used Homer selectively, not requiring us to suppose that all narratives, especially historic narratives, were constructed in deliberate imitation of Homeric models.

MacDonald, ibid., 10–12, does note clear Elijah typology (for discussion of such typology, see this commentary’s comment on Acts 1:8–9), as does Pervo (Dating Acts, 29–35). Even in these cases, limitations in these parallels allow us to suppose that Luke adapted his material, filling it out with such models, rather than that he freely composed it without historical tradition (e.g., the difference between adapting and inventing resuscitations), especially given the appearance of Elijah parallels already in Mark.

See Mitchell, “Homer,” on MacDonald, Epics; Sandnes, “Imitatio”; Johnson, “Imitate”; Spencer, Gospel and Acts, 39–41; Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 340–43 (on Epics); less negatively, Harstine, “Imitate.” Carsten Claussen kindly directed me to these reviews. Sandnes, Challenge, 249–50, further argues that only upper social strata had sufficient Homeric education to catch such allusions, and this is not Luke’s likely audience; later Christians with such audiences rewrote Scripture in Homeric style. Wittkowsky, “Zitate,” doubts that even the pagan quotations reveal direct acquaintance with Greek sources. Sandnes, Gospel, develops his own approach further in a work that MacDonald, “Review,” reviewed graciously (agreeing with some points and disagreeing with others).

Mitchell, “Homer,” 255; cf. Johnson, “Imitate,” 490, on nearer sources influenced by Homer.

Sandnes, “Imitatio,” 725.

Ibid., 732.

MacDonald’s current work takes more explicit account of OT intertextuality, which he did not actually deny earlier (as noted on Elijah above). Thus, in an oral interchange with Loveday Alexander at a meeting on Acts at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Diego, November 17, 2007, MacDonald agreed that Luke’s work is saturated with direct LXX quotations and that Luke uses it even at the discourse level. But (rightly) noting that the genre is more Greek, he found characterization and other elements to be more classical. His work with LXX intertextuality is forthcoming (personal correspondence, Nov. 26, 2010).

Even the innovative J. D. M. Derrett, never one to underestimate parallels, finds only vague allusions to Homer in the NT and not explicit quotations (Derrett, “Homer”). These more debatable allusions offer a striking contrast with the plethora of biblical quotations.

E.g., Horace probably evokes Virgil (see, e.g., Zarecki, “Duet,” on esp. Carmina 4.15.32); Roman epic writers often imitated earlier Latin epics (Stover, “Apollonius”). Virgil’s own imitation of Homer (e.g., Beck, “Ecphrasis”) might contrast his hero (a noble precursor for Augustus) with the Homeric antiheroes Achilles and Odysseus (Shea, “Imitating,” 50–51). Perhaps somewhat analogously, though probably for the sake of maintaining focus more than valorizing his heroes, Luke wastes little time with his heroes’ weaknesses in Acts, at least once they are converted (Acts 8:1, 3; cf. Luke 5:8).

The Aeneid’s composition in Latin is one of the objections that MacDonald, Imitate Homer, 8, puts to Bonz’s thesis. MacDonald acknowledges the connections with Virgil that Bonz finds, but attributes them to Virgil’s and Luke’s independently imitating Homer (8–9)! Schnabel, “Reading Acts,” 261 (noting Krauter, “Vergils Evangelium,” 220), notes that only a small circle of elite readers would have been able to closely emulate the complex literary patterns in Virgil.

See the summary of views in O’Gorman, “Intertextuality,” 233–34, concerning the use of Virgil’s language (Aen. 2.13–16) in Tac. Ann. 2.61.1 (where an allusion does appear likely). She goes on (234–35) to note another approach to intertextuality that does not require intentionality (noting esp. Fowler, Constructions). Scholars differ regarding other allusions as well; e.g., does Tacitus recall Sallust in the opening of his Histories, as many think (Woodman, Rhetoric, 164–65), or Cicero, as Woodman thinks (165–66)?

Alexander, Context, 41; see also Schnabel, “Reading Acts,” 261 (citing Diomedes Ars Grammatica 3; Quint. Inst. 10.1.51–57; Aristotle Poet. 23–24, 1459a17, b31; and Krauter, “Epos,” 225–31). Granted that some ancients treated epics like the Aeneid as historical (Leigh, “Epic,” 483), epics diverge sharply in style from the bulk of ancient historiography; overlap in some narrative elements and focus on the past does not obliterate clearer genre markers.

Although “elegiac distich” appears in early samples, hexameter prevailed for works about the distant past (Fantuzzi, “Historical epic,” 410). In the imperial period, encomiastic epic completely displaced the regional form (411).

See also Alexander, Context, 167.

Cf. Hardie, “Epic.” Silius Italicus, unlike Lucan, retained deities as characters, in keeping with his poetic model in Virgil, but he depended on Livy for the bulk of his historical information (Feeney, “Silius Italicus”). On the Greek association of epic with the distant past, see also, e.g., Nicolai, “Place of History,” 15; on the rarer epics about more recent historical events (in poetic form), see Leigh, “Epic,” 484–85, 488–92.

E.g., Lucan follows Livy and Caesar but “freely manipulates historical truth where it suits his purpose, e.g., in introducing Cicero in Pompey’s camp on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus in book 7” (Anderson and Hardie, “Lucanus,” 94). Whereas a slave rescues Scipio in Livy, it is his son in Sil. It. 4.466–68 (LCL, 1:202 n. b).

Alexander, “Fiction and Genre,” 382–85. On epics, see, e.g., Latacz, “Epic: Antiquity”; idem, “Epic: Literature”; Courtney, “Epic.” But epic is, by definition, metrical (Hardie, “Epic”), not comparable with Luke-Acts or other prose histories.

With Alexander, Context, 173.

Ibid. (where Alexander notes that novels embraced epics’ mythology while subverting heroic ideology).

Ibid., 9, noting fuller dependence on the LXX than on Greek or Roman epic (though allowing some hyperlinks to these, especially in Paul’s final voyage). Alexander develops the critique more fully on 165–82. Note also concerns in Krauter, Epos; whatever indirect influence may exist, the similarities cannot negate the differences, and Krauter deems Bonz’s thesis finally implausible (Krauter, Epos, 243). Schnabel, “Reading Acts,” 260n58, adds other critics, including Breitenbach, “Epos,” 100–101; Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 8.

Moreland, “Mythmaking.”

Wilson, “Urban Legends.”

With Alexander, Context, 169.

Cf. Bonz, Past as Legacy; Pao, Isaianic Exodus, 3. During the empire, cities often emphasized their foundation legends (e.g., Lichtenberger, “Foundation Legends”).

Rome’s mythical “foundation stories” are normally in the distant, often archaic past (“Aetiology,” 982); Livy follows sources, is more restrained than his sources, and probably has some basically true material even on sixth-century B.C.E. Rome (Laistner, Historians, 91–93). Many foundation legends in the earliest sources probably circulated due to regional pride and competition; see Dillery, “Roman Historians,” 93. Most of the examples of “mythic” material in Weaver, Epiphany, 1–6, refer to the distant past (chronological distance constituting a larger factor, in my view, than “foundation” stories). The mythic patterns he notes in Thucydides’s way of recounting history (1) are more relevant (especially to his parallels with prison escapes in Acts), but they reflect literary patterns, not event-creation.

Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 88–91, warning (88, against Bonz) that historiography and epic were not opposites.

Luke’s geographic movement might evoke even an epic scope (with a goal of Rome, as in Virgil), but Luke’s interests, defined explicitly in his preface, involve recent events that he believes to be historical (see discussion in – below), though historians could exercise more freedom in speeches (see below).

So Alexander, Context, 169.

Ibid., 171. She also reminds readers that Luke’s primary model is the LXX (172). Much more direct citations of Virgil appear in nonelite ancient graffiti (Toner, Culture, 140, citing CIL 4.1527, 4401, 9987), none of which sought to produce epic.

Alexander, Context, 181, emphasizing the LXX.

E.g., Plümacher, Lukas, 38–72 (in the mission speeches); Rothschild, Rhetoric of History, 293 (for archaizing style); Steyn, “Vorlage of Quotations”; also Pervo, Dating Acts, 29–35; MacDonald, Imitate Homer, 10–12; Pervo, “Flattery.” Luke also certainly used Mark as a model (Pervo, Dating Acts, 35–47, not always persuasively, finds this in Acts as well as the Gospel).

Mimesis could include a wide range of models, not limited to a single genre or even to literature; see, e.g., Zimbrich, “Mimesis” (though noting poets’ frequent imitation of Homer, p. 927); Symm. Ep. 1.2.2; 1.4.1. Epic writers imitated earlier epics (e.g., Stover, “Apollonius”), but historians also typically imitated the style of earlier writers; see some examples in Woodman, Rhetoric, x–xi, 6 (Thucydides imitating Herodotus), 127 (Sallust imitating Thucydides), 165–66 (Tacitus Hist. imitating Cicero), 167–68 (Tacitus Ann. imitating Sallust); some Roman historians may also draw on Ennius (Elliott, “Cunctator”), who adapted early traditions about Rome in epic form. Cf. also historians’ allusions to poets (recently proposed cases include an allusion to Homer Il. 5.254 and Od. 21.426 in Suet. Galba 20.2; Power, “Taunt”). Yet even literary allusions to earlier writers can be used to characterize events rather than create them (Damon, “Rhetoric,” 445, qualifying Woodman’s approach [in Tacitus, xvii] to the use of Sall. Jug. 46.8 in Tac. Ann. 15.36). Sources constrain historians’ application of these techniques in a way that they need not constrain novelists (on the special constraints of the historical genre, see also Lendon, “Historiography,” 60). Even when using rhetorical models, one could work against them (see Nagel, “Lyrics”).

Although Jews also had other writings, none of them (apart from some quasi-canonical works, e.g., Sirach and Wisdom, that circulated in some Diaspora collections) had achieved widespread cultural status the way that some works and traditions supplementing Homer did (e.g., dramatists and some historians), although this may be partly because Judaism straddled multiple dominant cultures (from the Parthian to Hellenistic-Roman spheres; e.g., 1 Enoch seems limited more to the Semitic sphere).

Pesch, Apostelgeschichte, 1:22–23, and Hull, Spirit in Acts, 13, citing the Latin version of Iren. Her. 3.13.3 (also 3.12.11; 3.14.1); Clem. Alex. Strom. 5.82.4; Tert. Bapt. 10.4; anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke; the Muratorian Canon (though other titles were also available).

Cf. Pesch, Apostelgeschichte, 1:22–23.

Certainly, writers of apocryphal gospels and other works respected the now-canonical writings, and readers of the canonical works also respected “the apocryphal legends” (Bovon, Studies, 301). Some scholars also suspect that the apocryphal acts, like patristic sources, contain some earlier extracanonical traditions (see Gounelle, “Réception,” 205, though urging a cautious approach); Elliott, “Apocrypha,” 688–89, also notes some correspondences of apocryphal acts and gospels with legends or tradition, though quite limited (nowhere comparable to what our first-century sources provide; see below).

Fitzmyer, Acts, 47–48, citing, e.g., Diod. Sic. 3.1.1; 16.1.1; Jos. Ant. 14.68; 2 Chr 12:15; 13:22; 28:26 LXX.

E.g., Max. Tyre 15.6, 9; Res gestae divi Augusti (conveniently, e.g., in Sherk, Empire, §26, pp. 41–52). On deeds in ancient encomia, see, e.g., Malina and Neyrey, Portraits, 28–33; Men. Rhet. 2.3, 385.8–9; 2.11, 420.24–25; Hermog. Issues 46.14–17.

Cf. 1 Cor 4:9–13; 2 Cor 4:8–11; 6:4–10; 11:23–33; Epict. Diatr. 1.11.33; 2.6.18; 2.19.18; Max. Tyre 12.10; 15.9; 34.9; see Malherbe, Moral Exhortation, 130, 141–43; esp. Fitzgerald, Cracks, passim (see esp. 59–65; for the history of research, see 7–31); idem, “Affliction Lists,” esp. 16–17. Although most important to sages, such lists were not limited to them; cf., e.g., Rom 8:35–39; 1 En. 103:9–15; Test. Jos. 1:4–7; Hodgson, “Tribulation Lists”; Danker, “Debt,” 265; Heracles’s trials (Epict. Diatr. 1.6.32–33; Max. Tyre 15.6); perhaps even the image of Philoctetes (Bowersock, Fiction as History, 55–76). Lists of afflictions can even be used to prove romantic love (Ach. Tat. 5.18.3–6) or to draw on political capital (Cic. Cat. 4.1.2). The key is that enduring suffering revealed nobility of character (e.g., Diog. Laert. 6.2.74).

Hadas and Smith, Heroes. Cf., somewhat more plausibly, aretalogical biographies (Wills, Quest).

Shuler, Genre, 15–20; cf. Talbert, Gospel, 12–13.

Burridge, Gospels, 18–19; Aune, Dictionary of Rhetoric, 57; for narrower and wider senses, see Haase, “Aretalogies,” 1003. Talbert, Gospel, 43, cites biographies of immortals (mainly from the second and third centuries), but as he admits, the religious or mythical dimension does not affect genre (cf. Shuler, Genre, 21). Some argue that his evidence for specific cultic biographies (Talbert, Gospel, 91–113) is mainly inferential (Aune, “Problem,” 37–42).

Fitzmyer, Acts, 48–49.

So Parsons, Departure, 184, stressing what he calls the “primacy effect.” Against the title “acts of the apostles,” see also Mount, Pauline Christianity, 42–43.

Aune, Environment, 78. The genre should not be confused, because of its English title, with Latin acta, which could be gazettes (including official events, decisions, lawsuits, and speeches) or lists of emperors’ enactments (Balsdon and Lintott, “Acta”; Gizewski, “Acta”).

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