Keeping the Focus on Paul
2
First-Person Claims in Acts and in Ancient History
Parts of Acts, especially in the final quarter of Acts, include some first-person narration. In other historical sources from this period, we would normally understand this feature as evidence of the author’s participation, underlining the author’s direct access to information. Some scholars have questioned this interpretation, but those who question it usually sidestep the abundant, dominant evidence from other ancient historical writers. ¹³³ This essay challenges a less common alternative approach that does appeal to historical evidence but is vulnerable to misapplication.
Various ancient historians used third- and first-person designations for themselves differently, and sometimes even varied the usage within their individual works.¹³⁴ William Sanger Campbell offers a useful survey of some of this usage, correctly observing that ancient writings, in contrast to most modern ones, regularly “refer to their narrators in first (singular and plural) and third person for both event- and narrator-level narration.”¹³⁵ Although his survey of usage is quite helpful, his reservations concerning Luke’s first-person usage for eyewitness historical testimony must be qualified.¹³⁶
“We” as a First-Person Historical Claim?
Classicist Arthur Darby Nock contended that Luke’s “we” should be read like “we” in other ancient historians: a claim that included the author himself.¹³⁷ By contrast, one of the chief conclusions for which some will cite Campbell’s article is his argument that broader historiographic usage tells us little about Luke’s use of “we” as an eyewitness claim.
Questioning “We” as a Historical Claim
Campbell acknowledges that the majority of scholars view Luke’s “we” as an eyewitness claim (whether from the author or his source).¹³⁸ Nevertheless, he draws on his study of three ancient historians (Thucydides, Polybius, and Josephus) in order to neutralize the traditional argument that “we” reflects eyewitness presence.¹³⁹ He does concede that his argument “does not mean that the author or his source could not have been an eyewitness,” only that this is not the primary point of the first-person usage.¹⁴⁰ Whatever Luke’s other literary intentions, however (and I am not here challenging Campbell on these points), a first-person claim in historical sources does indicate the narrator as the subject of the verbs in question—in this case verbs that claim the narrator’s presence.
Campbell recognizes that, based on Polybius’s usage, Luke’s “we” passages “place the narrator character at the scene, an eyewitness to and a participant in the events narrated.” Nevertheless, he balks at the expected conclusion, protesting that in light of Acts’ anonymity “we” simply establishes characterization, not historical information.¹⁴¹
The evidence that Campbell assembles, however, does not support this case, which rests instead on some inferences unrelated to the data he cites, inferences that not all scholars accept. The narrator does not emphasize his presence, Campbell contends, because he “does not say that at these points he has entered events personally, nor does the story itself suggest that this is the case.”¹⁴² This claim is surprising, especially because Campbell himself notes that ancient writers could shift from third to first person or first person singular to plural at times without warning.¹⁴³ When an ancient writer attributes action in the narrative to a first-person actor and is not quoting another’s speech, the writer by that very attribution normally claims to enter events personally. In such cases, we do not expect the writer to offer a further level of affirmation explaining that he intends what readers would normally infer that his words communicate.
Ultimately, Campbell’s principal reason for denying that Acts’ narrator claims to be present rests not on the analysis of other ancient historians, but on Campbell’s contention that Luke differs from these historians.¹⁴⁴ That is, the comparison with other ancient historians does not support the conclusion, but would actually challenge it were it not for different factors technically unrelated to usual ancient historical usage.
Acts’ Anonymity?
Campbell’s argument against the author claiming to be present depends especially on his repeated suggestion that Luke’s anonymity makes him different from the other historians surveyed; Luke’s first-person usage therefore does not refer to an identity claim earlier in the narrative.¹⁴⁵ Of the four works (two by Josephus and one each by Thucydides and Polybius) that Campbell investigates, three do indeed name their authors in the beginning of their works. Such naming was, however, neither the exclusive nor the necessary practice of ancient sources, as one may easily note by surveying prefaces in other histories¹⁴⁶ and biographies.¹⁴⁷ In fact, Campbell himself observes that in one of the four works he treats, Josephus’s Antiquities, the author does not name himself within the work.¹⁴⁸
Works did not always explicitly identify their authors. Lack of such identification thus no more makes Luke’s work necessarily “anonymous” for his real audience than does lack of intrinsic authorial identification in other ancient works make all of them functionally anonymous for Luke’s contemporaries.¹⁴⁹
An ancient work could be anonymous in terms of explicit intrinsic claims and yet not be anonymous for its real audience.¹⁵⁰ As relevance theory demonstrates, some information in communication is implicit or assumed;¹⁵¹ readers of the Antiquities knew that Josephus was the author, and Luke’s ideal audience undoubtedly knew who the “I” of his preface was. Simply because modern scholars often argue that we cannot know who Acts’ author was does not mean that Luke’s original audience in the first century suffered the same deficiency. Luke names at least one member of his intended audience (Theophilus; Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1), and presumably takes for granted that Theophilus knows his identity. When dedicatees are named in ancient works, the dedicatees normally knew the authors’ identity; any exceptions to this practice would have been rare.¹⁵² For that matter, if we do not know the author’s identity, we cannot even argue with much certainty that Luke does not name himself in the third person at points in the narrative (if, say, he was Silas or Timothy).¹⁵³
What Historians Meant By “We”
Campbell emphasizes that first person dominates at the narrator level and is rarer at the event level.¹⁵⁴ This observation is true (and for other purposes helpful), but the primary issue for evaluating what Luke means by “we” is not how often the author uses first person within the narrative but what he means when he uses it. Historians varied among themselves as to which of them ever included themselves in the narrative in the first person.¹⁵⁵
No rule, therefore, prohibited Luke from including himself in the first person, even if, as is likely (see discussion below), he minimizes his role as actor more than many other actor/narrators minimized their own. Despite the value for literary analysis of observing authors’ differences in usage for the level of the narrator and presence within the narrative, these differences affect only frequency of first-person usage within the narrative, not whom the first-person usage identifies.
What is critical when asking who is included in Luke’s first-person usage is whether historians referred or did not refer to themselves when they used the first person. Here the resounding answer of Campbell’s own evidence is that they did intend themselves, whether individually (in the first-person singular) or as part of a group (in the first-person plural).
Thus one may note Josephus’s use of the first-person plural in Antiquities: “The first person singular in Antiquities often serves to distinguish the author/narrator individually from first person plural references close at hand that associate him with the Jewish people.”¹⁵⁶ That is, Josephus speaks in his “we” passages as part of a group.¹⁵⁷ Campbell rightly concludes that in Luke-Acts, as in other works, first-person plural usage shows the “narrator’s personal knowledge as eyewitness or researcher and, therefore, his credentials for telling the story accurately as Luke claims in Luke 1:3–4.”¹⁵⁸
Authors employ the first-person plural in various ways, sometimes including the addressees and sometimes excluding them, and occasionally as a collective or authoritative replacement for the first person singular;¹⁵⁹ yet “we” nearly always includes the speaker. On a literary level, it states the obvious to point out that in Luke’s usage, the first person includes the speaker, just as other writers’ usage did; that was the point of using the first-person plural. Whatever the genre of Luke’s work, speakers within his narratives include themselves in first-person plural claims.¹⁶⁰ Why should readers suddenly interpret the expression differently when the narrator is the one speaking?
Relevant analogies in ancient historians therefore are not limited to the uses of the first person (and still more narrowly, the first-person plural) at the event level. Dividing narratorial and event-level uses of the first person reduces the evidence admitted for discussion, but on the point in question (that is, whether the first-person usage is self-referential) there is no significant difference between the narratorial and event levels.¹⁶¹
Campbell’s article does not claim that any of his examples involve a fictitious we; rather, it argues that first person usually dominates the narratorial level. One cannot use this observation to construe Luke’s “we” as narratorial, however, since it invariably appears with verbs at the event level. If the “we” is not fictitious, it must be taken as a claim to participation, just as readers elsewhere construe it where it occurs, on whatever level, in primarily factual writings.
Likewise, the historian’s first-person usage in these cases includes himself whether the usage is singular or the plural.¹⁶² Some historians, such as Diodorus Siculus, often use first-person plural narration, perhaps even preferring it to the singular.¹⁶³ Although dividing the first-person evidence into singular and plural uses may suggest patterns of usage distinctive to particular authors, not all the authors make the expected distinctions in usage. The division into singular and plural effectively minimizes the evidence being discussed, allowing one to complain that little evidence is available for the plural examples.
Luke, however, has a very clear reason for preferring the plural of the first-person: he identifies his presence only as part of a larger group, not as a primary actor within the narrative. A singular pronoun would require a statement of action distinct from one concerning the group. That is, Luke uses the plural because he belongs to a group, just as Josephus sometimes uses the plural because he belongs to a group.
Use of “We” instead of author’s name
An important question separate from what Luke means by “we” is why he uses it. The narrator’s mention of himself within the narrative using the first-person plural contrasts with the frequent historiographic practice of naming oneself as a participant only in the third person. Thucydides occasionally, and Polybius and Josephus usually, use the first person at the narrator level.¹⁶⁴ In Acts, however, the narrator’s first-person plural verbs appear not at the narrator level but within the narrative (16:10–13, 16; 20:6–8, 13–15; 21:1–8, 10, 12, 14–17; 27:1–5, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 27, 29; 28:1, 10–14, 16).
Other Meanings of the First-Person Plural?
Campbell suggests that if Luke wished to communicate his presence, he should have followed the example of Thucydides, Polybius, and Josephus in using the third person.¹⁶⁵ Yet the setting in which Luke uses the first person is what determines what he communicates with it.
First-person plural usage, Campbell suggests, need not indicate presence. To support this claim he notes that Josephus’s first-person identification with his ancestors cannot really “signal Josephus’s historical presence among his Jewish ancestors.”¹⁶⁶ But although Josephus is not making a claim of historical presence, he is identifying himself as part of the people, a claim that virtually no one disputes. That is, he is included in his “we.” Luke’s usage differs not in whom the “we” includes but the action or identification described; in both cases the first person includes the author.
Campbell may be right to conclude, “In the histories analyzed, referring to the author/narrator as ‘we’ gives a sense of corroboration to the narrative eyewitness’s version of the story. . . . Similarly, the effect of first person plural grammatical style in Acts is to cast the narrator character as a narrative eyewitness and participant in Paul’s mission and, in so doing, to emphasize his version of events.”¹⁶⁷
At the same time, Campbell argues, this usage “qualifies the narrator’s involvement by characterizing him as part of a broader eyewitness group.”¹⁶⁸ As I argue below, this is indeed true on one level.
Campbell’s argument that Luke’s first-person plural invites his audience into the narrative¹⁶⁹ is possible but not certain, and here Campbell’s own distinctions become significant: an editorial or narratorial “we” may invite audience participation, but does a narrative “we” at the event level necessarily do so, if the audience recognizes most members of the group in question? Whether or not Campbell is correct here, however, is not germane to the historiographic question about the narrator’s presence, since a narrator’s claim to be present historically is not in principle incompatible with an additional literary purpose such as reader identification.¹⁷⁰
Returning to the question of historical presence, what is more critical here is to note that we have no reason to believe (and Campbell does not specifically claim) that ancient historians introduced such an invitation to audience participation fictitiously. Since the actions Luke’s “we” depicts involve participation in the narrative’s events rather than narration, it remains a claim of genuine presence, for which the interpretive options are that it is either accurate or fictitious.
This observation in a sense holds true not only for ancient historiography but for ancient writings in general: if a writer claims to have been present, the claim is either true or false; if we deem it false, it is either because we expect it to be so based on its presence in a work the genre of which does not make many historical claims (such as a novel) or (in principle, though we cannot cite many cases) because we have sufficient reason to believe that the author in question is lying in this case.¹⁷¹ There is not sufficient reason to believe that Luke is lying, given his relatively rare, inconspicuous, and geographically consistent use of the first person, and given the consistency with the epistolary Paul on the points one would expect for a writer other than Paul.¹⁷² (Luke’s approach to Paul is obviously different from what Paul himself would have written, but some of the older contrasts posited between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the letters, such as Paul’s approach to the law, are no longer tenable in light of the New Perspective[s].)¹⁷³
Usage Varied
Why would Luke use first person within the narrative when most historians used especially third person there? First, we may note that not all authors identified themselves within narratives only in the third person, even in some of the works on which Campbell’s study focused; there was some room for author variation (in contrast to what appears to be a fairly uniform absence of a fictitious “we” claim in ancient historiography).¹⁷⁴ Campbell’s own evidence shows that occasionally Polybius, for example, used the first person at the event level.¹⁷⁵
Further, most historians did not directly participate in events and therefore could not mention themselves within the story’s events per se. Nevertheless, they could mention their activity involving research, inquiries, or eyewitness testimony of monuments. In these cases, they speak not simply as narrators but as those who acted in a way that is briefly narrated. This was already true of Herodotus, for example;¹⁷⁶ when acting in concert with others, he could also speak of what “we” did in the first-person plural.¹⁷⁷ Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes that he acquired some information orally from learned men, “with whom I associated.”¹⁷⁸ Occasionally Diodorus Siculus could also mention himself at the level of presence and research.¹⁷⁹
Writing in a work that covers some of the same historical ground as his War, Josephus’s Life employs the first person lavishly;¹⁸⁰ other forms of biographic works also did not object to it.¹⁸¹ Suetonius, for example, casually includes self-reference in the first person where it explains a source for his information.¹⁸² When Philostratus uses “we” or “us” (in his Vit. soph. 2.21.604) for students of Proclus of Naucratis, it is because he himself was among the students (2.21.602). Many other factually-oriented works also seem to have lacked reticence to employ the first person.¹⁸³
Because Luke’s marked citations are mostly from Scripture, it is the one source that we can be most certain that Luke and his ideal audience shared. Biblical historians do not usually claim their presence in the narrative, but exceptions appear in Ezra (chs. 8—9, alongside third person usage in chs. 7 and 10)¹⁸⁴ and Nehemiah (1:1–6 and passim, alongside third person in 1:1; 8:9; 10:1; 12:26, 47). These writers can shift to the plural “we” when traveling as part of a group (Ezra 8:31–32) or some other group activities (e.g., Neh 2:17–20; 4:1, 4, 6, 9).
First-century Jews viewed Deuteronomy, one of the most widely cited works at Qumran and in early Christianity, as Mosaic. This work introduces Moses speaking in the third person (Deut 1:5), as we might expect from sources sampled above, but then allows Moses to elaborate a lengthy historical prologue in the first-person singular (1:6—3:29). Where the plural occurs, it is not limited to Moses but includes him as part of a group,¹⁸⁵ including his participation on journeys (Deut 1:19; 2:1, 8, 13–14; 3:1, 29).
The Book of Isaiah introduces the prophet in the third person (Isa 1:1), but he appears thereafter in both the first and third person;¹⁸⁶ whatever this book’s editorial history, people in Luke’s day read it as a unified work. Likewise, the Book of Jeremiah introduces him in the third person (Jer 1:1–3), but he appears thereafter in both the first and third person.¹⁸⁷ Ezekiel appears in his book in the first person, except once in Ezek 1:3.¹⁸⁸ Other Jewish literature sometimes uses the first person for a narrator’s involvement in narrative, whether pseudonymously (in pseudonymous literature)¹⁸⁹ or in the name of the genuine author. This is the case, for example, in 1 Enoch,¹⁹⁰ and also in the Christian book, Revelation, where the narrator participates on the level of events.¹⁹¹
It thus makes sense that Luke, writing at a fairly popular level to a biblically literate audience, would have seen no problem including first-person factual narration.
Keeping the Focus on Paul
Why does the narrator appear only as part of a group? Luke’s specific use of “we” allows him to avoid entirely the risk of self-commendation (one of Polybius’s concerns with using first person in the narrative, 36.12.3).¹⁹² If some writers used the third person to evade charges of drawing undue attention to themselves, even though readers knew that the authors spoke of themselves, Luke actually shifts attention away from any personal activity on his part even more by using the first-person plural. Luke does not use first-person narration often;¹⁹³ when he does use it, although he is present as an actor, he never contributes individually to the narrative action. He thus would have no need to highlight or name himself, and describing his individual activity separately would have drawn attention to his activity rather than his historical function as a (limited) witness.
Whereas some authors may have avoided the first person to avoid the appearance of self-promotion (sometimes even while obviously promoting themselves, as in Caesar’s case), Luke avoids self-promotion even more fully by blending his presence into the group of which he was at times a part. Luke is not using a conventional literary plural distinct from the singular only on the level of the convention; he has to use plural because he is part of a group.
The reason that he does not depict himself as actor in narrative individually is because he is not writing about himself, but about (primarily, in these sections) Paul and his mission.¹⁹⁴ Luke minimizes mentioning himself more by including himself in “we” than by mentioning himself even in third person; he is present but never the focus of action. To mention himself more explicitly in the third person would require narrating an action of which he was the sole subject, unless he were to simply name each member of the group. As it is, he both indicates his eyewitness presence at some key events, particularly involving Paul’s controversial Roman custody, and keeps himself from the focus of activity. In this way, he affirms his role as reliable narrator without detracting from his focus on Paul.¹⁹⁵
Conclusion
Campbell’s study has brought to the attention of scholars some useful features of first-person usage in ancient historians, especially the prevalence of first-person singular usage more on the level of the narrator than on the level of narrative action. Nevertheless, first-person usage does appear at times within historical narratives, including in the style of biblical narratives familiar to both Luke and his audience. Where it occurs, its meaning in such cases is normally unambiguous.
It is thus not Campbell’s evidence from his survey of three ancient historians that prevents him from drawing this conclusion regarding Luke’s usage, but other common inferences, which must be judged on their own merits. I suggest above (against Campbell’s primary reason for treating Luke differently from other historians) that the author was likely known to Acts’ first real audiences. I have argued elsewhere at greater length that the author’s alleged unfamiliarity with or misrepresentation of Paul is overstated.
The simplest solution is frequently the best, and the most obvious solution is sometimes the simplest. Historians most frequently depicted their participation within narratives in the third person, but when first-person claims occur, whether on the narratorial or the event level, they do include the author. In Acts, these claims note the narrator’s participation. Luke does not restrict (or, beyond his prefaces, use) the first person for his narratorial voice; the verbs in the “we” narratives depict the narrator within the narrative.
Although Luke includes notice of his participation, however, his use of the first-person plural minimizes focus on it far more than even third-person usage would have done. He avoids needing to mention himself separately (by name, title or first-person singular pronoun) by simply including himself in group actions. The narrator reports no separate actions of his own, even though he apparently did share in the ministry (Acts 16:10, 17). His focus remains on Paul and, to a lesser extent, Silas, with a few other named characters.