Paul’s Cumulative History with Riots
3
Paul and Sedition
Pauline Apologetic in Acts
In a number of cases, Luke’s depiction of riots in Acts follows the appropriate convention in forensic rhetoric of returning charges against accusers. At the same time, Luke’s apologetic could have been better served had he been able to avoid narrating riots surrounding Paul at all. His narration of riots therefore likely reflects accusations against Paul still circulating in his day, charges exemplifed in Acts 24 : 5 and 2 5 : 8 and perhaps associated with Paul’s martyrdom (depending on the date one assigns to Acts). There is therefore strong probability that Luke preserves relevant and fairly recent, therefore probably accurate, information about some of Paul’s historical experiences. Observing Luke’s apologetic therefore informs our appreciation of Luke both as an apologist and as a historian.
Defending Paul’s Legacy
Many scholars agree that at least one function of Acts is apologetic, a purpose that many extend to include an apologetic for Paul. Less frequently noted is Luke’s recurring narrative response to a charge stated by Paul’s narrative opponents: Paul as a stirrer of unrest (Acts 24:5). Luke offers repeated examples of riots involving Paul, in each case showing that the unrest was caused not by Paul but by his enemies. Shifting opponents’ charges back onto one’s accusers was a standard tactic in forensic rhetoric.
These observations have consequences for our evaluation not only of Luke’s rhetoric but also of the information available to him about Paul. It is highly improbable that Luke would risk Paul’s reputation by reporting a charge of sedition and many incidents of riots associated with him unless these were in fact charges that needed to be answered. This observation is instructive both regarding the support it offers for preexisting information behind sometimes-disputed action scenes in Acts and also for recognizing one of the key purposes and rhetorical strategies in Luke’s writing.¹⁹⁷
Paul’s defense speeches dominate the closing chapters of Acts before his voyage to Rome (Acts 22–26, passim). These forensic speeches, which appear in the context of the probably eyewitness “we” material, are carefully crafted rhetorically.¹⁹⁸ They probably also reveal information about the actual charges offered.¹⁹⁹ Because these charges include the capital charge of sedition (24:5; 25:8), Luke’s narration of riots surrounding Paul reflects not simply good storytelling (though it is that as well) but an apologetic strategy to absolve Paul from responsibility for these riots. This strategy would be important whether Paul remained alive at the time of writing (as some have argued) or whether (as many think more likely) he had been martyred but his detractors continued to contest his legacy.²⁰⁰
Acts and Apologetic
Scholars generally regard Luke-Acts as at least partly an apologetic work.²⁰¹ Even before examining Luke’s work in greater detail, one may observe clearly apologetic elements on the surface. Thus the presence of numerous apologetic speeches (especially 7:2–53; 22:3–21; 24:10–21; 26:2–29) and of “apologetic” and accusatory language appears to support the premise that Luke writes at least partly with an apologetic agenda in mind.²⁰² Scholars have argued that Luke affords more space to Paul’s custody than to his missionary journeys,²⁰³ and that Acts may include more trial scenes than the five standard Greek novels put together.²⁰⁴
But why would Luke need an apologetic for Paul? Probably not to exonerate him before Roman officials directly; few scholars today view Acts (in its completed form) as a legal brief.²⁰⁵ Further, some elements in Acts would actually militate against the support of Roman courts if presented to Roman officials—an observation that makes it unlikely that Luke intended the entire book to function in this way.²⁰⁶ Nevertheless, the narratives of Paul’s experiences before officials would provide useful models for Christian audiences, who might need to frame their own defenses or public arguments wisely with appropriate precedents.²⁰⁷
Luke himself indicates that he authored his two-volume work not primarily for outsiders, but to legitimate and confirm faith (Luke 1:4).²⁰⁸ Analogies from Jewish apologists confirm our expectation of a primarily Christian real audience for Luke-Acts. Whatever Jewish apologists’ intention for their works,²⁰⁹ it is doubtful that they received a large hearing outside Jewish circles; despite Judaism’s probable numeric strength in the Empire, most Jewish apologetic works were not widely read by gentile audiences.²¹⁰ The apologies of most minorities probably faced the same fate. Except perhaps for the most sophisticated and politically connected apologetic historians such as Josephus, apologetic history often sought especially to reinforce the claims of the targeted in-group.
Even so, apologists writing for Christians normally respond to the concerns raised by particular outside detractors or issues, just as other ancient Jewish apologists did. Whose concerns was Luke addressing? Some scholars argue that Acts’ apologetic audience seems primarily Jewish.²¹¹ They contend that only one of the final defense speeches addresses specifically a Roman;²¹² moreover, even when addressing Roman officials Paul is answering Jewish issues, and he continues to address Jewish issues (and a Jewish audience) in his final speech in Acts.²¹³ Acts concludes not with legal vindication but with God’s faithfulness to his people.²¹⁴
While all these observations are important, Luke would have to address even Jewish accusations if these accusations were or risked becoming an issue vis-à-vis local and Roman governments.²¹⁵ Luke is probably interested in answering Jewish objections of concern to his audience, not only because of their own relationship with local Jewish communities (and probably sometimes Jewish believers’ nonbelieving relatives), but also because of the effects of such accusations on Christians’ standing with regard to Rome. Showing that the Christian movement was an ancient and honored religion (i.e., part of Judaism) would be helpful (see comment below); showing that the most Spirit-led part of the movement embraced gentiles would guard against Christians being depicted as anti-social or (especially after 70) seditious in view of anti-Jewish prejudices of the era.
I focus in this essay on a more specific apologetic issue, however, namely accusations that Paul’s custody (and perhaps execution) confirmed the seditious behavior of a major leader in the diaspora Christian movement.
Apologetic Historiography
Before turning to Luke’s presentation of Paul, it seems helpful to offer a brief survey of Luke’s apologetic approach more generally. These observations are not meant to imply that Luke’s only agenda is apologetic; much of his larger story could make sense apart from that agenda. Thus, for example, Luke writes what scholars often call salvation history. Like some other ancient writers, from the Chronicler to Josephus to the authors of some Dead Sea Scrolls, Luke’s historiography appears to offer an implicit continuation of the biblical narrative.²¹⁶ This trajectory offers one essential approach to reading Luke-Acts in its ancient setting.
But how would the broader Greco-Roman world hear such a particular story about God’s people? Gregory Sterling has examined at length the question of ethnographic, apologetic historiography in relation to Luke-Acts, and a summary of his conclusions will prove helpful here in shedding light on an apologetic reading of Luke’s work. Sterling argues that many early Greek historians were ethnographers chronicling the histories of peoples, but originally from an exclusively Greek perspective.²¹⁷ Even when they became more sympathetic to other peoples in a later period, they continued to interpret them from Greek categories and perspectives.²¹⁸ (Indeed, despite Greek respect for Rome, Tacitus, a second-century CE Roman historian, complained that Greek historians admired only their own culture.)²¹⁹ Inevitably, other Near Eastern peoples, especially the priests guarding their sacred traditions, felt a need to respond to Hellenism’s cultural imperialism.²²⁰ To gain a hearing, however, these peoples had to use Greek language and literary forms; in the process they developed apologetic historiography.²²¹
In apologetic historiography, the literary elite of these cultures could employ their local traditions, which provided both an antidote to Greek ethnocentrism and evidence of their own antiquity.²²² Often they argued that their own civilizations predated the Greeks, hence that the Greeks borrowed from them.²²³ Hellenistic Jewish historians followed this pattern, adapting their stories as best as possible to Greek literary and rhetorical forms to argue that their culture was older and greater than that of the Greeks.²²⁴ Although the apologetic element is not always dominant, some scholars have argued that all extant ancient Jewish historiography was to some degree apologetic historiography, emphasizing especially the antiquity and superiority of Israel’s religion.²²⁵
Josephus’s retelling of sacred Jewish history in his Antiquities is our most massive and complete example of such Jewish apologetic historiography; Josephus seeks to demonstrate God’s providence in Israel’s history.²²⁶ As Daniel J. Harrington notes, Josephus “reworks Jewish traditions in categories derived from and comprehensible to a Greco-Roman public.”²²⁷ Although it was particularly in his Antiquities that Josephus sought “to dispel the ridicule and misinformation that characterized literate Roman portrayals of the Jews,”²²⁸ his other works also reveal heavily apologetic emphases (such as his implication in the War that merely a few bandits provoked the entire conflict).²²⁹ He also seeks to vindicate the Jewish God vis-à-vis Roman gods or Fortune, showing after the loss of 70 CE (as did the compilers of Kings and Chronicles after the exile) that the defeat belonged to God’s plan.²³⁰ In contrast to Josephus’s multivolume treatise, Jewish writers could also offer briefer monographs of apologetic history; one may argue that Philo’s Flaccus fits this category,²³¹ though the work is as different from Acts as its author is from Luke.²³²
Sterling argues that Luke-Acts fits the genre of apologetic historiography, and many other scholars now follow him.²³³ This proposal makes good sense of our extant ancient evidence, although Luke of course goes about this apologetic historiography in his own way and, like some other ancient Jewish historical works, includes this function as only one part of his objective. By showing the Christian movement’s and gentile mission’s heritage in Israel, Luke also offers a conventional ancient apologetic from antiquity: as an ancient faith with an ethnic heritage, the Jesus movement should be respected. Here, however, I want to focus on a different aspect of Luke’s apologetic historiography, which appeals to more recent precedents.
Luke’s Defense of Paul against the Charge of Sedition
Luke’s narrative includes both depictions of riots surrounding Paul and specific charges linking him with sedition. Neither portrayal would engender Paul to Roman officials, so it is unlikely that Luke the apologetic historian invented them. Rather, he must acknowledge them and work to explain them in a manner that exonerates Paul from suspicion of having caused the unrest.
Charges Against Paul
Whether Luke (or other early Christians) originally collected responses to charges against Paul for a legal brief, most scholars rightly doubt that Acts as it currently stands is such a brief. Nevertheless, concerns about Paul seem to have persisted, whether among Roman authorities, among Jewish detractors, among Jesus-believers, or more probably, some combination of the above (e.g., Christian concerns raised by Jewish detractors, of relevance to their own current situation vis-à-vis Rome).
The charges achieve their more explicit form in the prelude to Paul’s forensic defense speeches in the final quarter of Acts. The allegations that Tertullus levels against Paul in 24:5, adding to the existing charge of having desecrated the temple (21:28), are serious accusations, though apparently presented by Luke in summary form.²³⁴
Tertullus’s fierce language is expected; denouncing opponents’ character was standard forensic rhetoric.²³⁵ It was in fact customary to attack based not only on the charges, but to smear the accused person’s character in other ways, slandering them as viciously as possible.²³⁶ Thus, for example, when Fronto learned that the person he must prosecute was a friend of Caesar’s, he promised to stick to the charges, and not invent other accusations. Normally, however, shocking charges demanded prosecution with shocking tactics (Ad M. Caes. 3.3).²³⁷ It was common to paint one’s opponent’s wickedness with a broad brush, emphasizing that one could offer at most samples of his crimes. One earlier orator warned that simply recounting all his opponent’s crimes would consume too much of his hearers’ time, so he had to content himself with a few brief examples (Aeschines Tim. 109). In the Republic, Cicero notes that his example is part of a much larger pattern of abuses (Verr. 2.2.47.118), but that if he does not stop listing the accused’s crimes, his speech would never finish (Verr. 2.2.48.118).
Of particular interest here, however, is the content of the charges. Roman rhetorical handbooks emphasized that the charge of agitation (Greek stasis) or sedition was the most effective charge to bring against a person.²³⁸ The primary charge in Acts 24:5 is seditio, as in 17:6–7 and 18:12; this was an extremely dangerous offense with which to be charged.²³⁹ Luke’s audience would understand that this was the charge for which Jesus was tried and executed (Luke 23:2).²⁴⁰ Maiestas, or treason, was a very broad category of offense that could include even executing hostages without the emperor’s permission.²⁴¹ More specifically, “internal treason or sedition” included “assembling a mob, armed or otherwise, against the interests of the state, or occupying temples or other places.”²⁴² Sedition was a lesser charge, but when maiestas was hard to demonstrate, seditio, or stirring up the people, proved more suitable.²⁴³ No clear line of demarcation separated treason from sedition, and they might share the same penalties.²⁴⁴
The claim that Paul had stirred such unrest “among all Jews throughout the world” resembles Claudius’s historically recent charge against the Jewish people as a whole.²⁴⁵ Tertullus could thus imply that if there is Jewish unrest, Paul is one of its instigators. The accusation also fits conventional forensic hyperbole.²⁴⁶ Offenses “throughout the world” were incomparably terrible offenses.²⁴⁷ Of course, a skilled orator could present words more hyperbolic than this: “Was there ever any riot [seditio],” Cicero demands, “in which he was not the leader? any rioter with whom he was not intimate? any disorderly meeting where he was not the ringleader?” (Sest. 52.1). But once the hyperbole is taken into account, the charge likely reflects knowledge that Paul has been active over a wide geographic range. Acts itself attests that Paul had impacted a substantial number of Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean region, excluding Egypt.
The flexible charge of maiestas against Paul could be made to appear plausible. Classicist Arthur Darby Nock rightly pointed out that, “whatever Paul might say for himself, there had been riots in many places where he had been.” Nock then added with conspicuous understatement, “and the Roman government did not like riots.”²⁴⁸ That Luke makes no attempt to conceal such unrest in his narratives is telling; riots something like those that Luke portrays must have occurred. Meanwhile, that Luke blames them fairly often on Jewish opposition fits the rhetorical technique of returning charges against one’s accusers.
Luke is thus undoubtedly historically correct that Paul’s opponents associated him with unrest (leading to his Roman custody), but Luke is also likely correct that Paul was not politically seditious. Given the agendas of the historical Paul revealed in his letters, it is unthinkable that his aim was destabilizing the Roman order (cf. especially Rom 13:1–7, not coincidentally addressed to Jesus-followers in Rome). It is also clear that he faced considerable opposition, at least some of it from some members of his own people.²⁴⁹
Paul’s Cumulative History with Riots
The charge of stirring unrest (Acts 24:5) was a serious one, and Luke takes it so seriously that his narrative includes both incidents that could be cited against Paul and evidence that in none of these cases did Paul incite the trouble. Luke would hardly have cited so many incidents to begin with if accusations of stirring unrest did not remain too much of a live issue for him to evade. Tertullus presents a potentially damning and cumulative case against Paul; that Luke must mount an extensive (and, from our knowledge of Paul, virtually convincing) refutation of it throughout Acts, indicates that the charges that Luke reports were undoubtedly leveled against Paul historically.²⁵⁰
From Luke’s limited report in Acts 24, it appears possible that Tertullus could offer little more than generalities at the time. Had there been time for research before this hearing (24:1 suggests that there was not), Paul’s opponents might have listed riots with which Paul was associated rather than simply accusing him in a general way (probably based on his original Asian Jewish accusers’ reports to them; cf. 21:27–29). Given sufficient notice, some of his Jewish detractors from Asia could have collected reports from other cities, though few would have been willing to travel around to various cities soliciting reports of unanswered charges that had never produced a conviction.²⁵¹ As noted above, Josephus shows that Jewish communities in Asia carefully preserved legal precedents and reports on matters important to their survival and rights, over the course of many generations.
Paul’s Asian Jewish adversaries probably supplied the chief priest with their report from Ephesus and others they may have heard of, but they would know of those outside Ephesus only secondhand (perhaps received from Jewish travelers passing through their community). They had not expected to find Paul, or opportunity to accuse him, in Jerusalem, hence would not have gathered documents and certainly would not have brought them to the festival. (According to Luke’s account, accepted as historical by most commentators at this point, Paul had bypassed Ephesus during this journey to Jerusalem; Acts 20:16.)
Even the reports about the riot in Ephesus are now secondhand: the original accusers have left (24:19), probably without offering formal affidavits (which might be effective, but might also move Roman authorities sympathetic to Paul to invite these “witnesses’” appearance).²⁵² The accusers might not wish to remain so long after a festival (24:11), but they might also not wish to be accountable for their charges. If these Asian Jews believe that Paul retains powerful patrons in Ephesus (19:31), they might not wish to come into open conflict with his patrons, weakening their community’s own status in Ephesus.²⁵³
Luke himself provides a substantial list of potential incidents, but in each case refutes the potential charges (I use an asterisk to highlight the cases involving actual riots or unrest):²⁵⁴
Passage
Luke’s perspective
Jewish involvement?
9 : 23–25
Opposition in Damascus
Jewish opposition
13 : 12
Positive response from the proconsul
Despite a Jewish opponent
13 : 50
*Aristocrats in Pisidian Antioch drove them out (perhaps forgotten by now)
Jewish instigation
14 : 5
*Mob in Iconium
Jewish instigation
14 : 19
*Mob in Lystra nearly killed Paul
Jewish instigation
16 : 22–23
*Beaten in Philippi, but vindicated ( 16 : 37–40 )
Due to anti-Semitism
17 : 10
*Paul escapes without responding to charges (but these expired once the politarchs left office)
Jewish instigation
17 : 14
*Chased out of Berea
Jewish instigation
17 : 32–34
Tolerant response in Athens
No trouble from synagogue
18 : 12–17
Governor rejects the charges against Paul as purely religious
Jewish legal opposition
19 : 23
*Riot in Ephesus
No Jewish instigation, but it embarrasses the Jewish community
21 : 28
*Riot in the Jerusalem temple
Jewish instigation