Acts In Recent Study
ACTS IN RECENT STUDY
Survey of Research
Recent study of Acts must be understood against nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century background. 68 The assumption that Acts gives to us a straightforward historical narrative of the beginnings of the church was first seriously questioned at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the German critic W. M. L. de Wette. 69 He was followed by F. C. Baur and his disciples (the TQbingen School), who argued that Acts pursues a definite theological "tendency” (Tendenz ; hence Tendenzkritik). This tendency, formulated with the purpose of reconciling second-century church factions, determines what is contained in Acts. Luke does not, then, simply tell us about things "as they really happened.” 70 Predictably, so new and radical a thesis stimulated a strong reaction, and numerous objections to the TQbingen approach from scholars of widely varying theological commitments appeared during the course of the nineteenth century. The turn of the century witnessed the work of two great Acts scholars, both of whom made a strong case for the essential historicity of Acts. In a series of books, the famous German historian and theologian Adolf Harnack argued, among other things, that Acts was written at an early date by Luke the physician and must be considered a serious work of history. 71 William Ramsay went further. Ramsay, an archaeologist, started out as a skeptic but became firmly convinced of Luke’s historical reliability as he discovered detail after detail in Acts that demonstrated firsthand acquaintance with conditions in the Roman Empire in the middle of the first century. Luke, Ramsay concluded, belongs in the first rank of ancient historians. 72
At about the same time, scholars were showing considerable interest in the sources of Acts. Harnack himself, as we have seen above, was in the forefront of this development. As Ernst Haenchen puts it, scholarly attention had shifted from the question of what Luke was willing to say ("tendency criticism”) to what he was able to say (source criticism). 73 Shortly after this, in the 1920s, the new discipline of form criticism began to be applied to Acts. The most prominent practitioner of form criticism in Acts was Martin Dibelius, who, in a series of articles, established influential methodological points and conclusions.74 Dibelius argued that criticism of Acts must focus on the style of the narrative, since, in contrast to the Gospels, one does not have written sources with which to make comparison. By analyzing the style of Acts, Dibelius believed we could isolate certain forms, or narratives that Luke had used in his composition, from the rest of Acts, which was the product of Luke’s own creativity. The speeches of Acts, Dibelius particularly emphasized, showed every sign of Luke’s own creativity. The unique features of Acts rendered the shift from form-critical approaches to redaction-critical approaches to Acts less obvious than in the case of the Synoptic Gospels. Thus, the work of Hans Conzelmann and Ernst Haenchen builds directly on that of Dibelius, with perhaps slightly more interest in Luke’s theology as a whole. 75 Both writers are quite skeptical about the historicity of Acts, arguing that Luke’s desire to edify the church (Haenchen) or to explain the delay of the parousia (Conzelmann) has virtually erased any concern on his part with what really happened.