Ancient Historical Standards
Ancient Historical Standards
It is often suggested that we should not expect Luke to give us an accurate, true-to-life record of the facts because ancient historians were not careful to stick to the facts. They wrote to edify or to draw moral lessons and felt at liberty to play fast and loose with the way things really happened if it suited their purpose or if they did not have access to the facts. To insist on historical accuracy would be unfairly to impose modern standards of history on an ancient historian.
Standards for historical writing in the ancient world were certainly not as uniformly insistent on factual accuracy as those in our day. Many writers who claimed the name "historian” wrote more fiction than fact. But the best ancient historians were concerned with the facts and did not differ very much from the modern historian in this regard. Polybius, for instance, criticizes other historians for making up dramatic scenes in the interest of moral lessons or sensationalism and insists that the historian should "simply record what really happened and what really was said, however commonplace” (2.56.10). 93 A similar position is taken by Lucian in his essay "On Writing History.” To be sure, the words of Thucydides are often quoted to substantiate a different position. Describing his procedure in writing his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides says:
As to the speeches that were made by different men, either when they were about to begin the war or when they were already engaged therein, it has been difficult to recall with strict accuracy the words actually spoken, both for me as regards that which I myself heard, and for those who from various other sources have brought me reports. Therefore the speeches are given in the language which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion, though at the same time I have adhered as closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually said. (Acts 1.22)
While Thucydides, who is generally highly regarded as an ancient historian, admits that not all his speeches are verbatim reports, two things also need to be noted about this statement. First, he resorted to giving the general sense "befitting the occasion” only when he did not have firsthand data. Second, he did not make up rhetorical flights to match his own purposes but stuck to what was appropriate to the actual occasion.
We will come back to the issue of the speeches in Acts. 94 Here we want simply to point out that ancient authors testify to very high standards of historical reporting, standards that are not much different at all from those with which we are familiar. It is not fair, then, to conclude that a concern for the way things actually happened was foreign to ancient historians.
Comparison Between Acts and Other Sources Luke, then, had available to him standards of historiography as rigorous as those in our day. The question is whether he successfully met them or not. Only a careful comparison of Luke with other ancient sources for the same data can answer this question. Because of the lack of parallels to Acts, we do not have available to us a great deal of material for comparison. But we can test Luke at three points: his knowledge of first-century society, politics, and geography; his reporting of events recorded by other ancient historians; and his accuracy in depicting the history and theology of Paul.
William Ramsay, 95 A. N. Sherwin-White, 96 and Colin Hemer 97 have demonstrated the accuracy of Luke’s knowledge about detail after detail of Roman provincial government, first-century geographic boundaries, social and religious customs, navigational procedures, 98 and the like. This accuracy shows not only that Luke knew the first-century Roman world but that he was intimately acquainted with the specific areas and regions in which his narrative is set.
Luke does not often record events that are also mentioned by other historians, and when he does, he does not usually give us enough detail to enable us to make comparisons. In the book of Acts, Luke’s mention of the death of Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12:19-23), of a serious famine in the middle 40s (11:27-30), of the edict of Claudius expelling Jews from Rome (18:2), of the replacement of the Judean procurator Felix with Festus, and of an Egyptian terrorist active in the middle 50s are all confirmed in secular historical sources. Only at two places has it been claimed that such a comparison finds Luke to be inaccurate. In 5:36-37, Luke has Gamaliel, the Jewish rabbi, mention the false messianic claims of a Theudas and, after him, of "Judas the Galilean.” Josephus, however, also mentions a rebel named Theudas but places his activity in the years A.D. 44-46, about forty years after Judas and at least ten years after the setting of Acts 5 (Ant. 20.5.1). But Gamaliel may be referring to a different Theudas entirely, and in any case, as F. F. Bruce remarks, "where we have simply the one author’s word against the other’s, Luke is at least as likely to be right as Josephus.” 99 The other problem is the Roman officer’s reference to the "four thousand” men whom "the Egyptian” had led in revolt (Acts 21:38); Josephus, however, refers to thirty thousand (Ant. 20.8.6). But again, we should certainly prefer Luke to Josephus, especially since Josephus’s numbers are often impossibly large.
The most serious challenge to Luke’s accuracy involves a comparison between his story of Paul and the apostle’s own accounts. We have examined some of the alleged discrepancies above and have concluded that there is no reason to drive a wedge between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the Epistles. The alleged historical contradictions almost all involve matters on which Paul’s own evidence is incomplete or ambiguous. This is not surprising, for, granted the nature and purpose of Paul’s letters, it is not to be expected that the apostle would have gone into the historical detail that we find in Acts.
Perhaps we should say something further here about one of the most famous problems in a comparison with Paul and Acts: the number of trips Paul made to Jerusalem after his conversion. Paul’s own epistles mention only three such trips: three years after his conversion (Gal. 1:18); fourteen years after his conversion, or, perhaps, after his first visit (Gal. 2:1); and a projected visit at the time of the writing of Romans (Rom. 15:24). In Acts, however, we are told of five visits: the postconversion visit (Acts 9:26), the famine-relief visit (11:27-30), the visit for the apostolic council (chap 15), a visit between the second and third missionary journeys (18:22), and a visit at the end of the third missionary journey (21:17). Now, it is clear that the first visit in Acts corresponds to the one Paul mentions in Galatians 1:18, and the last to the one mentioned in Romans. But it is common to accuse Luke of fabricating one or more of the other visits, particularly because, it is usually argued, the visit in Galatians 2:1 must be the visit for the apostolic council (Acts 15), leaving no place for the famine relief visit of Acts 11:27-30. But it is, in fact, more likely that Galatians 2:1 describes the famine-relief visit (see the introduction to Galatians, chap. 10 below). There would then be no contradiction between Paul and Acts, only a difference over the number of trips mentioned. But we have no reason to expect that Paul has told us of all his journeys to Jerusalem, so the problem disappears entirely. A similar situation prevails with respect to the other, less serious alleged discrepancies between the history of Paul in Acts and the details of his life furnished in his letters.