AUTHOR
AUTHOR
The Traditional Case
Both Luke and Acts are, strictly speaking, anonymous. From the preface to Luke, which is probably intended to introduce both the gospel and Acts, we can conclude that the author was well educated (the Greek of Luke 1:1-4 is good, literary Greek), not an original apostle or disciple of Christ (he writes about those things "handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word”), yet one who may have been a participant in some of the events he narrates ("fulfilled among us ”). 4 He knows his Old Testament in the Greek Septuagint version, has an excellent knowledge of political and social conditions in the middle of the first century, and thinks a great deal of the apostle Paul. 5
Further inferences about the author come from the "we” passages in Acts. These are four passages in which the author shifts from his usual third-person narration to a first person plural narration. Note the beginning of the first such passage: "So they [Paul, Silas, and Timothy] passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them” (Acts 16:8-10). The author continues with his first person plural style through 16:17, and then uses it again in 20:5-15, 21:1-18, and 27:1-28:16. The most natural explanation for this style is that the author of Acts accompanied Paul at these times during his ministry. On this showing, he was with Paul on the trip from Troas to Philippi and during the initial evangelization of Philippi on the first missionary journey (16:10-17). Joining Paul again as the apostle came through Philippi at the end of the third missionary journey, he then accompanied him to Miletus, and from Miletus to Jerusalem (20:5-15; 21:1-18). Finally, he was with Paul on his voyage to Rome (27:1-28:16).
The author could not have been any of the companions of Paul who are mentioned in these passages. Furthermore, since the author accompanied Paul to Rome and was probably with him during Paul’s two-year house arrest in Rome, we might expect Paul to mention him in the letters he wrote during that period of time: Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians, and, perhaps, Philippians. 6 Those companions who are named in these letters are Mark, Jesus Justus, Epaphras, Demas, Luke, Tychicus, Timothy,
Aristarchus, and Epaphroditus. This line of reasoning is certainly not foolproof: the author of Acts may have left Paul after their arrival in Rome, or Paul may not have mentioned him in his letters, but it is suggestive. At least, this is as far as the internal evidence of Luke and Acts can take us.
External evidence takes over at this point and singles out Luke from the list of possible candidates. The tradition that Luke, a companion of Paul, was the author of the third gospel and of Acts is early and unchallenged: the Muratorian Canon (A.D. 190),
Ireneus (Adv. Haer. 3.1; 3.14.1-4), the anti-Marcionite prologue (end of second century), Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 5.12), Tertullian (Adv. Marc. 4.2), and Eusebius (H.E.
3.4; 3.24.15). Luke’s authorship of these two books went virtually unchallenged until the onset of critical approaches to the New Testament at the end of the eighteenth century. Since then, doubt about the tradition has been widespread. We now examine the reasons for these doubts.
The Case Against the Tradition
The external evidence. Critics of the tradition question the value of the testimony of the early church. Early Christians, Cadbury alleges, produced many fanciful theories about the origin of New Testament books. 7 Moreover, in an argument echoed again and again in the literature, it is said that the tradition itself is probably no more than an inference from the text of the New Testament itself and has no independent historical value. 8 But as we saw above in our examination of the internal evidence, the New Testament does not furnish enough data to single out Luke as the author of Acts. Fitzmyer’s criticism of the idea that the external evidence can be dismissed because it depends on the reasoning of early Christians is fair. "That an individual in the second century—or even several individuals—might have so reasoned is certainly possible; but that such inferences from the NT text are the sole basis of an otherwise uncontested or unambiguous tradition...is difficult to accept.”9 We must, then, attach importance to the testimony of the early church—particularly since this testimony runs against form in singling out a nonapostle as the author.
The “we” passages. The traditional argument (given above) is that the "we” passages reveal the presence of the author of Acts. Some think that the author depends on an itinerary or diary that he himself wrote in the first person plural at the time of the events and that he incorporates into his literary product; others that the author has lapsed into the first person plural at these points as he writes. In either case, however, the "we” passages are thought to point to the author of the book.
But two other explanations for the phenomenon are advanced that would remove the value of this datum for the question of authorship. One is that the author has incorporated into his history a source written by another person in the first person plural. 10 But why would the author leave his source in that form? As critics never tire of pointing out, Luke has consistently reworded his sources, putting the stamp of his own style on everything he writes. And Harnack has shown that the style of the "we” passages is no different than the style of the text around these passages. 11 Why, then, would the author have left these several sections in this first person plural style, especially since it could hardly escape being misunderstood?
A second alternative explanation is that the use of the first person plural is a stylistic device, intended to make a rhetorical rather than a historical point. 12 But the evidence for such a rhetorical use of "we” is not strong, nor is it clear why the author would have used such a device at the points where he does. 13 The attempts to explain the use of "we” in these four texts as anything other than an indication of the presence of the author are failures.
Acts and Paul. These first two points are not so much arguments against the traditional view of authorship as they are attempts to make the data conform to the view that Luke did not write Acts. The reason why so many scholars now conclude that Luke could not have written Acts lies in the picture the book gives us of the apostle Paul. This picture, it is alleged, distorts the "historical Paul” at a number of key points; so serious is this distortion that they find it impossible to think that a companion of Paul could have produced the picture. The alleged distortions are of two kinds: historical and theological.
One of the most frequently cited historical discrepancies is the disagreement between Acts and Paul about the number of trips the apostle made to Jerusalem. But this matter has a plausible solution, which we consider briefly toward the end of this chapter. Other historical discrepancies, such as the claim of Paul in Acts that he had been educated in Jerusalem (Acts 22:3), in contrast with Paul’s own silence on the matter in his letters, can be resolved through a recognition of the different purposes of Acts and the letters of Paul. Paul tells us very little about his background in his letters, and his failure to mention items that Luke includes should not surprise us.
More serious are the alleged theological discrepancies. Philipp Vielhauer, whose essay on the subject is something of a classic, 14 points out four key areas of contrast between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the Epistles.
1. In the Areopagus speech of Acts 17, the Paul of Acts liberally uses Stoic notions about God, the world, and the relationship of human beings to God to make a case for natural theology. Nature and the world are so constituted, Paul here argues, that they serve as a preparation for the gospel. The Paul of the Epistles, on the other hand, as Romans 1 reveals, viewed natural revelation as having only a negative purpose: to confirm the responsibility of people for their sins.
2. The Paul of Acts is utterly loyal to the law: he agrees to impose ritual requirements on Gentile Christians (Acts 15:22-35); he circumcises Timothy, who had a Gentile father (16:3); he claims to be a loyal Pharisee (23:6); he even goes so far as to participate in Jewish purification rites in the temple in Jerusalem (21:17-26). Contrast this picture with the Paul of the letters, the Paul who claimed that Christians should not impose ritual restrictions on one another (1 Cor. 8-10; Col. 2), who told the Galatians that their circumcision would mean their being severed from Christ (Gal. 5:2-4), who viewed his Pharisaic background as so much refuse to be discarded (Phil. 3:5-8), and who proclaimed loudly and often that Christians were no longer "under the law.”
3. The Paul of Acts lacks the emphasis on union with Christ and the expiatory benefits of Christ’s death that is so central in the Paul of the letters.
4. The preaching of the Paul of Acts is uneschatological. Missing is the focus on fulfillment in Christ with the sense of imminence that is so typical of the "authentic Paul.” Related to this lessening of eschatological intensity is the concern for orderly church government manifested by the Paul of Acts (e.g., on the first missionary journey he and Barnabas very quickly appoint elders in the newly founded churches [Acts 14:23]). Contrast the Paul of the Epistles, who insists that the Spirit should have sovereign freedom in ruling the churches (1 Cor. 12).
To answer these objections fully would require monographs on both Paul’s theology and the theology of Acts. We will content ourselves with a few remarks on each of these points, along with some general comment.
The attitude toward natural revelation that emerges from Acts 17 and Romans 1 is certainly different, but the question is whether they are contradictory. Could not the Paul who wrote Romans 1, when arguing with sophisticated pagans in Athens, have used as many contacts with their culture as possible in order to establish some common ground as preparation for the gospel? Nothing in the theology of Romans 1 suggests that he could not. True, in Romans 1 Paul teaches that the ultimate effect of natural revelation by itself is wholly negative: people cannot be saved by it, only judged by it. But Paul never suggests in Acts 17 that knowledge of "an unknown god” could be saving—it is only by repentance in that God as now revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ that salvation can come (see v. 30). Moreover, we should probably view Paul’s speech in Acts 17 more as a preparation for the gospel than his preaching of the gospel as such. The text suggests that Paul’s mention of the resurrection led to a premature conclusion to his sermon. 15
Two things must be said about the issue of the law. First, Paul’s view of the law as found in his epistles has frequently been caricatured as being far more negative than it really is. Serious revision in the teaching of Paul on the law is now underway; while much of that revision is going too far in the other direction, it does serve to caution us about assuming a certain view of the law in Paul’s letters that is at least unbalanced. Second, and more important, the practices of Paul in Acts are by no means incompatible with the standard interpretation of his teaching on the law. Paul’s agreement with the decree of the apostolic council, which probably applied to mixed Jewish-Gentile Christian communities, is quite in keeping with his principle that a Christian should not be a stumbling block to others (see 1 Cor. 8-10 and Rom. 14:115:13). Timothy, whose Jewish mother gave him rights as a Jew, is circumcised not to enable him to be part of God’s people (the issue in Galatia) but to enable him to carry out his mission more effectively. This is quite in keeping with Paul’s claim that circumcision is a thing indifferent (Gal. 6:15). Paul’s claim to be a Pharisee must be understood in its context to be a claim to adhere to the Pharisaic doctrine of resurrection, over against the Sadducean rejection of the doctrine. And Paul’s willingness to participate in a Jewish purification rite is in keeping with his expressed willingness to be all things to all people (1 Cor. 9:19-22). Nothing in Paul’s letters suggests that he was opposed to participating in Jewish rites—as long as they were neither being imposed as necessary to salvation nor causing a stumbling block to other believers. 16
Some of the distinctive Pauline Christological and eschatological motifs are indeed missing in Acts. But this may be because the preaching of Paul that we have in Acts is almost entirely evangelistic, and we would not expect to see some of these motifs in such a context. Moreover, the picture of the Paul of the letters that Vielhauer and others set in contrast to the Paul of Acts is itself distorted and lacking in balance. In denying (in our opinion, wrongly) the Pauline authorship of Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles, they eliminate a significant and distinctive part of Paul’s own teaching—teaching that, if integrated into our total picture of Paul, would bring the Paul of the Epistles much closer to the Paul of Acts.
Distortion of the Paul of the Epistles takes place in another way as well. As Ulrich Wilckens has pointed out, many of those who find a great gulf between the Paul of the Epistles and the Paul of Acts do so because they are committed to an existential interpretation of Paul. 17 It is this narrow and distorted understanding of Paul that creates a significant amount of the distance with the Paul of Acts.
The great distance between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the Epistles that so many find is, in reality, a distance between a caricature of the supposedly authentic Paul and a one-sided interpretation of the Paul of Acts. To be sure, some distance between the two remains, but no more than we might find between one’s self-portrait and a portrait drawn by a sympathetic friend for a specific purpose. 18