Acts 1-15
Acts 1-15
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, scholars working on Acts shared with their colleagues working on the Synoptic Gospels a preoccupation with written sources. Adolf Harnack’s source proposal for Acts 1-15 stands as a climax to this development. Harnack recognized, along with most scholars of his day and ours, that Luke has so uniformly imposed his own style on whatever sources he has used as to make it impossible to distinguish his sources through style and language. 55 Harnack appealed rather to geographic setting, theological tendency, and, especially, the presence of doublets to dissect Acts 1-15 into its component sources. Doublets are apparent duplicate narratives of the same story, and there are five of them, claimed Harnack, in Acts 1-5: two sermons of Peter (2:14-39; 3:12-26), two arrests of the apostles (4:3; 5:18), two appearances of the apostles before the Sanhedrin (4:8-20; 5:27-40), two estimates of the number of converts (2:41; 4:4), and two accounts of the sharing of material goods in the Jerusalem church (2:44-45; 4:32). Source critics often think that such doublets point to an amalgamation of two different sources, each with its own particular version of such incidents. Using these doublets in Acts 1-5 as his starting point, Harnack postulated the existence of three written sources in Acts 1-15: a "Jerusalem A” source, standing behind 3:1-5:16, 8:5-40, and 9:31-11:18; a "Jerusalem B” source, represented in 2:1-47 and 5:17-42; and an "Antiochene” source, which shows up in 6:1-8:4, 11:19-30, and 12:25-15:35. 56 Harnack’s scheme has been very influential and has been adopted, sometimes with modifications, by a significant number of scholars.
Despite its popularity, Harnack’s proposal is unlikely. Its foundation is shaky in that the evidence for doublets in Acts 1-5 is not strong. The narratives concerned are either so different from one another (e.g., the speeches of Peter), so integral to the progression of events (e.g., the two arrests and hearings of the apostles), or so integral to Luke’s plan (e.g., the references to the community of goods and the numbers of the converted) that they are unlikely to be duplicates. 57 Beyond that, there is little basis for differentiating the material in Acts 1-15, beyond the obvious matter of setting, and this can be explained in any number of ways. We simply do not have enough data to identify written sources of this sort behind Acts 1-15.
A source proposal of a very different sort was advanced by C. C. Torrey. He argued from the presence of Semitisms that Acts 1:1-15:35 is the translation of a single Aramaic source. 58 Torrey’s theory is now universally rejected. Although it is recognized that his proposal goes far beyond the available evidence, the discussion continues of the Semitic element in this first part of Acts and of its implications for Luke’s sources. There is some reason to think that the distribution of Semitisms in these chapters points to the use, at places, of Aramaic sources,59 but the evidence is not clear enough to justify firm conclusions or the identification of specific sources.
The sources behind Acts 1-15 cannot, then, be definitely pinpointed. It is likely that Luke depends on Aramaic sources for parts of these chapters, particularly for some of the speeches, and other written sources that we now have no means of isolating were perhaps used as well. But we should probably place as much if not more emphasis on oral reports as the basis for Luke’s narrative. 60 Certainly Luke’s two-year stay in Palestine during Paul’s Caesarean imprisonment (his stay is a fair inference from the "we” passages) would have given him ample opportunity to interview people such as Philip, Mark, and Peter himself. 61 And if Luke was a native of Antioch, he could have had firsthand knowledge of the planting and growth of the church there, as well as of the labors of the missionaries Paul and Barnabas, sent out from that church.