phorton

I'll try to answer the questions as posed:

1.The story was included by Luke to encourage his contemporaries to be generous.
2. I doubt if anyone was murdered. Could people kill each other in Roman Provinces, even Jews, without someone asking questions? Two in three hours? The story has all the hallmarks of what we would now call an urban myth. It may have been going the rounds for years or Luke may have borrowed it from pre-Christian tales.
3.As 1
4.Yes, a desire to raise cash seems to have been a probable motive.
5.I think persuasive propaganda aimed at Luke's contemporaries is more probable.
6.This is an interesting question. When I came across the story I studied a number of commentaries and questioned religious friends at length. The theologians were pretty hard nosed about it; they 'lied and deserved to die'; one called it a 'miracle of God's judgement'. one friend, a gentle and kindly man, said approvingly it was 'zero tolerance'. I found it pretty chilling that otherwise cultured and educated people were happy to worship a God they thought capable of such an act but what most did was shut their minds to the brutal reality of Luke's tale; as indeed they seem to with other cruelties in the Bible. One, a staunch Catholic agreed with my view that it was propaganda by Luke, but then he could not see that this cast doubt on the whole of Luke's miraculous stories.

So I think well meaning people salvage something good from religion by ignoring the brutal bits; they don't like them but they say 'God knows best' and ignore them.

Unfortunately people who mean ill find ample justificaton for ill in the same texts

7. Myth

8. One can just as well say that vileness was needed in the story to boost the Sunday plate, which supports my interpretation. If vileness proves veracity then most of the Bible proves itself.

Mary.

I would agree with everything phorton says in answer to the original questions asked, but would like to add something to:

I've always wondered why retribution for this lie was so swift and unmerciful, when the Bible (and Xtians) say God is merciful and slow to anger. The two liars should have been given a chance to ask forgiveness and offered the rest of their estate or whatever. But instead, they're struck down without a chance to redeem themselves. To me, this story is telling its audience they'd better fork over when the plate is passed, or they run the risk of getting struck down, too.

A Xtian friend of mine tried to explain it away by saying there is IRL an actual disease that matches what is described in the story and both these people up and died of that sudden disease. (I forget what she called it - she knew the fancy Latin name for it and everything.) When I asked her how was it that two people could have the same extremely rare disease and die from it within a short span of time under the same circumstances, she had no answer. Neither could she answer why they just didn't ask for forgiveness and offer up the rest of the money.

Mary.

Godless Wonder

Well, if a husband and wife are members of a cult, as the cult leader, you can't just kill the husband or the wife if you want to avoid questions. You've got to kill them both.

phorton

Mary's point intrigued me too, particularly as Christ , who preached forgiveness, must have known it would happen. Also it seems to be the only example in the NT of God killing someone instantly as a punishment; that must have justified many killings in Christ's name. My religious friends however weren't troubled at all. They either said God knows best or just looked the other way and didn't try to answer.

It interests me that in services of many denominations at Easter the whole of Acts are read over a number of Sundays but they omit the story of A and S. Summary execution is bitter fare for a Sunday morning.

Baidarka

Hi phorton

Thank You for reviving my sinking post and for adding your interesting take on the issue.

My inclination to accept the bare facts that underlie the A&S story.
Questions like why didn't God give them a second chance, only have meaning if the story is fiction, but if the incident occurred then what we are dealing with is an apologist spin on an actual event.
If we were to speak of the 9/11 event from a fundamentalist Christian perspective we could say that God allowed it to happen to punish the wicked NY fornicators and the worshipers of Mammon. To question why didn't God warn the NY fornicators and give them a second chance is meaningless because the question is based on a fantastic paradigm with no base in the real world.
My basic premise is that the little acorn from which the giant oak of Christianity grew was probably a swarmy little cult like the swarmy little cults that we are familiar with today ( Mooneys, Mormons,Scientologists,Jim Jonesians,David Koreshies).
I think that A&S were about to join the cult and hand over their money to Peter when they decided to back out. They may have made verbal promises in front of witnesses or even signed away their property but were still in a position to back out. Peter's only option (from an evil point of view) was to kill them.
If his group practiced communion he could have poisoned their wine or wafers. If they did not practice communion we know from Paul that they did practice communal meals. I'm sure that there were no ancient autopsies capable of proving murder in the case of poison. Besides the NT testifies to the fact that the early Church fathers were often chased from villages like vermin. My contention is that they were con men and criminals and that this was well deserved.
Check out "acts of Paul and Thecla". I think that this text reveals an interesting view of a very contemporary type cult separating children from desperate loved ones and parents, attempts at deprogramming, everything then as it is now.

capnkirk

One cannot understand why the story of Ananias and Sapphira is included in Acts before understandyng why Acts was written at all. Acts was written at a time when the first concerted efforts at overlaying an organizational heirarchy over the until then largely independent and largely autonomous congregations that Paul's missionary work had produced. IOW, the establishment of a priesthood and an orthodoxy. These congregations were about to become churches with overseers who were responsible for the theological content of the message offered to their membership. These overseers (eventually to be called bishops) desperately needed some unassailable claim to the (orthodox) truth. That claim was to be "direct descendancy from one of the Apostles - one of the 12 who were actually with Jesus when he was alive". But that claim needed bolstering.

Acts was thus written specifically to transfigure the (previously invented) 12 disciples (one of whom, Judas, would have to be replaced) into 12 Apostles, and to couple them to Paul's vision of "the Christ". The first several chapters of Acts is spent establishing the Apostolic credentials of the 12, and the last part is spent trying to reconcile Paul and his teachings with these Apostles. Since it was written to establish authoritative foundation for a claim to fill a specific ecclastical need, Acts is best understood as an act (pun intended) of mythmaking committed somewhere in the Aegean early in the 2nd Century.

Within this framework, the inclusion of the story of Ananias and Sapphira takes on new meaning. The intention is clearly to warn. Of what?

• That to hold back from your commitment to the church is a crime against god
• That the bishops, being descended from the apostles will also see through your deceit
• To practice such deceit places your mortal soul in peril

It was included to emphasize the necessity of submission to the church as equivalent to submission to god.

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A. Uiet bhor

Excellent explanation! That just about covers it, unless someone has objections?

The idea that it was written to cover up a murder doesn’t really make sense, as they would have needed to explain themselves to the authorities at the time, and they would not have accepted that explanation. If they had murderd the couple and got away with it they would not have wanted to bring it up, even as a scare tactic in case the truth came out, it is possible it was written to counter rumours of the event, but it seems to well thought out, who knows? All we have to go on without empirical evidence is reason, and probability.

phorton

Capnkirk is quite right,it was about much more than cash, it was about power. My excuse for a slightly frivolous interpretation is that a lifetime as a commercial lawyer tends to make you feel that people regard them as the same.

What intrigued me about his exposition was its similarity with some theological commentaries. The difference being that they took the story as true and hailed it as a miracle performed by God; one which was at that time necessary to attest to the truth of the Church's teaching and which preserved the integrity of the community. Whether God did it or Luke made it up, it seems to have worked.

I tried to persuade intelligent and highly educated friends to explain their reasoning whereby a wholly improable or wholly brutal event proves the truth of other improbale events, but to no avali. I concluded that they are in the grip of a propensity for belief, which they embrace as 'faith', which they, like most of humanity, cannot yet shake off. Perhaps it never will.

capnkirk

First, let me thank you for your kind words. Your analysis of its concordance with the theological commentaries does illustrate that the church recognized and used Acts for its intended purpose. If you would like to expand your knowledge of the subject, let me recommend Who Wrote the New Testament? : The Making of the Christian Myth by Burton Mack. Check out the link; read the reviews, and decide for yourself.

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Clivedurdle

This idea was more recently taken up by Karl Marx, but seems to be an Essene idea. What is the earliest example of this?

I thought it was a major tribal idea going back millenia that everything belongs to the community and the sharing out is done in a collective fashion. Keeping things back, the idea of private property, is an idea of cities, agriculture, capitalism and heirarchies. Proudhon - property is theft, chief seattle, who does the land belong to?

I have always taken this story, with the parable of the workers all getting equal pay for unequal amounts of work, and the phrase that in Christ there is no....as examples of what this religion was really about - a return to some ideal - for that time - pre modern - social system.

Their deaths are a very powerful morality tale about the dangers of private property. Ooops, what happens to capitalism? Oh of course doesn't matter, new heaven and earth very soon, with new Jerusalem. Sorry, a city, shome mishtake, that's heirarchical thinking again! Many mansions? Oh no, one communal sweat lodge thank you!