[...] Based on earlier efforts, Price has reconstructed Marcion’s Gospel, one of the most interesting highlights of the book for what it contained and what it did not contain. But the important point here is that Price, like Knox and a few others similarly convinced by him, such as J. T. Townsend, sees Marcion as using an Ur-Luke with a few excisions which were unpalatable to Marcionite doctrine. Shortly therefore, in direct response to Marcion, revisions and additions by a “Lukan Ecclesiastical Redactor” who did his work sometime in the 140s and 150s created the now-canonical Luke, recasting the Gospel with a more pronounced “catholicizing” tone and content.

This view, quite naturally, has been generally resisted by mainstream scholarship, for it opens up a dangerous can of worms. [...] And especially in this case, since a concomitant conclusion is that the same Ecclesiastical Redactor in the mid-2nd century also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, this being another compelling aspect to the case presented by John Knox. This would be disastrous to the orthodox view of the history of early Christianity, for it would essentially reveal what many have already suspected: that Acts is a late, agenda-driven fiction, designed to further the interests of the 2nd century Roman Church, again in response to Marcion and his co-opting of Paul, as well as to the factional rivalry within developing orthodox Christianity, between traditions which were rooted—at least in legend, if not in fact—in Petrine circles vs. Pauline circles.

Over the years there has been a seesaw debate in critical scholarship as to whether Luke and Acts were really written by the same author. Between the two, says Price, there are some “striking differences in vocabulary” [p.496], suggesting different writers. Yet what they have in common is just as important: thematic consistency, a common agenda to get certain ideas and positions across. This suggests a single mind and purpose behind the two documents—those ideas and that purpose relating to 2nd century issues. As Price suggests, the two observations can be reconciled by assigning the unique vocabulary to the original author of the Ur-Luke (which, by the way, was the stage at which Q was added), while a single writer was responsible for revamping the Gospel for mid-2nd century Roman interests and at the same time creating the Acts of the Apostles to further those same interests. This writer-editor created a story arc embodying a soteriological process that spanned both documents. These common threads are highlighted throughout Price’s commentary and footnotes attached to his translations of Luke and Acts.

The commonest justification (it goes back to Harnack) for dating the Acts of the Apostles to the 60s of the 1st century is that the author ends the work with Paul’s arrival in Rome and says nothing about his death. Price offers several indicators within the text which suggest that the author did know of the death of Paul, such as the presence of large-scale parallels between the Passion of Jesus and that of Paul, necessitating a knowledge of Paul’s ultimate fate [p.483]. As well, the whole treatment of Paul throughout Acts speaks to a time when Paul was long gone and it was traditions about Paul and others in the early Christian movement and what was subsequently made of them that needed addressing and ‘spinning’. Prominent here is the obvious paramount concern of Acts to reconcile the two factions represented by Peter and Paul, to create a unity in the early movement which the epistolary record itself does not bear out. Acts subordinates a submissive Paul to the Jewish apostles. Peter and Paul are made two sides to a single harmonized coin. They perform similar miracles. The content of their speeches (all crafted by the author of Acts) are the same. Paul has been Petrinized and Peter Paulinized. These are not presentations which could have engaged a Christian writer—much less an actual companion of Paul—as early as Paul’s lifetime. Nor would such a companion or early writer have been likely to produce so many contradictions and irreconcilabilities between what Acts tells us about Paul and what Paul’s reputed epistles tell us about Paul. After all, as I pointed out in Challenging the Verdict [p.19], within Paul’s lifetime there would hardly have developed widespread traditions about his preaching and movements that would have been available to a writer to fashion the Acts story. He would have had to go to Paul himself for much of his information, in which case we would hardly see the significant anomalies that exist between Acts and the epistles.

Price offers several other reasons to reject Acts as the product of the 1st century, including its treatment of apostolic tradition (something never appealed to in 1st century writings), the use of the term “bishops” to refer to elders of the community, the treatment of Jews as beyond redemption, 2nd century apologetic language, late Christology, and the presence of numerous anachronisms betraying 2nd century features and concerns; all discrediting any early dating of this document. In one waggish heading, Price calls it “The Acts of the Apologists.”

Both Luke and Acts “de-eschatologize” Mark, who pointed to signs of an imminent End. For the writer-redactor of Luke-Acts, too much time has now elapsed and even Jesus’ language has to be altered to dilute any expectations of immediacy for the Second Coming. It goes without saying that the Prologue to the canonical Luke—the address to “Theophilus” and the reference to “many accounts” that preceded the writer’s own—is the product of the 2nd century Redactor, tied into the opening line of Acts. But it should be noted that even here, whether at an early or later date, no identification of a purported author is included for either the Gospel or Acts. It was only a generation after the Redactor did his work that we encounter any reference to “Luke, the companion of Paul” as the one who wrote these accounts: in Irenaeus around 180.