Sheshonq

I missed nothing at all.

OK.

Still OK.

Which doesn't change or refute what I said: You don't know that all the ones you have are copies; you actually might have an original among the documents you are calling 'copies'. Small odds are not zero odds, and you yourself admit that an original *must* exist somewhere.

Here is your task:

1. You have to prove that each an every alleged copy really *is* a copy, and rule out the possibility of being the original. Given the close dating and the margins of error associated with the dating process, I highly doubt that is possible.

2. Then you must track down the original. Until you do, you cannot imply a 1st century date for it merely by the presence of 2nd century copies. Both the autograph as well as the copies could date to 2nd century.

In fact, a strong argument could be made that as soon as the autograph was complete, the church went into high gear to create as many copies as they could to facilitate getting the gospel out. That would imply that autograph and copy are very close in time, not separated by years or decades. So if P52 is dated to the 2nd century, then that scenario implies that the autograph would also be from that time.

No, it's just your misunderstanding of the numbers combined with a busted attempt to invoke probability. It doesn't bother me, but it should disturb you greatly.

Johnny Skeptic

Here is the second file that Dr. Robert Price sent me:

mod note: for the entire essay, see This thread. The parts related especially to the date of Luke have been kept here.


The book is not mentioned until Irenaeus includes it among the four gospels he is willing to accept in ca. 180 AD/CE. Justin (150?) may refer to Acts, but we are not sure. Marcion (ca 140) had a shorter version of Luke, but no Acts.

A. Proposed dates (in ascending order):

1. 60 AD/CE: The principle defense of this earliest date was that of Adolf Harnack (The Date of the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts).

a. Harnack decided that there was no other way to explain the silence of Acts re Paul's death, or at least the outcome of his trial, unless we suppose that Luke wrote during the period of Paul's house arrest in Rome, awaiting trial and preaching the gospel. If Luke knew Paul had been martyred, can we imagine that he would not have made much of it?

i. It cannot be that he is not interested in depicting martyrdoms per se, since he does mention that of James son of Zebedee in Acts 12, as well as Stephen's in Acts 8.

b. Though conservative apologists like W.W. Gasque now delight in invoking Harnack in favor of an early date so they may argue for the historical accuracy of the Acts, it is important to realize that Harnack admitted that Acts was untrustworthy and simply fabulous at many points, that Luke was habitually inaccurate, that early dating was incompatible with none of these phenomena. He was by no means an apologist for biblical inerrancy.

c. Harnack accepted the theory of Luke's dependance upon Mark, and he knew his early dating had to take that into account: Mark and Q must have been early, too.

i. This, however, brought up another problem, in that most scholars regard Luke as having taken the Markan "abomination of desolation" prophecy (Mark 13:14ff) and historicized it in light of the actual events of 70 AD/CE (Luke 21:20; cf. 19:43). Mark probably already reflects the events, but Luke seems to have taken the trouble to renarrate the text in terms of a literal description. What was Harnack's answer to this?

aa. He said that Luke could see the original prophecy denoted a Roman conquest and simply employed his knowledge of typical Roman tactics. Similarly, some years later, C.H. Dodd argued that the language of the siege of Jerusalem reflected LXX language, though scholars have since challenged him.

This seems to me a harmonization, an attempt to get out of a tight spot, but maybe he is right. There are, however, more serious objections to his theory of a date before the death of Paul.

d. Is Luke ignorant of the martyr death of Paul? Most scholars today do not think so.

i. Note that at the end of Acts Luke refers to Paul's two-year imprisonment as a thing completed, a rounded-off episode. "The imprisonment lasted two years." And then what happened? It is indeed puzzling that he does not tell us, but it equally seems that he is assuming something else happened, i.e., the story went on.

ii. Luke has Paul predict his martyrdom in pretty explicit terms in Acts 20:25 (v. 22 notwithstanding). "You shall see my face no more"--a prediction he could make only if he knew he would be dead (Luke has no indication of a Spanish mission which might forever take him away from the East).

aa. In fact, the passage as a whole, the farewell speech to the Ephesian elders is an easily recognizable "Last Testament" piece, a common device to put "famous last words" into the mouth of a famous man. (see Crito, Testaments of the 12, of Abraham, Moses, Job, etc.).

Specifically, the "prediction" (ex eventu) of Gnostic heretics emerging later to forage among the churches of Asia Minor seems to be a much later post-Pauline way of dissociating Paul from the floodtide of "heresy" that overtook the area by the 2nd century. Luke seeks here to absolve Paul of the blame of it, contrary to the heretics themselves who claimed him as their patron saint.

iii. Luke draws a large-scale series of parallels between the Passion of Jesus and that of Paul. Both undertake peripatetic preaching journeys, culminating in a last, long journey to Jerusalem, where each is arrested in connection with a disturbance in the temple. Each is acquitted by a Herodian monarch as well as by Roman procurators. Each makes, as we have seen, passion predictions. Is it likely that Luke wrote this in ignorance of what finally happened to Paul?

2. 80-90 AD/CE: This date is accepted by the majority of current scholars (though I think it is incorrect). It is simply an attempt to push Luke as far back as possible while admitting that neither Mark nor Luke were written before the death of Paul (62 AD/CE) or the fall of Jerusalem (70 AD/CE), and this in order to keep it within the possible lifetime of a companion of Paul, which is what tradition made Luke.

3. 100-130 AD/CE: The Tubingen critics of the 19th century (Overbeck, F.C. Baur, Zeller) dated Luke-Acts in the second century. More recently Schmithals, Koester, and O'Neill have maintained the 2nd century date.

a. Baur placed Luke-Acts late on the historical timeline because of its "catholicizing" tendency. That is, he showed how there is a conflict between nationalist Torah-observant Jewish Christianity on the one hand, and more open, Torah-free Hellenistic/Gentile Christianity on the other. The first was led by James, Peter, and the 12, while the latter was led by Paul, the 7, Apollos, Priscilla, Aquilla, and others.

i. Baur showed how most of the New Testament documents could be placed on either side of this great divide. On the Jewish side were Matthew, James, Revelation. On the Gentile side were the 4 authentic Pauline Epistles (1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians and Romans 1-14), Hebrews, John, the Johannine Epistles, Mark.

ii. Later there arose the catholicizing tendency, i.e., the tendency to reconcile the two parties. The pseudonymous 1 & 2 Peter either give Pauline thought under Peter's name or have Peter speak favorably of Paul while denigrating those who quote Paul against the memory of Peter. Interpolations into the Pauline Epistles, as well as pseudonymous epistles attributed to Paul, make him friendlier to Judaism and the Law.

Luke-Acts attempts to bring together the Petrine and Pauline factions by a series of clever moves:

1. Peter and Paul are paralleled, each raising someone from the dead (Acts 9:36-40; 20:9-12), each healing a paralytic (3:1-8; 14:8-10), each healing by extraordinary, magical means (5:15; 19:11-12), each besting a sorcerer (8:18-23; 13:6-11), each miraculously escaping prison (12:6-10; 16:25-26). If one praises God for the work of Peter, then one can scarcely deny him to have been at work in Paul either (and vice versa).

2. He makes Peter a universalizing preacher to Gentiles, cf. the Cornelius story and especially the speech of Peter in Acts 15 which echoes that of Paul in Galatians 2, aimed at Peter!

At the same time he makes Paul still an observant Jew, claiming still to be a Pharisee (23:6), piously taking vows and paying for those of others (21:20-24), attending Jerusalem worship on holy days. He makes it clear that there is no truth to the prevalent rumors that Paul had abandoned legal observance (Acts 21:24), which is not clear at all from Paul's own writings.

Having vindicated Paul as a true and divinely chosen preacher of the gospel, and this conspicuously in the teeth of Jewish Christian opponents, Luke seems to deny him the dignity of the apostolate itself, redefining the office in an anachronistic fashion which would have excluded everyone else as well! (Acts 1:21-22)

Paul is subordinated to the 12 as their dutiful servant. He makes a beeline to them after his conversion, in direct contradiction to Galatians 1:15-19. He does nothing without their approval and preaches of their witness to the Risen Christ (13:30-31), not his own.

In short, Luke has Petrinized Paul and Paulinized Peter, so as to bring their respective factions closer together. All this bespeaks a time well after Paul himself.

B. Hans Conzelmann (who, however, does not place Luke-Acts quite so late) also argued (in The Theology of St. Luke, or Die Mitte der Zeit) for a date significantly after Paul and presupposing sufficient passage of time that it had become apparent that history had entered a new era.

Conzelmann argued that in Luke's day it had become evident that the apocalyptic enthusiasm of the earliest Christians, still evident in Mark, was premature, that the world would keep on going, and that a new era of salvation history had commenced.

This is why he wrote Acts: the story of salvation was not yet over. Jesus was the decisive "center" of it, but not the culmination of it. He rewrote the story of Jesus to "de-eschatologize" it and make it fit into an ongoing world in which the church had more of a role than merely awaiting the end.

Conzelmann envisioned salvation history as consisting of three great eras. The first was that of Israel. In Luke it would be represented by the first two chapters of the gospel with Zechariah, Elizabeth, Miriam (Mary), Simeon, and Anna as quintessential Old Testament characters (actually modelled on characters in the stories of the infancy of Samuel [Simeon=Eli, Elizabeth=Hannah, etc.]).

Conzelmann believed the first two chapters were a later addition to Luke, so he did not make this connection, but it seems to me to fit his theory pretty well.

The second period was that of Jesus. It forms the middle of time, the strategic pivotal zone of history. It culminates the time of Israel and commences that of the church.

John the Baptist is the pivotal figure, marking the shift of the aeons (Luke 16:16) from the time when the Law is preached to the time when the Kingdom of God is preached.

Within the period of Jesus there is a further breakdown: In the center of it lies the public ministry of Jesus, when the full blaze of heavenly light dispels shadows; wherever Jesus goes, evil flees, like the Canaanites before the advancing Israelites. This Conzelmann called the "Satan-free" period. It begins with Jesus' warding off of Satan by successfully withstanding the temptations. At the end of this story Luke says Satan "departed from him until an opportune time (kairos)" (Luke 4:13). That time comes at the betrayal story when, as in John, Luke says that Satan entered into Judas Iscariot to engineer Jesus' betrayal. Between these two events we see either an editorial elimination of Satan's activity or a continual banishing of his forces from the field.

In the first case, notice that Luke has omitted the rebuke of Jesus to Peter, "Get behind me Satan!" from the Confession of Peter scene. Even Matthew who doesn't want to make Peter look bad (as witness the "Thou art Peter" material in his version of the scene) retains the rebuke. Why does Luke omit it? The period must have been Satan-free!

In the second case, note that Jesus rides roughshod over the forces of evil, witnessing Satan falling precipitously (Luke 10:18-19) from his position of power in one of the lower heavens ("the powers of the heavens shall be shaken" Luke 21:26b), freeing those oppressed by the devil (Luke 13:16; Acts 10:38) apparently without resistance.

Some see these two motifs as contradictory: how can the period of the ministry be free of the machinations of Satan and yet be the time of unceasing battle between Jesus and Satan? But I think they misunderstand the idea that Satan seems completely unable to reinforce his vanquished troops. Where is he?

Once the Satan-free period is over (and Jesus knows it is over as of the Last Supper) he warns the disciples that it will no longer be so easy as it has been up to this point. Whereas they could travel preaching the gospel unmolested thus far, now they had best carry weapons to protect themselves (22:35-36). It is only now that we learn of Satan's demand to thresh the 12 like wheat (22:31).

If Conzelmann is right about this, we can detect for the first time the perspective, much like our own, of a distinctly later period, one from which the time of Jesus already looks something like a never-never-land unlike the mundane and difficult time in which we live, a pristine "once upon a time" of origins. It is, from the standpoint of the reader and the writer, long over. We are now in the third period, that of the church, when the gospel is to be preached and tribulation is to be endured. This is not a work of the apostolic age, it seems to me.

Conzelmann's Luke also tends to push the eschatological fulfillment off into the future. At first this is not obvious, since he retains the passage from the Markan apocalypse in which we are told that this generation will not pass before all these things are fulfilled (Luke 21:32). But we dare not ignore the many subtle changes Luke makes in his sources elsewhere:

In the Olivet Discourse:
1. Now the false prophets do not merely announce that "I am he," but also that "The time is at hand!" (21:8; cf 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3)

2. Now the events Jesus predicts lead up only to the historical destruction of the Jerusalem temple by Roman troops (21:20), not to the very end of all things, as Mark had expected.

3. The fall of Jerusalem will usher in a new period, the times of the Gentiles, i.e., apparently times of Gentile dominion over Israel, as in the visions of Daniel 7. Thus there is a distancing buffer between the events of 70 AD/CE and the end, and Luke stands in the middle.

At the Confession story, Jesus predicts that some there will see the Kingdom of God, but not "coming in power" as Mark had it (cf. Luke 9:27 and Mark 9:1). He wants to avoid the embarrassment that the 12 all died, and still no second coming (cf. 2 Peter 3:4; John 21:23).

At the Trial scene: Jesus no longer tells his contemporaries that they will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power (as in Mark 14:62, "you will see"), but rather simply that from now on he will be seated there (Luke 22:69). He wants to avoid the embarrassment that the Sanhedrin are dead and the coming of the Son of Man and the Kingdom of God has not transpired.

The Three Impatient Questions:

1. Luke 17:20-21. Jesus is asked of signs whereby the arrival of the Kingdom may be counted down (signs such as he himself is presented as giving in the Olivet discourse, but as repudiating in Q). His answer is that there will be no such anticipation. It is not the kind of thing at all that even could come that way, since it is an inner spiritual reality. (Conzelmann didn't say so, but we must wonder if this is where we see Luke's own eschatology emerge most clearly!) Cf Thomas 3.

2. Luke 19:11ff--Luke has very heavily redacted the parable of the Talents (which survives in something more like its Q form in Matthew 25:14ff) in order to make the point that before the Kingdom comes the Son of Man is going to have to go very far away (i.e., heaven--cf. Acts 1:10-11) and thus be absent a long time before he can return as king.

3. Acts 1:6-7f: Even after 40 days of "inside teaching" from the Risen Christ himself the 12 are still so dense as to expect an immediate theocratic denouement. The artificiality of the scene is plain; hence it is redactional. The point is not to trouble yourself about matters of eschatology and get busy spreading the gospel.

Similarly, according to some MSS, Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer replaces the petition "Thy Kingdom come" with "Thy Spirit come upon us."

The replacement of horizontal with vertical eschatology: Luke alone among the gospel writers speaks of people going to heaven or hell as soon as they die. The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (17:19-31), perhaps borrowed from the Egyptian tale of the two brothers, and the thief on the cross story (23:43) both have such a picture.

Also see Luke 20:38b, where Luke adds the idea of present immortality, "for all live unto him," just as in 4 Maccabees 7:19 ("to God they do not die, as our patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob died not, but live to God").
Earlier Christians thought of attaining the kingdom or not. One thinks of going to heaven only when the prospect of an imminent end has faded (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14; 2 Corinthians 5:1-4; Philippians 1:23).

The thief on the cross passage is also clearly a Lukan redaction, a development of Mark, and perhaps even of a special Lukan source where "Remember me when you come to the throne" must have been intended as mockery, as in Diodorus Siculus (where the same phrase appears, as a taunt by a nobleman to a slave with delusions of royalty). And again, the eschatological enthronement of Jesus is replaced by "going to heaven!"

Conzelmann argued that if Luke is not an early work representing a radical millenarian movement, then perhaps the ethic it implies is a more bourgeois ethic to be lived by those who no longer imagined they had the option to remain aloof from the world. Luke represents the rejection of the "interim ethic" of radical movements.

The attempt of Luke to point up the innocence of Jesus and Paul at every opportunity surely leans in this direction. Like the Pastorals, he wants to find an accord between church and empire.

All in all we get a view very much like that of the late first-early second century Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus). Later we will see there is reason to believe that the similarity stems from more than just a common church-historical milieu, perhaps actual common authorship.

Conzelmann pointed also to the expanded preaching of John the Baptist in Luke, where he gives ethical teachings to the crowds. He didn't in Mark and Q. Why the difference? Because Luke understands John as ushering in a new historical era, for which concrete guidelines will be necessary, not merely the end of the age, for which one can do nothing but repent and wait with bated breath.

C. Charles Talbert (Luke and the Gnostics), though again without actually holding to a second-century date, showed how Luke shares the agenda and the views of the second-century Apologists Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian. These men faced the challenge of "heresies" (competing forms of Christianity) which they sought to refute by claiming an exclusive copyright on the "apostolic tradition."

1. The Apologists relied heavily, in their polemics against the Gnostics, on the idea of "apostolic succession" of bishops. That is, the 12 apostles had been the apprentices of the Son of God. They alone saw the whole of his ministry and thus were in no danger of taking things he said out of context as, e.g., Irenaeus accused the Valentinians of doing.

In the Pseudo-Clementines Peter takes Simon Magus to task precisely over this issue: how can the Magus hope to have a correct understanding of Christ and his teaching derived, as he claims, from occasional visions of him? If he were really taught by Christ, he ought to agree with Peter who saw and heard everything the Messiah did and said!

Luke seems already to be setting up the 12 Apostles as a college of guarantors of the orthodox tradition of Jesus. As Talbert notes, Luke makes explicit in Acts 1:21-22 that he views as an apostle one who has seen and thus can verify all the events of the Jesus story as they are preached elsewhere in Acts, namely the baptism on through the ascension.

The artificiality of this is evident from the simple fact that the 12 cannot all have been present at these events even on Luke's own showing! But he does make the effort, as Talbert shows, to have the disciples miss nothing at least from the point when they join Jesus.

E.g., while they are away on their preaching tour, there is nothing recorded of Jesus--otherwise the witnesses could not attest it! Jesus would have been a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear the sound!

Günther Klein has gone one step farther (Die Zwölf Apostel) and argued that, whereas we hear from Paul about "the Twelve" and "the apostles," and from Mark and Matthew about "the disciples," the notion of a group of "the Twelve Apostles" is a Lukan creation to restrict the office of apostle, originally much less restrictive, to the narrow confines of the 12. The one reference to the 12 apostles in Mark would make sense as a harmonizing interpolation; in Matthew, it seems to be used in a non-technical sense ("the 12 he sent out came back").

Note that Luke has every step of the fledgling church carefully overseen by the vigilant eye of the 12 who stay magically untouched in Jerusalem even when the whole church is otherwise scattered by persecution (Acts 8:1): They authenticate the conversion of the Samaritans, the ordination of the 7, the conversion of Cornelius, the ministry of Paul.

The Apologists held that it was the bishops of the Catholic congregations who were appointed by the apostles to continue their work, teaching what they themselves had been taught, as it were, from the horse's mouth. Luke has Paul tell the Ephesian elders that he taught them everything he knew (Acts 20:20--i.e., against Gnostic claims that he had taught the advanced stuff only to the illuminati, as he says pointedly in 1 Corinthians 2:6f that he did), and calls them "bishops" in 20:28, though translations hide it. Cf. 2 Timothy 2:2.

2. Tertullian denied the right of "heretics" even to quote scripture in their own defense (much as Justin did Jews), claiming that the scripture was meaningless unless interpreted in accordance with the tradition of the apostles. And what was that? Well, whatever the current catholic interpretation happened to be!

Even so, Luke is careful to have the 12 appear as recipients of the Risen Christ's own scriptural exegesis (Luke 24:25, 43-44), which, however, Luke refrains from giving in any detail--writing himself a blank check!

3. Tertullian fought against the Gnostic idea of a spiritually resurrected Christ, as opposed to a physically resurrected one. Is it any accident that Luke has the same concern, as opposed to the presumably earlier view of 1 Cor. 15:49-50; 1 Pt 3:18?

4. The Gnostics claimed that Jesus had remained on earth some 18 months, even perhaps 11 years, teaching the apostles, from whom, incidentally, they, too, claimed apostolic succession (Paul -> Theodas -> Valentinus; Peter -> Glaukias -> Basilides). This was of course a way of saying they had the inside stuff, with all veiled language dropped away (cf. John 16:25-30, originally part of such a resurrection dialogue as we find in Pistis Sophia, Dialogue of the Savior, etc.

It is no wonder that Luke appropriates the device of the post-Easter period of teaching, of 40 days, claiming such warrant for whatever the bishops may teach (which is, again, why Luke does not tell you what Jesus taught them!).

5. Talbert notes that the decision of Luke to write an account of Jesus, then one of his major authorized successors, reflects the practice of current philosophical schools, who produced two-volume treatises, the first an account of the founder's life and teaching, the second of the duly appointed successors as a legitimation for the current leadership of the school. Sometimes to this there might be affixed a collection of genuine or spurious epistles from the founder. This fits well with the theory of Jerome D. Quinn that the Pastorals were intended to follow Acts as "volume 3."

D. J.C. O'Neill (The Theology of Acts in Its Historical Setting) argued that Acts belongs in the early second century because its theology has most in common with the writings of that time (again, including the Apologists):

1. The view that Jews have forfeited their claim on God and have been shunted to the side is surely impossible before the second century. Had it become clear earlier than this that Jews en toto had completely rejected the Christian message? Hardly! Yet in Acts, not only is this a fait accompli, but (as Jack T. Sanders, The Jews in Luke-Acts, shows) Luke seems to view the Jews of the Diaspora, the only ones he knows as historical entities (i.e., as opposed to the Sunday-School-lesson Jews of Jerusalem) as horned caricatures who oppose the gospel out of base envy -- a motivation retrojected from a later period in which Christianity has begun to overwhelm Judaism in numbers, surely too late for the lifetime of Paul or one of his companions.

2. The theology of the supersession of the Temple seen in Stephen's speech is borrowed from post-70 AD/CE Hellenistic Judaism, where as we see in Justin's Dialogue with Trypho and the Sybilline Oracles, Jews had begun to make virtue of necessity and spiritualized temple worship.

3. The Apostolic Decree (Acts 15), fixing that Jewish Christians have every right to observe the ancestral law of Moses, and the stress on James's securing Paul's public endorsement of the idea, seem to reflect a later period attested in Justin where Jewish Christians were on the defensive against their Gentile Christian brethren, many of whom deemed them heretical for keeping the law at all, while Justin himself allowed their right to do so if they did not try to get Gentiles to keep it. This dispute seems to provide the Sitz-im-Leben for Acts 21, making Luke a contemporary of Justin.

Similarly, the Decree as set forth in Acts 15 seeks to provide (long after the fact) apostolic legitimization for the cultic provisions attested in second-century sources, but not earlier for the most part. Minucius Felix, the Pseudo-Clementines, Biblis (in Eusebius), the Syriac Apology of Aristides, and Tertullian mention that Christians do not eat the blood of animals or the meat of strangled animals. Revelation and the late section of 1 Corinthians ban eating meat offered to idols. Matthew forbids consanguineous marriages (porneia) to Gentile converts at about the same time.
The strange thing about this is that in none of these cases is the prohibition traced back to the Apostolic Decree of Jerusalem, which, if genuine, must have been treasured as the first ecumenical conciliar decision in the church.

Conversely, when Paul's epistles deal with the issues, they never mention the Decree, which would seemingly have been an authoritative way of dealing with the questions!

Luke has simply collected these various 2nd century Christian mores and retrojected them into the Golden Age of the Apostles to give them added weight.

4. The Titles of Jesus, particularly "Servant of God" (Acts 3:13; 4:27). Despite the desperate desire of Jeremias and others to trace this back to an imaginary "Suffering Servant of Yahweh" theology of the earliest church, there is no evidence that such a spectre ever existed. But the title does occur in later documents like the Didache, 1 Clement, and the Martyrdom of Polycarp. It is late Christology, not early.

5. The Natural Theology of Acts 17, the Areopagus Speech, reflects that of the 2nd century Apologists, who sought to make common ground with their pagan audience, e.g., the "Christians before Christ" theory of Justin.

E. Acts and the Ancient Novels (Richard Pervo, Profit With Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles; Stephen P. Schierling & Marla J. Schierling, "The Influence of the Ancient Romances on Acts of the Apostles" The Classical Bulletin, 54 (April 1978); Susan Marie Praeder, "Luke-Acts and the Ancient Novel" SBL Seminar Papers)

Acts shares much in common with the popular picaresque novels produced for several centuries, flourishing at the height of popularity in the second century AD/CE. These were most often romances but also sometimes chronicled the travels and miracles of teachers like Apollonius of Tyana. Rosa Soder notes five features shared by the novels and the Apocryphal Acts of the second century (more on these in a moment). They are also shared with the canonical Acts.

1. travel (see the apostolic journeys of Peter and Paul)

2. aretalogy, or tales of miracles and oddities (the apostles do numerous miracles, some quite fanciful, like Peter's healing shadow, Paul's healing hankies, Peter striking Ananias and Sapphira dead with a word.)

3. depiction of fabulous and exotic peoples (see the bull-sacrificing pagans of Lycaonia, Acts 14:8-19, and the superstitious natives of Malta, 28:1-6, and the philosophical dilettantes of Athens in 17).

4. some sort of religious propaganda function

5. chaste eroticism between separated lovers who resist all temptations during separation (Joanna and the female entourage of Jesus in Luke).

Rosa Söder adds five more important traits less often found in the Apocryphal Acts but common to the novels. They are found in the canonical Acts as well:

1. sale of the hero into slavery (see imprisonment of Paul, Peter, Silas, etc. Acts 12:6; 16:26; 21:33; 26:29)

2. persecution

3. crowd scenes (e.g., in Ephesus, the Artemis riot)

4. divine help in time of great need

5. oracles, dreams, and divine commands

We might add Vernon Robbins' observation that the "We" style of narration associated with sea-voyages is a contemporary novelistic technique, and the shipwreck scene is quite similar to several such in contemporary novels. (If this is true, it renders superfluous the efforts to identify a pre-Lukan "we" source or to argue for authorship of the Acts as a whole by a contemporary of the events.)

If the heyday of the novel genre was the second century, it also seems the best place to locate Luke-Acts, as Howard Clark Kee once suggested to me in 1980, though he later reversed himself.

F. Luke-Acts and the Apocryphal Acts: As many scholars note, the similarities between the ancient novels and the Apocryphal Acts imply that the latter represent a Christian adaptation of the former. Two prominent features of the Apocryphal Acts either not shared with the novels or distinctively adapted by them are:

1. The Christomorphic Apostle: an apostle (the star of the particular Acts) in effect takes the place of Christ, becoming virtually a second Christ, preaching, healing, travelling, even repeating Jesus' martyrdom in significant respects. The line between them is so thin that Christ invariably appears to someone in the physical guise of the apostle in every major Acts.

2. The Apocryphal Acts employ stories apparently drawn from female story tellers in the communities of "widows"--consecrated, charismatic, celibate women. These stories depict the conversion of young noblewomen or matrons to encratism upon hearing the preaching of the starring apostle. She then becomes an inseparable follower, infuriating her spurned husband, father, or fiance, who uses his connections with the pagan governor to have the apostle arrested, and sometimes martyred.

Luke-Acts has both features, though in the case of the second, it has broken up the story and redistributed the fragments elsewhere. The core is Luke 8:1-3.

Also, Luke's Acts share with the Pseudo-Clementines and the Acts of Peter the legend of the miracle-contest between Simon Peter and Simon Magus. As Gerd Lüdemann has pointed out, the appearance in Acts 8:22 of the hapax legomenon "epinoia" must be a reference to the doctrine of the Simonian sect, attested in patristic and heresiological writers (i.e., later writers), to the effect that Simon's consort Helen, a former prostitute, was the incarnation of the Epinoia, the archetypal First Thought.

To this I would add that we can spot traces of a pre-Lukan version of the story containing a miracle-ordeal between Simon Magus and Philip: else why did Simon retire from the field upon the appearance of Philip? If Simon's previous hold upon the Samaritans was effected by his miracles, his losing out to Philip must have been the result of losing out to him in a contest of miracles like that of Moses and the Egyptian sorcerer-priests (Exodus 7:8-12).

I believe that Luke's Acts was not necessarily the first in the genre, though it is quite likely the earliest extant. Luke's innovation was not to continue the story after Jesus by writing an Acts, but rather in writing both a Gospel and an Acts, both being established genres. This makes a 2nd-century date more likely.

G. Luke and the Apocryphal Gospels:

Luke is the only NT gospel with a story of the childhood of Jesus, but these abound in works like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and the Arabic Infancy Gospel. I suggest this shows Luke is intermediate between the two groups of gospels, and thus second-century.

Luke also seems to have used a version of the Passion which had Jesus tried and condemned not by Pilate but by Herod Antipas. This is what happens in the second-century apocryphal Gospel of Peter. I suggest Luke's similarity at this point means that it, too, stems from the second century.

H. Luke and Papias.

Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, about 140-150, collected traditions, many of them legendary, of the days of the apostles. Luke and Papias are strikingly similar at five points:

1. Both mention extant written gospels (A New Eusebius p. 52, # 15) but...
2. both prefer their own research, derived from those who heard the first apostles, which neither Papias nor Luke did themselves. (A New Eusebius p. 50, #s 3-4)
3. Both mention the prophesying daughters of Philip (p. 51, #s 8-9).
4. Both know the grotesque legend of the ghastly death of Judas by swelling up and exploding.
5. Both wrote their own "gospels," Papias' being called An Exposition of the Oracles of Our Lord, which Eusebius claimed contained "certain strange parables" of an apocalyptic nature.

Papias does not mention Luke's gospel alongside Mark and Matthew, presumably because he did not know of it. I suggest he and Luke were contemporaries, both men of antiquarian tastes and the same interests.

***

Malachi151

Well, skipping over the book that Johnny Skeptic posted, I have no problem at all with the 70 CE dating and find the attempts to "push the dating back" to be highly biased and not very well thought out.

Indeed, I would love to be able to favor an even earlier dating of Mark. If Mark were written in 40 CE all the better IMO, but the point is to stick to the evidence though.

The old idea that the closer the Gospels were written to the "life of Jesus" the more reliable they are has to be completely thrown out the window. This argument assumes that dating of the writing is the only factor in judging reliability and secondly assumes a real live Jesus.

If Jesus never existed then this argument is moot.

What undermines the credibility of the Gospels is not when they were written, but their content.

Indeed, their content so gravely undermines them that the closer they were written to the supposed life of Jesus the less likely it is that Jesus really existed.

The content of the Gospels is completely not believable as history and is almost entirely based on the scriptures. Take the relationship between Psalm 22 and the crucifixion.

The use of Psalm 22 displays a story based on scriptures, not observation of real events. The farther away in time the writing of this account is from the supposed time of the events the more one can justify the use of scripture to fill in details, but if this account were written within a supposed time that people should be able to provide eyewitness accounts, then the reality of such an event comes more into question.

Not only this, but the repetition of this account calls it even more into question.

Every crucifixion account uses the Markan template. If the Markan template is made-up based on scripture, and these details are not real, then we should expect that if the event really happened, and the other accounts were written withing reasonable memory of the event, and the other accounts were based on some eyewitness account of the event, then they should differ greatly from the Markan account, but they don't.

Everything that the Christians have traditionally used to support their claims actually works against them.

The parallel between Psalm 22 and the crucifixion scene doesn't demonstrate prophecy fulfillment, it demonstrates a fabricated symbolic story and the use of allusion, not observation.

The similarities of all of the accounts doesn't improve the reliability of the accounts, it shows that there were no other observations to go on, thus they all use Marks fabricated account because it was the existing description of this supposed event.

The close that all of this was written to the supposed time of the event the more the reality of the of the event is called into question, not less.

Furthermore, if you date mark after 100 CE, then how do you explain Tacitus and the possible Josephus passage?

The sooner that Mark was penned the sooner you establish the fictional basis for the Jesus story and the more time you have for the story to spread and for it to be the basis of all other views of Jesus.

If you date Mark after Tacitus, then that almost requires Jesus to have been real and the Markan account to be accurate, becuase Tacitus matches Mark.

If Mark came along in 70 CE, then Mark is easily the basis of the Tacitus account. If Mark came after Tacitus then Tacitus has to be based on either real accounts of the event or some other pre-existing tradition.

My view is much simpler and addresses everything.

Mark is essentially the basis for all of the "historical" concepts of Jesus and the basis for all Jesus narratives.

There were no Jesus narratives prior to Mark; Mark invented the first and original Jesus narrative, from which all other Jesus narratives are derived.

In order for this to be true, Mark has to be dated in the mid 1st century.

An "early" dating of Mark undermine Jesus historicity far more than a late dating, and goes far further to explain agreement in the Jesus story.

With an "early Mark" everything is explained as Mark being the sole origin of all narrative and historical accounts of Jesus.

Gamera

The earliest ms might be the holograph, but there is only one holograph and many copies. So for any given body of mss, all things being equal, the likelihood that the earliest ms you have is the holograph is small.

I don't admit at all that the holograph "must" exist, only that at some point it did. It is rare indeed to find a holograph of any significant historical text, since most get destroyed over time. I'm not aware of us having the holograph of any significant text from the ancient world, and only a few from the medieval world (like the Magna Carte). An argument has been made by Kiernan that the Cotton-Vittelius MS is a "working copy" of the Beowulf poet, but that's pretty much speculation, and we only have that one ms for the text, period.

Sheshonq

Which doesn't refute what I said in the least. Two points:

1. Your understanding of probability is at fault again. Say you have a handful of mss; let's assume ten mss. fo this example. You are trying to say that the more copies you have, the chance that any one of them is the original gets smaller and smaller. In my example, then, you believe that each mss. has a 1/10 chance of being the original. That is not correct. The copies do not all have the same probability of being the autograph. Only the earliest mss. is a viable candidate for that, since later copies can reliably assumed to be copies. So of the ten mss., find the earliest one - then the other nine of them are automatically out of the running. Or, if you have a handful that are all much earlier than the rest (say three of the ten are very early, with very small margins of error), then it is those three which are the only viable candidates for being the autograph, the other seven are out of the running.

So the question that you're facing is actually this: what is the probability that my earliest mss. is not a copy, but is in fact the original? I hope you can now see another reason why adding extra copies of mss. does not affect probability, because all the mss. are not identical in quality or characteristics.

2. Finally, you still haven't addressed the fact that a 2nd century mss does not prove a 1st century autograph.

Correct. And if you cannot find it (because it is lost, destroyed, or simply decayed over time) then your task of trying to date the original is substantially harder.

None of which matters to the argument at hand. How many of these documents are the subject of an intense effort to constrain the autograph to within a particularly narrow timeframe of 30 to 50 years?

You want a 1st century autograph. All you have is a 2nd century copy. I don't see any way to use the existence of the copy to conclude a 1st century date for the original.

gurugeorge

We know that Christianity expanded quickly after Constantine's acceptance of it, but what do we really know about its growth before that? I mean, we don't have any archaeological evidence of Christianity gradually spreading at all, in fact no archaeological evidence of any kind till the beginning of the 3rd century (is it? either that or the late 2nd). We can assume that's because they were so poor, etc., etc., but the fact is there's no evidence is there? So I think Sheshoq's right, the background of evidence that would ground your statistical argument seems to be lacking. It makes sense as an abstract argument ("could have happened"), but the background to make it a good concrete argument ("must have happened") seems to be lacking.

Roger Pearse

I think that if I read someone demanding that I run around while he thinks up problems, I would insert a chili in his anus and watch him do the same. Seriously, no-one owes anyone anything.

Um, if this is an argument that any copy *might* be the autograph, surely it is the same argument that any copy *might* have been written by Nero/Domitian/Uncle Fred? -- While it is possible, it isn't actually very likely and evidence offered is zero, so the argument can be disregarded. Statistically copies will hugely out-number the autograph for most works.

This is a bit odd, tho. The autograph will always precede the copies. For most ancient texts it will precede the extant copies by centuries and centuries. Since no autograph of any ancient literary text is extant, this involves asserting that we cannot know the date of any ancient literary text. Such an argument is not different from obscurantism in any important regard, surely?

Reducing this to a syllogism:

1. Many copies might have been made from the autograph (no actual evidence exists or is offered)
2. If many copies were made immediately, then all copies must belong to to that group of copies.
3. Therefore P52 is coaeval with the autograph.

Um.

In reality that chances that any papyrus of a literary text is a close relative of the autograph must be vanishingly small. Allow 25 years at least for copying and diffusion, I would suggest.

Could we stop trying to call each other disturbed and instead offer evidence?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

For most ancient literary texts of the 1st century, we know that a 1st century original of some sort existed. All we have is a 15th century copy. Apparently you feel that a gap of 100 years is too unlikely; but it is a little difficult to see why.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Julian

Sorry for the delay in replying. Here goes...
No shift on my part. I simply stated that if they were written starting as early as 70 but we don't hear about them until well into the 2nd century then they obviously were languishing. And maybe they were, maybe not. My point is that there is no way to know but that it seems like special pleading to place them early without accounting for their sudden popularity. We have a potential range in which they could have been written, that's my point. Or rather, my point is that we cannot proceed beyond the range to a fixed year (or smaller range) without entering into pure speculation until reasonable evidence appears.
Which is a complete arbitrary and unwarranted attempts to justify early creation.
Somewhat cryptic sentence but I think that it's accurate if it is essentially the same that I just said above.
Yet I can think of no evidence. That could just be attributed to my limited knowledge but that's what I have to go on until someone provides better.
We don't know much about christian output between 50 and early 2nd century so I have no way of answering that question. Why is it a lot of gospel stuff to place between 110 and 150? That's forty years! Surely, a few pages could be manufactured in that time...
A good point.
This doesn't work for me. The first generation or two would have consisted of very few people, even fewer of whom would have had any direct knowledge of any gospel source material. Obviously, these people weren't available for question and answer session on a regular basis. In other words, the moment the faith spread beyond the ability of a few handfuls to personally and continuously attend to, there would have been a need for gospel material.

Personally, this is were I think that GThomas and Q (and their likes) came into play. I suspect that something like it was the gospel that Paul was talking about. As we get closer to the early second century we start seeing narrative added, which may be why Papias, sitting on the cusp, as it were, knew of both logia and narratives (the latter, according to Eusebius/Papias, sound like they are still crude by this stage). Sometime right around or shortly after Papias, someone finally writes a decent gospel, probably Mark, a native Latin speaker, and the trend catches on quickly and we start seeing the other gospels and the harmonies. That all fits the facts much better than the mainstream scenario which has no evidential support and suffers from a host of MS trajectory problems, both in terms of christology and textual family relationships. As you can see, I am not opposed to the idea of a gospel type material starting in the 1st century, but I think that the decent narrative gospels were a product of the early 2nd century. My scenario has no problem with a Didache in the late 1st century, a Barnabas in the very early 2nd century, a Q and/or GThomas in the mid to late 1st century, a split into the western family in the mid 2nd century or perhaps a tad later, and so on, you get the idea. It resolves a lot of problems, yet it doesn't cater to the christian need to place our gospel back into the 1st century, an unnecessary and unscientific notion that solves nothing, has no support, and, indeed, creates a host of problems.

Julian

Julian

If they were well known under Hadrian, why would they have been written under Trajan? Why not under Hadrian who ruled quite a long time. And why Domitian? Why would it have taken more than a few months (or at the very longest, a couple of years) for a popular manuscript to reach a reasonable level of propagation?

I am not too up on gnostic literature. Could you post a link or explain why you think that Basilides used Luke?
Which doesn't really follow from what you stated above. If they were well known under Hadrian (117-138) then why would we place Mark at 85? What is the justification for subtracting all those years?
What internal evidence are you thinking of in particular? If you read my post above, I propose a gradual evolution of the gospel genre, starting in the first century but not becoming what we know from the NT until the 2nd century.

Don't get me wrong, I am not rejecting your theory, I am merely curious as to what evidence you have to support it, which is how I try to judge everything.

Julian