Johnny Skeptic

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


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:
[INDENT]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.[INDENT]

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.


Traditionally we have thought the author of Luke's Gospel and the Book of Acts as being Luke the "beloved physician," the companion of Paul mentioned in Colossians 4:14; 2 Timothy 4:11.

The text itself, like all the gospels, is anonymous. The traditional identification of Luke as the author rests on the assumptions that the "We" narrative of parts of Acts goes back to an actual eyewitness, and the letters in question are genuinely Pauline. If some companion of Paul wrote Acts, which one was it? Many names can be eliminated since the author mentions them in distinction from himself among the "we." Luke is one of the names he does not mention that is mentioned in the epistles. Some have suggested Titus.

But there is good reason to suspect the authenticity of both letters that mention Luke, though even as pseudepigraphs they would still attest a tradition that Paul had a companion named Luke.

The more serious problem facing the traditional ascription of authorship is the divergence between the authentic letters of Paul (provided there are any!) and Acts. The differences are so great that it seems doubtful a companion of Paul would have written Acts ands so have misrepresented his master.

1. Chronological problems: as John Knox has shown (Chapters in a Life of Paul), recently followed by Gerd Lüdemann, if we read the epistles on their own, without trying to fit them into Acts, we come up with a rather different scenario than that of Acts which schematizes the ministry of Paul into three neat missionary journeys.

a. Also, on any reading Acts is at least quite selective, omitting most of the Pauline vicissitudes listed in 2 Corinthians 11:21-27.

2. Acts is irreconcilable with Galatians on the matter of Paul's movements following his conversion. Luke tells precisely the version that Paul expressly repudiates! He did not go to Jerusalem to consult those who were apostles before him! Gal. 1:15ff vs. Acts 9:20-26.

There is also the problem of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) with its decree. Paul never mentions any such decree. Had he submitted to it, it is hard to see how he never would have mentioned it to settle certain issues quite readily (e.g., the business about eating idol sacrifices in 1 Cor. 8-10).

But it is even harder seeing how he could have submitted to its imposition in the first place! Does not Gal. 2:6 rather rule it out?

3. Acts is Unpauline: As Philipp Vielhauer pointed out ("The 'Paulinism' of Acts"), the author of Acts did not understand Paul's thought at several key points. How then can he have been Paul's bosom companion?

i. Natural theology: In Acts 17, Paul is depicted as granting that pagans are on the right track in their search for God, their only problem being that they have remained stalled without making the connection that there must be one transcendent God. But in Romans 1-3 Paul has a more severe estimate of paganism: none is righteous, and paganism is nothing but a repudiation of the almighty from the word go. Gentiles are not searching for him but rather on the run from him. Natural theology is a bridge in Acts, a barrier in Romans. Acts has all humans as "his offspring," unthinkable for Paul. Sin is not hinted at in Acts 17.

ii. The Torah: Acts has Paul still a Pharisee (23:6; 26:5), while Philippians has him an ex-Pharisee. Acts has him still obeying the Law as his constant custom (21:18ff), while 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 allows it as an occasional, opportunistic exception at most.

Acts 13 has Paul say that the gospel supplements the law, expunging offenses for which the Torah made no provision, while for Paul in Galatians, the Law has been superseded by the gospel as a new dispensation.

Acts has Paul preach first in the synagogue of each city, turning only reluctantly to the Gentiles after the Jews reject him, something never hinted in the epistles, where Paul is "the Apostle to the Gentiles," not to the Jews.

Acts has him circumcise Timothy, while Galatians shows he would find such a course of action intolerable. While there are various possible harmonizations at this or that point, these would only be preferable exegeses provided there were some prior, overriding reason to stick with the traditional identification, which there isn't.

It seems, as Dibelius suggested, and as Vielhauer seconded (and as Earl Richard has made even clearer recently), the speeches of Acts are all Lukan compositions with no knowledge of what may have been said on the actual occasion (if there was one!).

So much for Acts. There is no possible way of securing the traditional ascription to Luke. Irenaeus claimed that Luke wrote down the gospel as preached by Paul, but this is doubly hard to believe since Paul in his letters scarcely makes a reference to the earthly Jesus and none at all to his miracles. The author may well have been named Luke, but this was one of the most common names in the Roman world, so in itself it is of no help.

Were Luke and Acts written by the same author? Scholten suggested in the 19th century that the two works do not come from the same author. Though there is near unanimity among scholars that the same author did produce both works, recently the opposite hypothesis has been revived by Albert C. Clark (The Acts of the Apostles, A Critical Edition, 1933) and A.W. Argyle ("The Greek of Luke and Acts," New Testament Studies 20). They both argued on the basis of striking differences in vocabulary.

On the other hand, many studies by Fitzmyer, Tannehill, and others have demonstrated such thematic consistency between the two works that it appears they were the work of the same author. But who knows? I am currently assuming the scholarly consensus is correct at this point, but we ought to keep in mind the other possibility, especially since we will discover at least one major point at which the demands of discipleship seem radically different between the two books.

Some scholars (C.F.D. Moule, "The Problem of the Pastoral Epistle: A Reappraisal" Bulletin of the John Rylands Library; Stephen G. Wilson, Luke and the Pastoral Epistles; Jerome D. Quinn, "The Last Volume of Luke: The Relation of Luke-Acts to the Pastoral Epistles" in Charles H. Talbert (ed.) Perspectives on Luke-Acts) have argued that Luke wrote not only Acts, but the Pastoral Epistles as well. There are certain striking similarities between the ideas and the vocabulary of Luke-Acts and the Pastorals that would seem to point in this direction, being closer than one would expect even for books sharing the same milieu.

Paul cannot have written them, as a surfeit of differences between the vocabulary and theology of the two groups of epistles makes plain. As P.N. Harrison showed (The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles) the vocabulary is rather than that of the age of the Apostolic Fathers (second century).

1. There is a large number of words found in the NT only in either the Pastorals or Luke-Acts. Luke-Acts differs from the Pastorals with regard to the use of Lukan particles and of sun for "with", but precisely the same differences are invoked by Clark to drive a wedge between Luke and Acts, so if this proves anything it proves too much for those who deny Luke the Pastorals yet retain Acts for him.

2. The Pastorals and Luke-Acts are almost alone in their use of euseb- words for piety. So for time as meaning payment, zogrein ("to catch alive") and zoogonein ("to preserve alive").

3. So with the idea of being "lovers of money" (1 Tim. 6:10, 17; 2 Tim. 3:2; Luke 16:14).

4. The notions of "laying up a foundation" for the future by means of charitable deeds rather than by hoarding money occurs in both Luke 12:21 and 1 Tim. 6:18-19.

5. Luke 22:28 and 2 Tim. 2:12 both have the idea of enduring trials in order to inherit the kingdom.

6. See Acts 14:22. "The laborer is worthy of his hire"--in Matthew 10:10 has tophes ("keep") while Luke 10:7 and 1 Tim. 5:18 have misthou ("pay").

7. Compare 2 Tim. 4:1, Acts 10:42 and Acts 17:31 for very similar passages about Christ being destined as judge of all alike, of the whole world, the living and the dead.

8. Acts 20:24 and 2 Tim. 4:7 both have Paul declaring himself finished with the race he had to run for Christ. Cf Acts 3:25 where the same thing is said about John the Baptist ("when he was finishing his course").

9. The idea that serious sin can be mitigated by ignorance is found in Luke 12:47; 23:34; Acts 3:17; Acts 7:60; 1 Tim.1:13. Also compare Acts 7:60 with 2 Tim. 4:16.

10. The image of plowing a straight furrow in one's Christian work is found in Luke 9:62 and 2 Tim. 2:15.

As Talbert and Quinn have pointed out there is precedent both in classical biography and in the biblical tradition to affix a letter or letters onto a book or books by a common author (Syriac Baruch; 1 Enoch, a composite book of Enoch writings, the last of which is The Epistle of Enoch; Jeremiah + Baruch + Epistle of Jeremy).

That Luke intended the Pastorals as volume 3, is hinted by the fact that in the prologue to Acts he calls his gospel not the "former" but the "first" volume, implying perhaps that he planned another, as scholars have often suggested.

III. Sources and Stages of Composition

A. Previous Gospels

As the prologue of Luke's Gospel might suggest, Luke has employed earlier written sources, specifically Mark's Gospel (though perhaps in an earlier version that did not contain the "great omission" of Mark 6:45-8:21). He uses over 60% of our Mark, making extensive changes in it.

Mark was itself a compilation of oral traditions with a more or less heavy literary contribution by Mark himself, especially in the Passion narrative (see Werner Kelber et al, The Passion in Mark; Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence).

He also used the Q source, a kind of Christian book of proverbs like the Gospel of Thomas. It had little narrative material and was mostly sayings. It was also a compilation of oral traditions, at some point attributed to Jesus.

Matthew used both of these sources, though perhaps in different recensions. This is why Matthew and Luke are so similar to each other as well as similar to the shorter Mark.

There is a good bit of very striking material in Luke that is found nowhere else (though some of this has echoes in the Gospel of Thomas), including the parables of the Prodigal Son, the Unjust Steward, the Good Samaritan, the Rich Man and Lazarus, the stories of the Samaritan Leper, the Bent Woman, Mary and Martha, Zacchaeus, the Widow of Nain, and sayings like the Woes of the Sermon on the Plain. Where do these items come from? Scholars speak of "L" or Luke's special source. Some of it may have been floating oral tradition. Some may have been free composition by Luke. With Harnack, Taylor, Swidler, Jo Ann McNamara, and others, I think the material concerning women comes from a female source, which I would specify as the oral tradition of the widow communities of the late first-, early second-century church.

Some of the apparent L passages are basically similar to items in Mark or Q but differ in many details. The parable of the cast sycamore tree, the parable of the minas, the two sons, the anointing--did Luke simply prefer tradition-variants he found elsewhere? Or did he rewrite material from Mark and Q?

Richard Dillon (From Eye Witnesses to Ministers of the Word) and John Koenig (New Testament Hospitality) have suggested that much of the special L material comes from a group of wandering charismatic prophets and evangelists. Robinson, Boring, Tuckett, and others suggest the same thing for Q. This possibility will be very important for concerns of ethics and discipleship: it is altogether possible that the most radical demands of renunciation were addressed originally only to these people.

B. Proto-Luke

Vincent Taylor (Behind the Third Gospel: An Examination of the Proto-Luke Hypothesis), following up on a suggestion made by B.H. Streeter, argued that Luke had written a first draft of his gospel in which he had added L material to Q and added the synchronism dating in Luke 3:1, which by analogy with other ancient synchronisms, would seem to make more sense as the beginning of a book, as would the genealogy of Jesus which follows, as in Matthew.

This version, then, would have lacked any Markan material, and also the infancy narratives and the apocalyptic material now found in chapter 17, but not derived from Mark or Q. It had a passion narrative, most of which still survives in Luke, ill-harmonized with snippets taken from Mark.

Luke soon read Mark's gospel and decided he had to make use of it. Luke as we know it was the result. As just implied, he added material from other sources at this time, too.

The primary basis for the Proto-Luke theory is the fact that Luke seems to have thoroughly mingled L and Q material while simply inserting blocks of Markan material which, when removed, leave a coherent narrative. Yet this verdict depends on taking the L parallels to Mark as independent L versions when in fact they may rather be Lukan rewrites, in which case it begins to look like there is some Lukan interweaving with Mark, too. Most scholars, I think, do not accept the theory.

C. Marcion's Luke

Marcion, founder of an alternative Christian church which surrendered the Old Testament to Judaism and made no pretensions to be the natural extension of that religion, was the first to select a new Christian scripture canon. In it he placed the Pauline Epistles (excluding the Pastorals, which did not yet exist, being written at least in part as a refutation of him) and a single gospel which bore some relation to our Gospel of Luke. The Church Fathers claimed, some decades later, that he had taken Luke and omitted the portions of it that were not to his liking.

Albrecht Ritschl, in his period of adherence to the Tübingen School, made the suggestion (in recent years revived by John Knox, Marcion and the New Testament, and Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity) that it had been just the reverse: that Marcion had instead possessed a shorter, earlier version of Luke, which the Catholic church proceeded to expand by the addition of material that was anti-Marcionite. Then they turned around and accused him of truncating it.

This does seem to be what they did with the New Testament canon as a whole after they adopted the idea from him but added several more Christian writings: "Why'd you cut out the others?"

Similarly, Tertullian reproached him for omitting the Pastorals--which were a post-Marcion reaction! Also, Church Fathers erroneously believed Mark to be an abbreviation of Matthew, when it looks more like Matthew added to the shorter Mark. Here is the same predisposition to explain a shorter work as a cut version of a longer one when the reverse was actually the case. Also cf. the Islamic claim that Christians had omitted passages in which Jesus predicted Muhammad, these latter in reality fabrications by Muslim apologists.

Several of the Marcionite "non-interpolations" seem to have no dogmatic Tendenz, i.e., no reason is apparent why Marcion would have chopped them if they were there in the text of Luke he read. Marcion had no Book of Acts. Is this because the two works were independent? He had apparently never heard of it either.

D. The Western Text of Acts

Acts exists in two versions. The Western Text, attested in both Greek and Latin in the Codex Bezae and in Latin, Syriac, and other versions, and very widespread in Patristic quotations, is about 20% longer than the one found in the RSV. Most of the additional material is simply lengthier versions of passages common to both versions.

These days most scholars think the Western text is a paraphrasing, glossing expansion of the text, similar to our "Study Bibles" which elucidate the text with footnotes and commentary. Here the glossator simply would have slightly rewritten it, polishing up the original as Luke did Mark, or adding little explanations as Matthew did to Mark.

But others, pointing out that the style of the "expansions" is not noticeably different from that of the shorter text, suggest that the Western text is Luke's own expansion, a second edition. Others would make the longer edition the first, and the shorter an abridgement by Luke.

In any event, it is clear that there are real questions about the textual history of the Lukan writings, as well as about their relation. There are some Western variants to Luke's Gospel as well, but nothing like this extent. Does this mean that Acts circulated independently? Some early writers who know Luke say nothing of Acts..

Toto

This has been split from the thread on the early dating of the gospels

andrewcriddle

The claim that the Pastorals are post-Marcion has problems if a/ The letter attributed to Polycarp knows and uses the Pastorals b/ this letter is pre-Marcionite.

a/ is highly likely (there is certainly some strong connection between Polycarp's letter and the Pastorals) and b/ is held by most scholars.

Andrew Criddle

Toto

Could the Pastorals have been based on Polycarp's letter?

Toto

This is the fourth file:


Papias of Hierapolis (ca. 125-150 CE):

"This, too, the Presbyter used to say: Mark, who had been Peter's interpreter, wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered of the Lord's sayings and doings. For he had not heard the Lord or been one of his followers, but later, as I said, one of Peter's. Peter used to adapt his teaching to the occasion, without making a systematic arrangement of the Lord's sayings, so that Mark was quite justified in writing down some things just as he remembered them. For he had one purpose only - to leave out nothing that he had heard, and to make no misstatement about it."

"Matthew compiled the Sayings in the Aramaic language, and everyone interpreted/translated them as well as he could." (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39)

Some cautions:

1. What Eusebius says Papias said does not seem to describe our Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Matthew is a Greek document, based on a Greek document, i.e., Mark. Matthew is much more than a list of sayings, though it is possible he is speaking metonymously of our Matthew, which is structured around a five-book Torah design. However, to say this is already to retreat one step into harmonization.

As Strauss pointed out, Jerome for a time thought that the Hebrew Gospel According to the Nazoreans was the Hebrew original of Matthew. It is possible that Papias was talking about our Matthew, thinking it had come from the Gospel of the Naroreans and supposed there were several rather different Greek versions of it ("everyone translated as well as he could"). Or since at least one of these Hebrew Gospels also claimed to be written by Matthew, Papias may simply be referring to it.

Mark gives no indication of reflecting eye-witness testimony, as Dennis Nineham shows. Strauss saw this: "On the whole, it would appear that when Papias explains the want of order in Mark from his dependence on the lectures of Peter, who may be supposed to have testified of Jesus only occasionally, he intends to refuse to his narrative the merit not only of the right order but of any historical arrangement whatever. But this is as little wanting in the Gospel of Mark as in any other, and consequently Papias, if we are to understand his expression in this sense, could not have our present Gospel of Mark before him, but must have been speaking of a totally different work." (p. 62)

So, for all we know, Papias may not be speaking of our Matthew and Mark at all: he may have in mind something like the Gospel According to the Hebrews (Eusebius attributes to that gospel Papias' story about a woman accused of many sins) and the Preaching of Peter, or even the Gospel of Peter. The point is that Papias is not necessarily evidence for our four gospels existing in the first quarter of the second century.


2. Papias is unreliable: he credulously accepted the wildest legends that he heard, such as the grotesque swelling and exploding of Judas. He attributes to Jesus a piece of apocalyptic that seems to have come instead from the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch.

3. One may even question whether Papias would have written such apparent apologetics for any written gospels in view of his fact that he preferred oral tradition to books, though even this is obviously only a "dangerous supplement" argument on behalf of the superiority of his own written gospel, Exegesis of the Oracles of the Lord.

In fact, just this sort of "end-run around the canon" argument is used by later Muslim jurists to fabricate a pedigree for their own innovations.

4. Papias has nothing to say of Luke and John, which apparently had not yet been written.

Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 180 CE)

"Thus Matthew published among the Hebrews a gospel written in their language, at the time when Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and founding the church there. After their death, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself delivered to us in writing what had been announced by Peter. Luke, the follower of Paul, put down in a book the gospel preached by him. Later, John the Lord's disciple, who reclined on his bosom, himself published the gospel while staying at Ephesus in Asia." (Against Heresies 3.1.1)

Note that Irenaeus is already parroting the party-line about Peter and Paul founding the Holy Roman Church.

Matthew cannot have been written first, since he uses Mark.

The idea that Luke was the ghost-writer for a Pauline gospel is simply borrowed from that of Mark as the amanuensis of Peter.

Strauss notes that Luke's gospel seems to regard none of his predecessors as stemming from apostolic witness, and this includes Mark and Q. "From this preface [Luke 1:4] we see, first, that at the time when the author or our third Gospel wrote, a considerable evangelical literature was already in existence, to which he referred from a critical point of view. In the second place, as he distinguishes between the 'many who had taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which were surely believed among them,' from those 'who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,' he appears not to be aware of any Gospel immediately composed by an Apostle; and thirdly, inasmuch as he alleges as his means for surpassing his predecessors, not any exclusive source, like the teaching by an Apostle, but only the fact 'that he has followed up, inquired into, all things accurately from the first,’ there is no appearance of our having before us the companion of an Apostle, though the author of the third Gospel has from the earliest times been considered as such." (New Life of Jesus/Life of Jesus for the German People, vol. 1., p. 63)

The description of a Lukan writing down of Paul's preaching would fit Acts better than Luke. (Strauss: "In this case, again,... the supposition might occur to us that these words must refer to a totally different work; for that the Gospel which Paul preached was neither that or like that which we now have, either in the third or any other Gospel." (63-64)

John 21: an appendix to the Gospel, attributing the whole thing retrospectively to an eyewitness, possibly by the same redactor who added the references to "the disciple that Jesus loved," as some scholars think (e.g., Bultmann).

Mark

Mark presupposes the same crisis actuating John 21 and 1 Peter: the death of the first generation of the disciples, since the Transfiguration is offered as a reinterpretation of the promised coming of the kingdom of God.

The Little Apocalypse (Mark 13) is a vestige of an earlier work (like the Little Scroll Apocalypse in Revelation 11). It does stem from 70 CE, but it has already attracted a stage of rationalization of the failure of the prediction: "But of that day and that hour no one knows, neither the angels nor the Son but only the Father" (note the late character of "the Son"). As the Transfiguration is a quite different harmonization, it must represent a subsequent layer.

Mark is "gnostic" at least in the sense of having Jesus pass on esoteric teaching to an inner circle (chapter 4), a teaching which is even interpreted as having to do with predestination and hardening of the non-elect, and of a fourfold classification of the human race vis-Ã*-vis the Revealer's truth.

Mark shares Marcion's antipathy to the Twelve.

Mark presents an adoptionist-separationist angel-Christology: the Spirit descends "into him," a detail Matthew and Luke both change to "upon him." Cf. Goulder: Cerinthus may have caught mark's intention re the departure of the Christ-Spirit upon the cross.

To anticipate, though Matthew and Luke will both add miraculous nativity stories in the manner of a Hellenistic biography (e.g., Philo's Life of Moses), this does not mean they are less "gnostic" or "docetic" than Mark. On the contrary, they both systematically remove any Markan suggestion that Jesus was unaware of information (Mark 6:38; 8:12; 9:12, 16, 21, 33: 10:3) and most Markan notes of Jesus having human feelings (Mark 1:41-42; 3:5; 10:14, 21; 14:33).

And whereas Mark said Jesus was unable to heal the unbelievers in his home town, Matthew and Luke both omit this.

Matthew omits Jesus' needing a baptism for repentance and his demurral to be called "good" by the Rich Young Ruler. (Remember, Mark drew a line between Jesus and the Christ-Spirit, like those Cainites who cursed Jesus, so he had no trouble picturing Jesus disclaiming divine goodness.)

Matthew

Matthew has used Mark, so scholars tend to allow a decade between Mark and Matthew. But we may have to allow more time than this simply because of evidence of stratification in the portions of Matthew which are not only added to Mark but based on it (or on Q). Note that Matthew has based the Sermon on the Mount on the Q sermon from which Luke's Sermon on the Plain also derives, and the section about the piety of the hypocrites (6:1-18) has accumulated other barnacles on prayer and glossolalia (vv. 9-15). Matthew based his mission charge on Mark 6:8-11, but he has added his "not-so-great commission in 10:5, which he has superseded in chapter 28. And as Arlo Nau shows (Peter in Matthew), Matthew presupposes a pre-Matthean but post-Markan stage of rehabilitation of Peter in the Matthean community, which Matthew then tries to take down a peg.

Matthew would seem to fall into the class of Nazorean Jewish Christianity. It commands Gentile converts to keep every yodh and tittle of the Torah and as such directly clashes with Paul in Galatians.

Matthew's Sitz-im-Leben is that of later Jewish-Christian polemics, as witness the trumped up nonsense about guards at the tomb, the genealogies seeking to rebut the charges that Jesus was a bastard, and not even a Jew. The trip to Egypt may have something to do with early charges that Jesus went there to learn magic. The very title "The Generations of Jesus" reflect the title of the anti-Christian Jewish gospels the Toledoth Jeschu.

Matthew swarms with legendary embellishments, especially all the seismic activity on Easter weekend, plus the enormity of the mass wave of resurrections coincident with the crucifixion of Jesus. Some sort of harrowing of hell document.

Matthew presupposes a competing form of Judaism in which the use of the titles Abba and Rabbi is already common and in which scribes sit on the Seat of Moses in synagogues, but all this is late second-century or worse.

Luke
[see The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny (or via: amazon.co.uk), p. 2]

John
[see "Hellenistic parallels to the Gospel of John" and notes on Docetic Christology in John in this thread ]

andrewcriddle

I suppose this is posible. IMS and IIUC this has been suggested.

However the phrases in Polycarp that parallel the Pastorals occur mixed in with passages that parallel the generally accepted Paulines. (Plus parallels to the Gospels 1 Clement etc). It is at least simpler to add the Pastorals to the other sources used in a similar allusive way by Polycarp.

Andrew Criddle

DCHindley

Andrew,

I've previously been inclined to not trust the letter of Polycarp due to the unusually large number of quotes, near-quotes and allusions to books of the NT, similar to what one sees with Irenaeus. Irenaeus, I have assumed, was making use of an edition of the complete 27 book NT.

But I also understand that Polyarp was supposed to have been Irenaeus' teacher, and that Polycarp in turn is supposed to have been a disciple of "John the Evangelist" (not necessarily John the apostle, but perhaps the "elder John" etc).

Wikipedia has Polycarp flourishing ca. 69 - ca. 155 CE. Per Theopedia, "The date of Polycarp's death is disputed. Eusebius dates it to the reign of Marcus Aurelius, circa 166-167. However, a post-Eusebian addition to the Martyrdom of Polycarp dates his death to Saturday, February 23 in the proconsulship of Statius Quadratus—which works out to be 155 or 156. These earlier dates better fit the tradition of his association with Ignatius and John the Evangelist."

It just seemed to me that Polycarp was too early to have had this edition of the NT available to him. I have to wonder, though. The critic David Trobisch now seems to think that Polycarp may actually have been the publisher of the 1st edition of our 27 book NT. This might explain Irenaeus' heavy use of the NT as we know it (I think he cites all books except for one).

David Trobisch, "Who published the New Testament?" Free Inquiry Magazine (vol. 28, no. 1; December 2007-January 2008). The irascible William Arnal, summarizes the article in a post in Yahoo's Christian Origins List. While I am not sure whether he approves or not (who can tell with Arnal?), he summarizes the main points of the article here, although he does not seem to be at all familiar with Trobisch's book below (Arnal seems more impressed by the implication of a late dating for Acts):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/christ...ns/message/531

Trobisch had previously expressed the opinion that Polycarp had published an edition of the letters of Ignatius. See David Trobisch, "How to read an ancient letter collection: Prolegomena to a narrative critical study of the Letters of Paul," paper presented at SBL International conference, Lahti, Tuesday 7/21/99. Asserts Polycarp may have been editor of the collected Ignatian epistles (presumably the shorter Greek version, not the greatly expanded longer Greek version).
http://www.bts.edu/faculty/Publicati...ollections.htm

Otherwise, David Trobisch makes no statements about who the publisher of the 1st edition of the NT was in _The First edition of the New Testament_ (2000), but locates it's readership in 2nd century CE and asserts that it has anti-Marconite tendencies, meaning it had to date after approximately 150 CE.

Another author of interest might be Paul Hartog, _Polycarp and the New Testament: The occasion, rhetoric, theme, and unity of the Epistle to the Philippians and its allusions to New Testament literature_ (2002).

Kenneth Berding, in his review of K. Hartog's, _Polycarp and the New Testament_, in WTJ (Westminster Theological Review) 64 (2002), offers comments about Polycarp’s probable possession of the entire Pauline corpus.

Berding also has a book out on the subject, _Polycarp and Paul: An Analysis of Their Literary and Theological Relationship in Light of Polycarp's Use of Biblical and Extra-Biblical Literature_ (2002).

What thinkest thou, Andrew?

DCH

andrewcriddle

I think Polycarp quite plausibly published the letters of Ignatius.

He may possibly have been the first publisher of something like our NT but if so I would be surprised if it had 27 books. More likely something like the 22 book canon found in the Syriac church, anyway a canon without all of the 7 Catholic epistles.

Andrew Criddle

DCHindley

Part of Trobisch's theory is that the 1st edition of the NT was in four sections, 1) The Four Gospel Book, 2) the Praxapostolos (Acts + General Epistles), 3) Pauline Corpus, and 4) Revelation. He thinks these sub-sections were original to the 1st edition on the basis of his analysis of thousands of early Greek mss. He reasons that all four sections had to be in the 1st edition, as it came to supercede any and all other mss of collected books now in the NT. That is not to say that some of these books had not previously circulated (such as the Pauline corpus), but Trobisch concludes these other collections have left almost no trace whatsoever, except as preserved in the four section 1st edition.

I am going off the top of my head, but I seem to recall that he reasons that Syriac translators, while rejecting some of the Greek books, otherwise translated the works found in Greek mss with these same four divisions.

Now I do notice that the letter of Polycarp has about 37 "quotations" according to the ANF index:

Quotations from Four-Gospel Book:
MATT 05:03,10
MATT 06:12,14
MATT 06:13
MATT 07:01
MATT 07:02
MATT 26:41
MARK 14:38
LUKE 06:20
LUKE 06:37
LUKE 06:38

Quotations from Pauline corpus:
ROM 12:17
ROM 14:10-12
COR 1 06:02
COR 1 06:09-10
COR 2 05:10
COR 2 08:21
GAL 01:01
GAL 04:26
GAL 06:07
EPH 02:08-09
EPH 04:26
EPH 06:14
THE 1 05:22
THE 2 03:15
TIM 1 06:07
TIM 1 06:10
TIM 2 02:12

Quotations from Praxapostolos (Acts-general epistles):
ACTS 02:24 (note this book is not transmitted in the gospel book collection!)
JOH 1 04:03
PET 1 01:08
PET 1 01:21
PET 1 02:11
PET 1 02:12
PET 1 02:22
PET 1 02:24
PET 1 03:09
PET 1 04:07

It would seem from this, assuming Polycarp would select quotes from all sections he was publishing, quotes from three of the division, but not Revelation. Irenaeus, however, quotes from all four divisions.

I wonder, then, whether Polycarp published, or at last had compiled, a three section NT, and later Polycarp's church or Irenaeus published a four section NT that became our "1st edition."

DCH (taking my union mandated break)

andrewcriddle

Note that John 1 and Peter 1 are both in the Syriac 22 book canon (together with James but not John 2 and 3 Peter 2 and Jude.)

Andrew Criddle