Chris Weimer

I've been thinking about this recently and Toto's most recent post prompted me to bring this up - is there any history in Acts at all? Now, by this I mean purposeful history, not merely allusions to history or parallels of history. I mean does the author of Acts know of real events, or at least purpoted real events, and write about them?

I know ahead of time someone is going to bring up the "we" parts of Acts. I don't want to discuss them, since they've already been discussed ad nauseam. Also, Luke's stealing of history from Josephus is not appropriate, since that's would fall under the "parallels of history" which is not the scope of this thread. Technically, it's not history because he "stole" from Josephus and placed it in a new context - thus non-history. I'd rather choose to talk about other things. For example, Acts 5 relates the story of Ananias and Sapphira struck dead for refusing to give all the money to Peter. Where did this come from? Could it be an apology for real history, that there was a scandal between Peter and Ananias/Sapphira, the latter two wound up dead and some people suspected Peter?

Amaleq13

Here's a prior thread on the subject in case it has something of interest for you:

Chris Price: Genre, Historicity, Date, and Authorship of Acts

Toto

How would you extract that history? Robert Eisenman thought that the stoning of Stephen in Acts was actually based on the stoning of James. If it were, is it still history? How would you know if there is a historical kernel there?

Chris Weimer

This is what I was talking about - even if the stoning of Stephen was based on the historical stoning of James, it's not what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for copycat historical parallel, but actually what might be history. We can probably find a lot of stuff that came from elsewhere and merely reworked to fit the plot, but does anything look like it actually might have plausibly happened, like the Ananias/Sapphira story...?

Doug Shaver

From all I have read on the subject, the most we can say is that there could be some. If there is, though, there is no independent source that can tell us where in the book it is.