Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (73 page)

The apostolic unity is set out somewhat more subtly in the speeches of Acts, where, as I noted before, one is hard pressed to differentiate between the words of the Galilean fisherman and the Hellenistic intellectual. Paul’s speeches sound little like the Paul we know from the surviving letters. It is likely that the earlier speeches in Acts are not those of the historical Peter either. Their unity of content results from the fact that they derive from the mind and pen of one man, the author of the narrative.

In order to effect this astounding harmony of Paul and his apostolic predecessors, especially Peter but also, notably, James, the author was compelled to smooth over their real, historical differences. The historical Peter had a serious
falling out with the historical Paul, prompted by the appearance of people from James, when they both were in Antioch (Galatians 2). None of that can be found in Acts, where Paul’s message and lifestyle conform closely with that of the Jerusalem apostles before him, including most emphatically the head of the Jerusalem church, James, and its leading spokesperson, Peter. This internal harmony is related to the broader concerns of Acts, in particular its celebration of the importance of Paul, his divine conversion and commission, his incredible miraculous powers, his persuasive preaching and teaching, his conversion of Jews and gentiles in moving the gospel through the world to the capital city of the empire, Rome itself. The book is, in no small measure, an encomium on Paul. But is it a forgery?

It is important to remember that a literary forgery, as I am using the term, refers to a text that makes a false authorial claim. In most Christian forgeries, an author claims to be someone other than who he really is in order to authorize his writing. In Chapter Three I explained a variety of ways authors make false authorial claims, one of which I termed an “embedded forgery.” I repeat that discussion here: there are a number of writings from antiquity that do not explicitly claim to be authored by a well-known person, but instead use embedding devices, such as first-person narratives, without differentiating between the first person and the author. In these instances the reader naturally assumes that the person speaking in the first person is the writer of the account. A good example occurs in the Ascension of Isaiah, whose author does not self-identify at the outset, but instead provides an anonymous historical framework that involves Isaiah and that appears very much like the prose narrative sections of the book of Isaiah itself. Part way through the narrative, however, and at key points throughout, the revelation given through Isaiah begins to be delivered in the first person. The author of the account does not indicate that he is now quoting someone else. The reader assumes that the author has begun speaking about what he himself experienced. This provides an unimpeachable authority for the account: it is revealed by none other than Isaiah. The author is not Isaiah, however. This was a later writer making an implicit, but false, authorial claim. The book, then, is what I have been calling an embedded forgery.

The book of Acts, like the Ascension of Isaiah, is anonymous. But does it make a false authorial claim? The irony is that if it does so, the claim is made anonymously. That is to say, on no reckoning can Acts be termed pseudepigraphic (i.e., it is not a book inscribed with a false name). But it is also to be recalled that there are other instances of what I earlier termed non-pseudepigraphic forgeries, in which an author claims to be someone other than who he is, without actually naming himself. This is true, for example, of Ecclesiastes, whose author is allegedly the son of David ruling in Jerusalem, fantastically rich and wise. The author does not use the name Solomon, but that is clearly who he is claiming to be. He was not Solomon, however, but an unknown author living centuries later. Ecclesiastes is, then, a non-pseudepigraphic forgery. So too, I will be arguing, is the book of Acts, whose author wanted his readers to understand that he was for a
time a traveling companion of Paul, even though he was not. This author used clear embedding devices in order to make his claim good. The claim functions to authorize his account, as an eyewitness to some of the events he narrates and as a bona fide authority even for those events that he did not personally observe. It was a remarkable strategy, and it proved to be extraordinarily effective, as readers to this day continue to attribute the book to Paul’s traveling companion, Luke.

The key to any discussion of the authorship of Acts is provided by the so-called “we-passages” that occur on four occasions (depending on how one accounts), narratives in which the author shifts from third- to first-person plural narrative. The scholarship on these passages may seem daunting in its scope, but it is even more disheartening in its execution, one suggestion even more implausible than the one preceding. Several full-length studies have been devoted to the question, the most recent by William S. Campbell, but including earlier important contributions by C. Thornton and J. Wehnert.
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The four passages in question are Acts 16:10–17, 20:5–15, 21:1–18, and 27:1–28:16. They include first-person-plural travel narratives (with Paul) from Troas to Philippi (16:10–11), from Philippi to Troas (20:5–6), from Troas to Miletus (20:13–15), from Miletus to Caesarea (21:1–9), from Caesarea to Jerusalem (21:15–17), from Caesarea to Fair Havens (27:1–8), and from Malta to Rome (28:11–16). It cannot be argued that first-person narrative is simply Luke’s preferred technique for travelogues, given the third-person narratives of 14:20–28, 18:18–23, and elsewhere. But on the whole, the travel sections of these passages are narrated in the first person, and the scenes after travel in the third person.

In beginning to explore and explain these passages, it is important to note that they are not the only occurrence of the first person in the book. On the contrary, the author introduces his narrative in the first-person singular in the prefatory dedication to Theophilus. On any reckoning, the “we” of the later narratives must be seen as inclusive of the “I” of the preface. In other words, however one explains the we-passages from the perspectives of literary or source criticism, the author is making a back reference to an earlier passage, and thereby claiming not only to be the author of the narrative but also a participant in parts of it. This will be the gist of the argument that follows, that Acts is not simply a collection of narratives about the earliest Christian community. Its author wants to make an authorial claim to have been an eyewitness to some of the events that he narrates, so as to authenticate the narrative claims he makes, even though many of these claims can
be shown to be false, as can his assertion to have been an eyewitness to the life and preaching of Paul.

I begin the analysis with several observations about the passages in question. First, it should be observed that the we-sections are sometimes interrupted by short third-person narratives (20:9–12, 27:9–14, 27:21–26, 28:3–6), and that they contain a number of details that appear, at least, to be unnecessary to the narrative. These details, however, serve a useful function, as recognized by Samuel Byrskog: “Precisely, then, as seemingly ad hoc pieces of information within passages in first-person plural, they provide, whether historically accurate or not, the narrative with a realistic stamp.”
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By far the most surprising aspect of the we-passages, however, apart from their existence at all, is their frequently noted abrupt beginnings and endings. It is their sudden and unexplained disappearance that is most unsettling. When did the author leave the company and for what reason? These and other related problems can be seen in the first of the passages, 16:10–17. How is it that “we” included Paul in 16:10 and 11, but then are differentiated from Paul in 16:17? That may make sense if an author had wanted to start easing out of the use of the first-person plural as a narrative ploy, but it is hard to understand if the narrative is a historically accurate description of a real life situation by an author who was there. Moreover, if “we” were with Paul when he rebuked the spirit of the possessed girl, how is it that only Paul and Silas were seized, not “we”? Did the eyewitness leave the company in 16:18 suddenly and for no expressed reason? If so, why is he still in Philippi much later in 20:6?

So too in the next passages in question, in chapters 20 and 21. Why is the narrative provided in the first person when traveling to Miletus (20:15) but then shifts to the third person once there? Was the author not present for the prayer in v. 36? Why did they not bring “us” to the ship in 20:38 if he sailed with Paul in the next verse? And in the next chapter, why does the author accompany Paul to Jerusalem in 21:18 and then disappear without an explanation or a trace in 21:19?

I will be arguing in what follows that the best explanation for these abrupt beginnings and endings is that the first-person pronoun was used selectively to place the author in the company of Paul, thereby authenticating his account. As Byrskog expresses the matter: “By presenting a narrator who speaks in first-person plural, the author himself appears, albeit vaguely, as present in the arena of history. Clearly, from a narrative point of view, the author is included among the ‘we,’ and that is sufficient.… The ‘we’ are, within the narrative of Acts, historical witnesses to the details and vividness of Paul’s words and deeds.”
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The we-passages have generated a considerable amount of spilled ink. Nearly all the explanations can be summarized under four rubrics.

1. The Author of Acts Was a Companion of Paul on Some of His Travels

This explanation of the we-passages is the oldest and probably the most widespread. It was the dominant view before the modern critical study of the New Testament began. It is riddled with problems, however, and is rarely supported among scholars outside the ranks of the theologically conservative proponents of the complete historical accuracy of the narrative. For in fact, whatever one might say about “Luke,” he does not appear to have been exceptionally knowledgeable about Paul, his life, and his message.
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There are simply too many basic, fundamental, and detailed discrepancies between what Paul says about himself in the letters that he almost certainly wrote and the accounts of Acts. There is no need here to provide a detailed delineation. The discrepancies involve (1) his itinerary, with issues both large and small: after his conversion did Paul immediately go to speak with the apostles in Jerusalem, as Acts claims, or not, as Paul claims, emphatically, with an oath, in Gal. 1:18–20? When he traveled to Athens, was Timothy with him as in 1 Thessalonians 3, or not as in Acts 17? Was the Jerusalem conference Paul’s third visit to Jerusalem or not? And on and on. (2) His missionary message. How could a companion of Paul think that Paul proclaimed idolatry as simply an honest mistake for which God was forgiving (as in Acts 17; contrast Romans 1)? Or how could an eyewitness and associate of Paul neglect to mention his theology of the cross? How could Paul preach to a crowd of gentiles and not even mention that it is Jesus’ death that puts a person into a right standing before God (14:15–17; 17:22–31; cf. 24:10–21: and elsewhere, even to Jews)? (3) His life. The general portrayal of Paul as The Good Jew who never did anything in violation of the Jewish Law, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, is hard indeed to reconcile with the Paul of the letters, who had no qualms at all with being a gentile to the gentiles, and who fell out with Peter on just these grounds.

2. The Author Used a Source for These Passages

More commonly it is thought that the author of Acts, not a participant in Paul’s mission at any time, made use of a written document—usually thought of as a travel itinerary—that he incorporated more or less wholesale into his account without bothering to edit out the first-person-plural pronouns.
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Sometimes the theory is
made a bit more complex, sophisticated, and, well, creative. In his detailed, full-length study, for example, Thornton maintains that the “itinerary” involved travel notes taken by Titus, provided to Luke (the real Luke, author of Acts) in scenes at which he, the author Luke, was actually present.
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Oddly enough, Thornton argues that the “we” figure was not necessarily with Paul
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for those events that are narrated in the first person, a concession that somewhat undercuts his case. Nor does the theory explain the abrupt beginnings and endings of the we-passages. Equally imaginative is the view of Wehnert that the passages come from an actual eyewitness—in this case, Silas—who was therefore reliable, and who passed along his account to the author orally; the first-person narrative was used, then, in order to signal to the reader that at this point the account was based on a source who was present at the event.
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Similarly, in a more recent but much briefer analysis, Wedderburn maintains that the first person is used to signal a source who was actually present, as opposed to a written source. As it turns out, mirabile dictu, that source was none other than Luke.
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The highly speculative character of these particular views has not done much to win many converts, but they must be acknowledged as serious attempts to grapple with an intractable problem. Their real difficulty, however, has been widely recognized: there is nothing in the passages, other than the first-person pronoun, to raise any suspicion that we are dealing with material that has come from a source.
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The passages are not distinct, stylistically or in any other significant way, from the surrounding narratives and they do not cohere, stylistically or in any other way, with each other in any unusual way. The stylistic unity of the passages with the rest of Acts was recognized as long ago as Harnack and emphasized in a classic study by Cadbury.
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The most thorough study has been by Darryl Schmidt, who finds no “significant patterns that characterize all four sections” and notes that those syntactical constructions that seem noteworthy within them can be found elsewhere in Acts. Schmidt, in short, did not discover “any basis in the syntactic style of the text for isolating this material from the rest of Acts. It is neither uniform enough or distinctive enough to make that possible.”
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