Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (75 page)

In some of these scattered examples, the first-person narrative is in the singular, in others, the plural. In some instances it dominates from beginning to end (Coptic Apocalypse of Peter); in others the first person appears after an initial third-person narration (Protevangelium; Apocryphon of John); in yet others the first person disappears into a third-person narration (Infancy Thomas). In a number of cases the first person is not identified, but is anonymous (John 1; 21; 1 John 1; Martyrdom of Polycarp; Martyrdom of Marian and James). Whether these first-person narratives represent accurate claims (Irenaeus?) or not (Apocalypse of Peter) they all are unified in having one thing in common. They all function to authenticate the reports in which they are embedded.

We have already seen from Polybius the importance of eyewitness testimony in antiquity in general. This can be seen, as well, in the writings of Thucydides on the pagan side and Josephus on the Jewish, as Campbell has recently stressed. For Thucydides, for example, the movement to the first person “emphasizes the
author/narrator’s knowledge and authority.”
⁹⁴
Indeed, for all these authors, “The author/narrator frequently attempts to establish his trustworthiness by lifting up his personal involvement in or thorough research and critical assessment of the subject matter.”
⁹⁵

Eyewitness testimony was certainly important for the early Christians as well. Consider the words of Theophilus of Antioch:

Seeing that writers are fond of composing a multitude of books for vainglory,—some concerning gods, and wars and chronology, and some, too, concerning useless legends and other such labor in vain—on their account I also will not grudge the labour of compendiously setting forth to you, God helping me, the antiquity of our books … that you may not grudge the labor of reading it, but may recognise the folly of other authors. For it was fit that they who wrote should themselves have been eye-witnesses of those things concerning which they made assertions, or should accurately have ascertained them from those who had seen them; for they who write of things unascertained beat the air. (
ad Autolycum
3, 1–2)
⁹⁶

It is interesting in this connection that Augustine’s nemesis Faustus denied that the Gospel of Matthew was valid precisely because it did not contain an eyewitness report of Jesus’ life and ministry (August.,
Contra Faust
. 17, 1).

The relevance of these parallels for understanding the we-passages of Acts should be obvious. Here too is an anonymous first-person narrator. Does this first-person narration function like the other examples we have cited, six of them from the New Testament, or not? Without accepting Wehnert’s somewhat extravagant theory of these passages, it is easy to agree with his general assessment of the function of the first-person narratives:

The narrated subject of a text … periodically becomes the narrating subject, takes the place of the author and in doing so vouches for the unconditional reliability of the depiction for the reader.… Who could narrate one’s own story better and more precisely than the person directly affected by it?
⁹⁷

A similar view was earlier expressed by van Unnik, “He who could claim to have been present at a certain event, was a generally accepted source of true information … autopsia was a safeguard against fallacies and opened the way of the truth.”
⁹⁸
Or consider the concession of Wedderburn: “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the author wishes to suggest that he was present on the journeys described and that the first person plural signals this participation.”
⁹⁹

Except that the author of Luke was
not
a personal companion of Paul who participated in his journeys. His claim to have been a companion is false. This, then, is a book making a false authorial claim. It is, in other words, a forgery.

To take the matter a step further, it is important to notice how the we-passages function in Acts. They put the writer in connection with Paul on his journeys, making him an eyewitness and thus self-authorizer of the account. In light of the genre considerations discussed by Plümacher and Robbins, it makes considerable sense that the author has inserted these references into passages in which sea travel was involved. That was not a requirement of sea-travel narratives, as Praeder and others have shown; but it was a common enough characteristic of them, and so the sea passages made a sensible location for the occasional insertion of a self-verifying but false self-reference. He could just as well have chosen other places, had he wanted.

In support of the thesis that the author created these first-person narratives in order to establish himself as a participant in the ministry of Paul, it is well worth observing how these passages—and the larger narrative of Acts within which they were embedded—were read in antiquity. Here there is no ambiguity about the evidence at all. The we-passages were everywhere taken to be clear and certain indications that the author was an eyewitness to the ministry of Paul and that his account, as a result, was well-informed and accurate. This “history of reception” as we will see, gives the lie to those scholars today who maintain that if an author wanted to portray himself as an eyewitness, he would have had to do a much better and thorough job of it. The job this author did was thorough enough as it was and his editorial work was fully effective. Because of these we-passages, from the earliest (known) readers of Acts down to our own day, it has simply been assumed that the account was produced by a companion of Paul and is, therefore, to be trusted.

Our earliest extensive references to the text
¹⁰⁰
come in the writings of Irenaeus, who indicates that the author, “Luke was inseparable from Paul, and his fellow-labourer in the Gospel, he himself clearly evinces.” Irenaeus goes on to mention
the we-passages, and then explicates the significance of having an eyewitness produce the accounts: “As Luke was present at all these occurrences, he carefully noted them down in writing, so that he cannot be convicted of falsehood or boastfulness, because all these [particulars] proved both that he was senior to all those who now teach otherwise, and that he was not ignorant of the truth” (
Adv. Haer
. 3.14.1).
¹⁰¹

At about the same time—assuming a late second century date for the text
¹⁰²
—we have the words of the Muratorian Fragment: “The third book of the Gospel is that according to Luke. Luke, the well-known physician, after the ascension of Christ, when Paul had taken him with him as one zealous for the law, composed it in his own name, according to [the general] belief” (2–6). Later it indicates:

The Acts of all the apostles were written in one book. For “most excellent Theophilus” Luke compiled the individual events that took place in his presence—as he plainly shows by omitting the martyrdom of Peter as well as the departure of Paul from the city [of Rome] when he journeyed to Spain. (34–39).
¹⁰³

It is worth noting that already by this time—the time of our earliest recorded “readers response” (180
CE
or so?)—it is a “general belief” that Luke was the author of the book and that he was an eyewitness to the life of Paul.

Soon thereafter Clement of Alexandria dubs Luke the author of Acts (
Strom
. 5.12). Some few years later, Tertullian’s views are interesting and worth noting: he downplays the importance of Luke as a person only because he needs to do so when attacking Marcion’s use of Luke’s Gospel, and only that Gospel:

Now Luke was not an apostle but an apostolic man, not a master but a disciple, in any case less than his master, and assuredly even more of lesser account as being the follower of a later apostle, Paul, to be sure: so that even if Marcion had introduced his gospel under the name of Paul in person, that one single document would not be adequate for our faith, if destitute of the support of his predecessors. (
Adv. Marc
. 4.2.2)
¹⁰⁴

And so Tertullian grudgingly concedes that the author of Luke followed Paul—obviously because he cannot deny it, since that was the established tradition already.

So too in the so-called anti-Marcionite Prologue to Luke (which has nothing obviously anti-Marcionite about it): “Luke was a Syrian of Antioch, by profession
a physician, the disciple of the apostles, and later a follower of Paul until his martyrdom.… Later the same Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles.”
¹⁰⁵
Eusebius too accepted the standard tradition (
H.E
. 3.4.1). Jerome expresses it even more strongly: Luke was Paul’s companion “in all his journeying” (
Vir. ill
. 7).

The tradition—unthinkable without the clues provided by the we-passages—continues down to the present day, not just among lay readers of the Bible but among noted scholars of the New Testament, from across a wide spectrum, including the likes of D. Bock, J. Fitzmyer, J. Jervell, C. K. Barrett, and C.-J. Thornton, just to pick several very different scholars from a host of possibilities. And so Barrett can declare about the we-passages: “The
prima facie
inference to be drawn from them is that the person who wrote them was present at the events he describes.”
¹⁰⁶
And as C.-J. Thornton states, somewhat rhetorically, “The We-passages of Acts do not contain anything that ancient readers would not have considered completely realistic. They could glimpse in them only a report concerning the actual experiences of the author. Had the author not participated in the journeys that are narrated in this we-format, his stories about these would be—from an ancient point of view as well—lies.”
¹⁰⁷

It is possible now to draw some simple but far-reaching conclusions. By the end of the second century, everyone who ventures an opinion concerning the authorship of Acts indicates that it was written by Luke, a companion of Paul, who wrote about things that he himself observed. The “fact” that the author was a companion was shown by the we-passages. Since the author was an eyewitness, he was a reliable source for the accounts he narrated.

Since that is the case, there is absolutely nothing peculiar at all in thinking that the author edited his account precisely in order to achieve that end, that is, that this is the effect that he had in mind. Nothing more was needed—no additional first-person narratives, no further self-identification. All the author had to do in order to authorize his account as based on eyewitness testimony and therefore to
make it trustworthy as historically accurate was to provide a few passages written in the first person, passages that are stylistically like all his other passages, and so do not appear to have come to him from a different source.

It is sometimes argued that if “Luke” had really wanted to convince his readers that he was a companion of Paul and an eyewitness, he would have done much more to make it obvious: name himself in the preface, introduce more first-person narratives, stress that he really was present to see these things happen, and so on.
¹⁰⁸
I have already shown why this argument strikes me as unpersuasive. Starting with the first author to comment on the matter, Irenaeus in about 180
CE,
and for the next eighteen hundred years, virtually every reader of the narrative of Acts was persuaded that it was written by an eyewitness, a companion of Paul. How could a ploy have been any
more
successful?

Others have argued that we have no analogy for what Luke allegedly did: introduce a first-person narrative without warning to authenticate the account.
¹⁰⁹
That view is completely wrong, as we have already begun to see, but it is also important to recognize that Luke had no analogy for a number of his most important literary decisions. So far as we know, he had no predecessor in writing an account of the early church from a historical perspective, or in providing it with a first-person preface without hinting at his own identity, or in making it part of a two-volume work in which the two volumes are actually different genres of literature. To put it otherwise, Luke wrote a Gospel, which was a kind of religious biography,
and
a general history of the early church, and made them two volumes of the same work. Where is the analogy for that? So why does Luke need analogies for anything that he chose to do? In addition, it needs to be stressed that there are abundant analogies for the insertion of the first person into accounts in order to authorize their accuracy, as we saw above; in many instances, these eyewitness authorities are left anonymous, as they are in Acts, and yet they function to demonstrate the validity of the account.

Finally, it is sometimes argued that Luke was too obscure a figure in the early church for anyone to think of as the potential author of the account, if he were not really the author; anyone wanting fully to authorize the account would have chosen someone more prominent, like Timothy or Silas.
¹¹⁰
Unfortunately, this argument claims far more than we could possibly know. For one thing, when someone insists that Luke is too obscure a figure, we might ask, too obscure for whom? Our data from the first century of the church are frustratingly sparse. We have no way of knowing who was obscure or who was well known in most times and places.
How can we possibly know who the local favorites among the early Christian missionaries were? In any event, this objection really has little to do with what the author was trying to achieve, since he never claims to be Luke but simply asserts that he was an occasional companion of Paul on his travels.
¹¹¹

We are left with the question of the purpose and function of the book of Acts—and indeed of Luke-Acts as a whole—an issue that luckily I do not need either to address or to resolve here in its broadest terms. There were undoubtedly multiple purposes for a work of this length and scope, and scholars have long debated the issues. More germane to my concerns here are the purpose and function specifically of Acts as a forgery. Here there is less room for dispute. The we-passages show that the author was (allegedly) a companion of Paul and therefore an eyewitness to his ministry. They provide assurance to the reader that the account is true and accurate.