The Quest for Certainty and the Climax of the Book of Acts

Sunset at Waskesiu Lake, 23 May 2021

There is a humorous quality to the Roman tribune’s repeated attempts to find out the truth—literally, the “certainty” (τὸ ἀσφαλές; to asphales)—of the charges against Paul in Acts 21-23. First, there is too much of an uproar in the Temple (21:34). Then Paul’s speech to the crowd in the Temple sparks another riot, so the tribune decides on torture. Βut Paul is a Roman citizen, so he orders the Sanhedrin to meet because he wants to get to the bottom of the matter—the certainty (τὸ ἀσφαλές) of what he was accused by the Jews (22:30). Something similar happens in Caesarea when the Roman governor Festus explains to King Agrippa that he still does not have “anything certain” (ἀσφαλές τι) to write to the emperor about Paul (25:26).

If I may indulge in a bit of speculative word association, I am tempted to suggest that the references to “certainty” are clues. Αccording to Luke 1:4, Luke wrote to convince Theophilus of the “certainty” (ἀσφάλειαν) of the things about which he had been instructed. Are these speeches why Luke wrote Acts? Are the things about which Luke wants to convince Theophilus (and his other readers) embedded in these often ignored chapters?

Brown bear by Waskesiu Lake, 22 May 2021

For other reflections on the possible purposes of Acts, see these posts.

Assessing Ernst Haenchen on the Purpose of Acts

I summarized Ernst Haenchen's understanding of the purpose of Acts yesterday (here). Today I want to comment briefly on three key aspects of his model:

1. Authorizing Christianity - The suggestion that Luke wrote to secure approval for the early Christian movement as a "tolerated" religion remains very popular, at least in a modified form. Although some scholars deny that a religio licita category existed in the first two centuries CE (see Maddox, on the one hand, and the fine discussion in Keener, on the other), it is common to suggest that Luke presents Christianity in the Roman world as a legitimate and honorable religious alternative by highlighting its Jewish origins and appealing to the antiquity of its traditions in the Jewish Scriptures. (See e.g., Gerald Downing, Philip Esler, François Bovon, Daniel Marguerat, Craig Keener.)

My question is this: Does a bid for legitimacy in the Roman world adequately explain a trial narrative that appears to address and respond to Jewish concerns--in particular, concerns which I will argue elsewhere have to do with a perceived threat to Jewish identity posed by Paul's Gentile mission? Not impossible, but it seems an odd way to go about it.   

2. Jewish Opposition - Haenchen's model supposes that Jews complained to the Romans that Christian Gentiles were not legitimate Jews and hence were "hostile to the state." But when, where and under what circumstances would Jews care about Gentile Christians, and would they have been in a position to complain to the state after 70 CE? Shaye Cohen's recent comment about the "parting of the ways" seems relevant here:

"There was no parting of the ways between gentile Christians and non-Christian Jews for the simple reason that their ways had never been united. ... [F]or gentiles who believed in Christ and for Jews who did not, there was no need for a parting of the ways, even if there was a need on occasion for polemic, apologetic, and recrimination" (From the Maccabees to the Mishnah [3rd ed; WJK, 2014], 232-3).

3. An External Audience - Haenchen's claim that Luke's apology in Acts was "designed to win over the Roman authorities" (116) has probably received the most criticism--and rightly so. C.K. Barrett's famous rejoinder is compelling: "No Roman official would ever have filtered out so much of what to him would be theological and ecclesiastical rubbish in order to reach so tiny a grain of relevant apology" (Luke the Historian in Recent Study [London: Epworth, 1961], 63).

Bibliography

Barrett, C. K. Luke the Historian in Recent Study. London: Epworth, 1961.

Bovon, François. “The Law in Luke-Acts.” In Studies in Early Christianity, by Bovon, François, 59–73. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014.

Downing, Gerald F. “Freedom from the Law in Luke-Acts.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26 (1986): 49–52.

———. “Law and Custom: Luke-Acts and Late Hellenism.” In Law and Religion: Essays on the Place of the Law in Israel and Early Christianity, edited by Barnabas Lindars, 148–58. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1988.

Esler, Philip Francis. Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology. SNTSMS 57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Haenchen, Ernst. The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971.

Keener, Craig S. Acts: An Exegetical Commentary: Volume 1: Introduction and 1:1--2:47. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012.

Maddox, Robert. The Purpose of Luke-Acts. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982.

Marguerat, Daniel. The First Christian Historian: Writing the “Acts of the Apostles.” Edited by Gregory J. Laughery and Richard Bauckham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Other posts in this series:
Jewish Christianity in Acts: In Search of a Sitz im Leben
Part 1: Reflections on Hermeneutics and the Purpose of Acts
Part 2: The Purpose of Acts: Some Alternatives
Part 3a: Ernst Haenchen on the Purpose of Acts
Part 3b: Assessing Ernst Haenchen 

Ernst Haenchen on the Purpose of Acts

The introduction to Ernst Haenchen's classic commentary on Acts contains no separate section on the purpose of Acts, but it is clear enough from his discussion that he thinks Acts was written (1) to reassure Christians (a) about the continuation of the Christian story after the death and resurrection of Jesus (i.e., to respond to the delay of the parousia) and (b) about the salvation-historical continuity of Gentile Christianity with the story of Israel (i.e., to demonstrate the legitimacy of the law-free Gentile mission). In addition to reassuring Christians about these two theological issues, Acts was also written to address a political problem. In the face of criticism by Jews, Luke wrote (2) to convince Romans that Gentile Christianity should be tolerated as a religio licita, just as Judaism was:

Luke's narrative suggests "a problem-free, victorious progress on the part of the Christian mission. But in reality Luke the historian is wrestling, from the first page to the last, with the problem of the mission to the Gentiles without the law. His entire presentation is influenced by this. It is a problem with two aspects: a theological and a political. By forsaking observance of the Jewish law Christianity parts company with Judaism; does this not break the continuity of the history of salvation? That is the theological aspect. But in cutting adrift from Judaism Christianity also loses the toleration which the Jewish religion enjoys. Denounced by the Jews as hostile to the state, it becomes the object of suspicion to Rome. That is the political aspect. Acts takes both constantly into account" (100).

Luke's answer to the theological question about salvation-historical continuity also responds to the political problem:

"As a religion of the resurrection, Christianity was in the direct line of succession to Judaism. And one cannot ... expect the Roman State to trouble itself with theological niceties alien to its concern. On the other hand Christianity does not imply any transgression of Roman laws. Consequently the intelligent representatives of Rome always took a benevolent view of the Christian mission" (102).

According to Haenchen, Luke conveys the continuity between Christianity and Judaism (a) by emphasizing that the extension of the Gospel to Gentiles was divinely initiated and (b) by depicting Paul and the apostles--those who first carried the Gospel to Gentiles--as completely law-observant. Haenchen declares that "Luke knows no break in Paul's attitude to the law" (625). Paul's trial narrative, with its stress on Paul's innocence, illustrates this.

But Jewish Christianity was no longer a factor in Luke's Gentile church, and there were no longer any actual positive connections with non-Christian Jews when Luke was writing. In Acts, Jewish Christians (represented by the apostles, the Seven and Paul, etc.) play a symbolic role in witnessing to Jesus and securing the transition to a Gentile Church. This means both that Jewish Christianity has transitioned to Gentile Christianity and that "Christianity was in the direct line of succession to Judaism" (102).

Haenchen seems to suppose that after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, any Jewish Christianity that still existed survived as an inconsequential Christian sect: "Jewish Christians after 70 had become unimportant, and the Gentile Christians were not Paulinists who had to contend with Judaizers for recognition. Luke no longer hoped for the conversion of the Jews" (693).

According to Haenchen, then, Acts depicts Jewish-Christianity as Torah observant, but because Jewish Christianity had, for all intents and purposes, passed from the scene, the church of Luke's day still represents a movement away from Judaism and the law. Although Luke claims continuity with Judaism, the evidence for that continuity lies in the past. Paul, according to Luke, may have been innocent of the charges against him, but the church of Luke's day was not. Luke's Jewish contemporaries were, in fact, right to accuse Christians of opposition to the Torah, Temple and the Jewish people (Acts 21:28). "For Luke the Jews are 'written off'" (128).

This is the third (or fourth) post in a series on the purpose of Acts. The earlier posts in this series, which also link to some of my reflections on the topic from previous years, are here:
Jewish Christianity in Acts: In Search of a Sitz im Leben
Part 1: Reflections on Hermeneutics and the Purpose of Acts
Part 2: The Purpose of Acts: Some Alternatives

The Purpose of Acts: Some Alternatives

In his excellent but now rather dated introduction to scholarship on Acts, Mark Allan Powell organizes proposals about the purpose of Acts into six major categories, which he admits are not mutually exclusive:

1. Irenic - Acts was written to unify Petrine and Pauline branches of early Christianity (F. C. Baur).
2. Polemical - Acts was written to respond to and reject heresies within Christianity--either Gnosticism (Talbert) or Jewish Christianity (Jack T. Sanders).
3. Apologetic - Acts was written to respond to opposition from either Roman or Jewish outsiders. In some forms of this view, Acts is addressed directly to the outsider audience as an attempt to persuade them that, for instance, Christianity should be recognized as a legal religion, as Judaism was (Haenchen). Others argue that Acts was written to Christians to enable them to respond to opposition from outsiders. Jacob Jervell, for example, suggested that Acts was written to a Christian church facing opposition from Jewish opponents. 
4.  Evangelistic - Acts was written to encourage non-Christian readers to convert to Christianity or to provide a model for Christian witness to non-Christians (F. F. Bruce).
5. Pastoral - "If the book of Acts is addressed primarily to believers, then Luke's purpose may be to strengthen their faith and to offer them pastoral guidance" (17).
6. Theological - According to Hans Conzelmann, Acts responds to "a theological crisis in the life of the early church" caused by the delay of the second coming of Jesus.

Mark Allan Powell, What Are They Saying about Acts? (New York: Paulist, 1991), 13-19.

This is a helpful orientation to the topic, but it will not take us very far if we are concerned primarily with the way in which proposals about the purpose of Acts account for the function of the extensive trial narrative in Acts 21-28: I would not have guessed from reading Powell's summary that Ernst Haenchen gave tremendous weight to the trial narrative in the latter chapters of Acts, and insisted that the book was written to legitimate the Gentile mission as well as to convince a Roman audience to treat Christianity as a legal religion. More on Haenchen in the next post.

Jewish Christianity in Acts: In Search of a Sitz im Leben

In Acts, Luke responds to the charge that Paul teaches “all people everywhere against our people, the law and this place [the Jerusalem temple]” (Acts 21:28) with an emphatic, multi-chapter denial:

• In Acts 22, Paul identifies himself as a Jew who is accurately instructed in the ancestral law, and who is as much a “zealot for God” as his audience in the Jerusalem temple (22:3).
• In Acts 23, Paul claims to have always conducted himself with a “good conscience” (23:1).
• On trial before Agrippa and Festus, he denies that he “sinned against the law … or the temple” (25:8).
• And before the assembled Jewish elders in Rome, he insists that he did nothing “against the people or the ancestral customs” (28:17).

C.K. Barrett, finding Luke’s portrayal of Paul at odds with the Paul of the epistles, concludes that Luke was honestly mistaken: He knew Paul was a Jew, he knew that Jewish Christians in his own day in the late 1st century observed the law, and he assumed that Paul did too, not realizing that “[w]hen Paul expected Jews to eat with Gentiles he was asking them to give up some of their Jewishness” or that the way in which Paul could claim “to be a conscientious Jew" (cf. Acts 23:2) “would have destroyed Judaism as currently understood”*:

“Luke writes in a situation in which it is accepted that Jewish Christians may and do observe the Law, and it is part of his conviction that Paul was both a good Jew (this will be frequently repeated in the ensuing chapters) and a good Christian. Paul was in fact a Jewish Christian of a kind that could hardly continue to exist after the first generation--a fact that was not clearly seen by Luke. The story presupposes that Jewish Christians in Palestine, in Luke's day and before it, continued to observe the provisions of the Law.”*

Wolfgang Stegemann** agrees with Barrett that the charges against Paul reflect actual Jewish opposition to early Christianity, but he transposes the conflict to the late first century. When Acts was written during the reign of Domitian, Luke’s community was located uncomfortably between the synagogue and Roman authority. The Romans suspected Gentile Christians of adopting Jewish ways because they followed a Jewish Messiah, but after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Christian acceptance of Gentiles without circumcision, indifference to the temple, and lax attitudes toward the law could only be regarded as apostasy by Luke’s Jewish neighbours. In addition to theological differences, conflict in Gentile cities caused by Christians tended to affect their Jewish neighbours. As a result, Jews distanced themselves from Christians. For non-Christ-believing Jews, the period after the destruction of the Second Temple corresponded to the period after the desecration of the Temple by Antiochus Epiphanes, and their Christians neighbours were like the Hellenizers of the Jewish reform after 175 BCE—people who abandoned the Jewish law and made a covenant with the Gentiles. After 70 CE, the Christian community could be conceived only as an “anti-Israel movement.”


According to Stegemann, actual practice in Luke’s Christian community justifies the conclusions of Jewish outsiders: Although Luke depicts Jewish Christians in Paul’s day as remaining faithful to the law, he shows no real interest in the details of the law, which shows that Torah observance was no longer a live issue in Luke’s own much later church context. Since Luke cannot deny the charges in his own time, he responds to contemporary conflict by projecting it onto the past when observant Jewish Christians still existed in the church and before the decisive break with the synagogue. The effect, I take it, is to blame non-Christ-believing Jews for the parting of the ways, and to attribute long-standing hostility to Jews.


Of interest to me is that these two proposals are almost precisely inverted:

• For Stegemann, Jewish Christianity is no longer a viable option in Luke’s late 1st-century context, and present conflict (between a Gentile-dominated church and non-Christian Jews) has been retrojected onto the past.
• For Barrett, Jewish Christianity is still alive and well. Luke lives in a time of harmony between Jewish and Gentile Christians in a church that has lost sight of Paul’s radical views about the law (and the conflict that accompanied them), and he has retrojected the absence of conflict between Gentile and Jewish Christians onto the past.

If you have read along this far in the hope that you will find out what I think, I am sorry to disappoint. The setting and purpose of Acts--in particular, a setting that makes sense of Acts 21-28--is a great puzzle to me. I don’t have it all worked out.


Notes:

*Quotations of Barrett are from C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Vol. 2; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), pp. 1013-1014, 1058.


**Wolfgang Stegemann, Zwischen Synagoge und Obrigkeit: zur historischen Situation der lukanischen Christen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), cf. esp. pp. 178-9, 186.


Much of the substance of Stegemann’s argument appears in English in chapter 11 of Ekkehard W. Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).