James writes:
I have enjoyed your website very much. Thank you for your hard
work. I have some questions for you as to the validity of the book
of Acts. I found this book by Dr. Gregory A. Boyd (a conservative
scholar) called "Jesus Under Siege." He makes many claims about
the accuracy of Acts. I was wondering what your knowledge of these
issues are?
JESUS UNDER SIEGE pages 130-131:
Luke's account frequently aligns with what we learn from other
ancient historians. For example, his unusual account of the sudden
death of Agrippa, his record of a major famine "in the days of
Claudius," his identification of Ananus as the high priest in A.D.
47, and his record of a certain Egyptian revolutionary who led
thousands to their death, have all been confirmed by cross-checking
them with the writings of Josephus.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of Luke's narrative is the way
he consistently gets the titles of certain dignitaries right. This
was particularly difficult to do of officials within the ancient
Roman empire because the titles of dignitaries, as well as the
status of the provinces they ruled, changed frequently. Yet Luke
consistently gets them right, a fact that must bolster our
confidence in his ability to relate reliable history. As Stephen
Neill puts it, "Experience shows that nothing is more difficult
than to get titles exactly right." But what we find in Luke is that
"exactly the right title is used at exactly the right time and place."
Archeology has confirmed Luke's accuracy on a host of other matters
as well. His detailed knowledge of the ever-changing political
topography of Rome, its geography, roadways, and means of travel,
have all been confirmed by archeological evidence. More particularly,
Luke's remarkably detailed account of Paul's sea voyage and shipwreck
in Chapter 27 has been called "one of the most instructive documents
for the knowledge of ancient seamanship." His accuracy in portraying
the widely divergent cultures and customs of various regions
throughout the Roman world has been frequently noted as well, as
has his command of the complex legal processes that were employed
in diverse regions of the empire.
It was evidence such as this that led Dr. Sherwin-White, arguably
the ablest historian of ancient Roman law in our time, to conclude
that: "The confirmation of historicity [in Acts] is overwhelming...
any attempts to reject its historicity even in matters of detail must
now appear absurd."
Response to James:
Accuracy and Reliability in Acts
I have reproduced all of James' quotation from Boyd to illustrate the extent to which weak arguments will be driven in order to defend a conservative apologetic position. None of the statements put forward by Boyd has anything to do with the reliability of Act's supposed historicity. Even if we were to assume (which I would not necessarily do) that all of Boyd's statements are accurate, they prove nothing about Luke's intent to be historically faithful to his core subject. It is not Luke's "ability to relate reliable history" that is at issue here. He may have had the ability: the question is, was that his purpose and did he carry it out where early Christian history was concerned? In view of the tendentious nature of Acts, and its overt contradiction of other more reliable evidence, particularly in the Pauline epistles, this is highly doubtful. In any case, the best historical novelist will attempt to set his fictional account within a setting which is as accurate as possible, and Luke may well have been similarly scrupulous. It is significant that Boyd does not offer a single example of how a detail about a specifically Christian element in Acts has been proven accurate by some independent corroboration.
In fact, Luke's "ability" is sorely wanting in the crucial matter of the circumstances of Jesus' birth. We all know that there is no evidence of a universal census under Augustus, and if Luke is simply enlarging on the Judean census of Quirinius in 6 CE, he has failed to align this with his placement of the Nativity before the death of Herod in 4 BCE. Quite a glaring flaw. I'm also a bit skeptical of Boyd's overemphasis on the matter of titles. When one has little of importance to appeal to, one must play up the relatively insignificant. (I confess I have not encountered this claim about Acts before, so I can neither dispute nor verify it.)
It's a little ironic that Boyd points to the authentic atmosphere of the sea voyage in Acts 27. Perhaps that authenticity can be explained by the fact that Luke has simply taken and reworked a common type of Hellenistic romance, putting his own characters into it. The much-discussed "we" passage phenomenon found in the latter part of Acts, which used to be taken as evidence of a 'diary' source used by Luke, has recently been shown to be a common stylistic device of Hellenistic writers when recounting sea voyages. Since corroboration anywhere in the Christian record for this episode in Paul's career is totally lacking, we can put the whole thing down (and some have) to a fictional creation on Luke's part, heavily borrowing from the 'adventure' genre of his time.
Dr. Sherwin-White may have been an able historian of ancient Roman law, but New Testament scholarship was not his specialty, and if the quote by him is accurate, it shows that he was pontificating on a subject about which he possessed little genuine understanding (or neutrality).
