Recently, Mark Goodacre put out a new episode of his excellent podcast. This one probed the question of Luke’s role as a historian. Here is the video version of that episode.
Goodacre makes a lot of great observations, some I’ve never really considered or at least haven’t thought about in some time. And he is absolutely correct that Luke is a historian of the ancient variety. But I would add that he is not simply an ancient historian but an ancient historian engaged in what can be called apologetic historiography.
What is apologetic historiography? Gregory Sterling in his excellent book Shaping the Past to Define the Present: Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography defines it as “the story of a subgroup of people in an extended prose narrative written by a member of the group who follows the group’s own traditions but hellenizes them in an effort to establish the identity of the group within the setting of the larger world.”1 Examples of this, he argues, can be found in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, and the two-volume composition scholars dub Luke-Acts.
Reading Luke-Acts in this way sheds light on not only the redactional choices the author makes in his version of Jesus’s story as he found it in the Gospel of Mark (and, in my view, the Gospel of Matthew) but also how he narrates the history of the earliest Christ-followers. He is not merely telling the story for the story’s sake but is instead seeking to offer legitimacy to the movement as a whole. The brief but pivotal story of the murder of Stephen, for example, is evidence of this because it is not only a “suprahistorical speech” that is more about “Stephen as a representative of the early Christian mission”2 than about Stephen himself, but it also connects Stephen directly through language and imagery to both his predecessor Jesus and his successor Paul.3
If you’ve not read Sterling’s book, I cannot recommend it enough. I’ve written a review of it as well, so check that out. And check out the video linked above from Mark Goodacre.
- Gregory E. Sterling, Shaping the Past to Define the Present: Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 5. ↩︎
- Sterling, Shaping the Past to Define the Present, 127. ↩︎
- See Shelly Matthews, Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity (Oxford University Press, 2010), 74-75. ↩︎
The Amateur Exegete 
Thanks for providing the Goodacre video and the associated piece.
I like the idea of describing Luke-Acts as “apologetic” but have some reservations about considering either a “history,” at least in a Greco-Roman sense. While they deal with events set in the past, their author doesn’t seem to go through the different explanations for what happened or describe his methodology/sources.
While I still have much to learn on the Gospels/Acts, the observations listed in Matthew Wade Ferguson’s “Ancient Historical Writing Compared to the Gospels of the New Testament” strike me for now as the most compelling in regard to histories vs. the Gospels/Acts. Just based on what I’ve read so far, the biblical (deuterocanonical) book of 1 Maccabees seems to come closest to Greco-Roman history with its tendency to use indirect speech and take a more “detached” narrative approach.
Thanks (and apologies if I rehashed something I posted before),
J Source
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