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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I think it’s the “apologetic” part that does a lot of the work. Luke has a vested interest in making Christianity palatable to non-Jewish audiences. He’s obviously familiar with tropes both from Jewish scripture as well as Greco-Roman ones, and he employs them in a way that tries to establish this sectarian movement as legitimate. I think it is definitely a kind of ancient history, though different from writers like Herodotus or Polybius.
If you’ve not read Greg Sterling’s book on the subject, I think you would get a lot from it by grabbing a copy. He says some stuff I don’t agree with (e.g., he doesn’t think Luke knew the work of Josephus) but there is much in his work that resonates with my intuitions about Luke-Acts.
The genre of Acts is contentious, I’ll admit.
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Alright, I’ll definitely have to add Sterling’s book to my reading list.
Sorry if my earlier post sound a bit polemical on questions of genre. I’m open to Acts being part of any genre (whether apologetic history, theological novel, or something else) that might convince apologists to be more cautious before insisting something along of the lines of “Luke was a first-rate historian” or “this was how awesome the early church was.”
While I don’t accept its miraculous claims, Acts does have some fun stories like Philip being taken away in the whirlwind (teleported?) and people trying to get healed by coming into contact with Paul’s shadow. (I kind of picture the whirlwind scene like something out of the Mario games where the characters get launched out of those twister things.)
Partly to check out some of their supernatural claims, I’ve been trying to read some of the passages in the Greco-Roman histories with miracle reports. The claims found in a few about Vespasian doing faith-healings are probably the most interesting (and amusing). Tacitus’ version has him initially reluctant to cure the blind and crippled persons seeking his aid but eventually “channeling” the power of Serapis and physical manipulation to accomplish “what was necessary.” Apparently, there were several “witnesses” who “attest” its veracity.
As kind of a side note, one analogy I have used in discussions with web apologists to illustrate why I don’t think the Gospels or Acts can ever prove the miraculous goes something like the following:
You are presented with two written accounts of alien abductions and you are unable to interact with any of the alleged witnesses. The first consists of a few dozen stories that invariably have a pattern of a skeptic being present and coming to believe in UFOs. The second is written by someone who places more confidence in the truth of some sightings than others and questions the reliability of certain witnesses but ends up affirming the reality of a few abductions. His stories don’t have a recognizable pattern of skeptics being present nor witnesses conveniently placed at every scene.
I think most people who find the second type more compelling for convincing people to believe in alien abductions than the first. The second author acts as more of a skeptic and “filters out” certain reports. The common patterns in the stories of the first also suggest that they could have been his own creations.
The Gospels and Acts seem closer to the first when reporting miracles while historians like Tacitus approach the second with their more “reserved” approaches. Yet it would be hard to find someone who would offer the works Tacitus or Suetonius as serious evidence that Roman Emperors were the sons of gods.
Thanks (and sorry for the long post),
J Source
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I like that analogy to abduction stories. I may need to develop that and use it for future discussions on miracle claims and the NT!
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Thanks. I kind of came up with the argument after reading a few pieces on the debate over genres in the New Testament and thinking of possible comparisons for the appeal to Christian texts for supernatural claims. It seemed to be an improvement over having to appeal to alleged sightings of Mary or the purported levitations of Eastern masters.
(My concern with some of the apparition arguments used by Bart Ehrman and others is that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox believers won’t find them persuasive since they recognize the Virgin Mary phenomenon as legit. But I think looking at a map of the claimed sightings leads one to wonder why she doesn’t seem to “appear” in heavily populated countries like China, India, Indonesia or Nigeria where more than half of the world’s population lives.)
Though the analogy is probably indebted to other skeptics like Ferguson, I’m really grateful for your positive feedback. It’s neat to hear what intelligent skeptics think about arguments or the possibility for their being taken up by others.
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