Between History and Spirit

The Apostolic Witness of the Book of Acts

Craig S. Keener

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532684104, 9781532684111
• eBook ISBN: 9781532684128
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Craig Keener is known for his meticulous work on New Testament backgrounds, but especially his detailed work on the book of Acts. Now, for the first time in book form, Cascade presents his key essays on Acts, with special focus on historical questions and matters related to God's Spirit.

Part 1

A Question of History

1

Luke-Acts and the Historical Jesus1

All scholars agree that Luke was not an eyewitness of the events reported in his first volume. Most obviously, whoever Luke was, he was surely from the Diaspora; many scholars cite his apparent lack of direct acquaintance with Galilean geography,2 and he probably did not know Aramaic.3 Moreover, Luke writes at least a generation after the events that dominate his Gospel (and longer still after those he reports in his infancy narratives). Although a substantial minority of scholars continue to date Luke-Acts in the 60s, contending that Luke omits Paul’s death because it had not yet occurred when he wrote, and a smaller number date the work, or part of it, in the early second century, the majority of scholars favor the final three decades of the first century, with most clustering in the mid-range of 70–90.4

Presumably, then, Luke did not know any of the events reported in his Gospel firsthand; yet he likely wrote within the lifespan of some of the eyewitnesses.5 While no one argues that Luke was an eyewitness of the events in the Gospel, other lines of evidence may help us reconstruct the sort of information about Jesus that would have been available to Luke; the degree of freedom a writer like Luke may have felt to adapt information or to “fill in” what he lacked; and a first-century audience’s expectations regarding the nature of Luke’s truth claims. In seeking to answer these questions, I will focus on two primary points: first, the genre of Luke’s work;6 and second, the explicit claims offered in his preface.7

Luke’s Genre

Many scholars argue, I believe persuasively, that Luke writes a two-volume work that includes both biography and historiography. Treating the two books together thus invites a brief exploration of the character of ancient historiography, and of where Luke-Acts falls in the broader range of this genre.

Biography and History

Through the work of Charles Talbert, Richard Burridge, Dirk Frickenschmidt, and others,8 a majority of scholars now view the Gospels as “lives,” or ancient biographies.9 This genre differs from modern biographies, for example, by often following a topical rather than chronological treatment. The Gospels are not modern biographies; nevertheless it is clear that they do fit the characteristics of ancient biography, being prose works focused on the life, or a particularly significant portion of the life, of a main character.10 In the early empire, such works depended heavily on prior information; incidents reported within the period of living memory (i.e., from within a generation of the last eyewitnesses) ideally corresponded with actual events.11

What complicates matters in the case of Luke’s work is that it consists of two volumes, the second of which is not (despite some valiant arguments to the contrary) self-evidently biography. Acts does not focus on a single character (despite the prominence of Peter and especially Paul); although parallels between these characters and Jesus in the Gospel do allow for comparisons with the ancient biographic genre of “parallel lives,” the lack of a single figure dominating the entire second volume renders unlikely the claim that the volume is bio...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: A Question of History
• Part 2: A Question of Context
• Part 3: A Question of Spirit
• 23. Reviews of Some Acts-focused Works
• Bibliography