The Archeology of the New Testament

The Mediterranean World of the Early Christian Apostles

Jack Finegan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138813380
• eBook ISBN: 9781317605041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides an introduction to the Mediterranean world in which the early Christian apostles moved. Drawing on the geographic setting and available archaeological materials to create a sense of the contemporary environment, the book traces the 15, 000 mile travels of Paul, whose world was also the world of Peter, John, and many other early Christians. The author presents a complete chronology for the major apostles based on his integration of existing histories, literary accounts, and archaeological information with new discoveries and new theories on dating New Testament events and documents. The text is lavishly illustrated and as fascinating now as when originally published in 1981.

1
SOURCES

The chief source of information concerning the travels of Paul is the Book of Acts in the canonical New Testament. In the New Testament the Third Gospel (in the usual order of the Four Gospels) is directed to a certain Theophilus (Lk 1:3), and the Book of Acts begins with a reference to a previous book addressed to Theophilus (Ac 1:1). Therefore, both of these books (although now separated in the New Testament order) were originally two volumes of one work and probably both by the same author. In the earliest manuscripts the Third Gospel has the heading “according to Luke,” and that is the traditional name of the author of both volumes.

In the letters collected in the New Testament under the name of Paul, we meet a man who is named Luke. In Col 4:14 this Luke is called “the beloved physician”; therefore, he was a person of the medical profession. In the same chapter several companions are named who are “men of the circumcision” (i.e., Jews) and then several others, who are evidently not Jews but Gentiles, and Luke appears in the latter group, so he was presumably a Gentile too. In Phm 24 Paul calls Luke a fellow worker; in II Tim 4:11 Luke is said to be the only person with Paul at that time.

This is the man–Luke the physician and companion of Paul–whom the early church writers name as the author of the Book of Acts. In the Muratorian Fragment (lines 2, 8) Luke is said to have written both the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. It is further stated that in respect to the Gospel, he had not himself seen the Lord, but in the Acts he showed that several things were done in his own presence by leaving out the passion of Peter and also the departure of Paul from the city (i.e., from Rome) on his journey to Spain. Irenaeus (Against Heresies III 14, 1) emphasizes the passages in the Book of Acts in which Luke writes in the first person plural, such as “we came to Troas” and “we sailed from Philippi,” and then comments, “As Luke was present at all these occurrences, he carefully noted them down in writing.” Clement of Alexandria (Stromata v 12) introduces a quotation from Paul’s address at Athens with the words “as Luke in the Acts of the Apostles relates.” Origen (quoted by Eusebius, Ch. Hist, VI 25) speaks of “Luke, the author of the Gospel and the Acts.” Such was the apparently unanimous opinion in the early church as to the authorship of the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts.

In this connection the texts in the Book of Acts to which Irenaeus calls attention–the socalled we passages –are of special interest. Although it is not always possible to know exactly where these sections begin and end, at least the following portions are composed in the first person plural, and in them, the writer says that “we” did so-and-so.

16:10–17	Journey from Troas to Philippi
20:5–16	Journey from Philippi to Miletus
21:1–18	Journey from Miletus to Jerusalem
27:1–28:16	Journey from Caesarea to Rome

Before and after and in between these passages the text is composed in the third person and says that “he” or “they” did so-and-so; thus the “we” passages stand out plainly as narrating events in which their author took part personally, in contrast with the other passages in which the writer tells what other persons did. On the other hand the “we” passages do not differ in style or vocabulary from the surrounding sections, so it appears that one and the same author wrote the “we” accounts and composed the entire book. Accordingly the simplest explanation of the state of affairs is that this author was a personal companion of Paul on at least those portions of his journeys where the narrative is couched in the first person plural, and that at least in those sections the author is drawing upon personal reminiscences or even upon personal notes written at the time. This, then, is entirely in harmony with the early tradition that the author of Acts was Paul’s companion, Luke the physician.

Interestingly enough, there is also a “we” passage in the so-called Western text of Ac 11:28. In the context at this point it is explained that certain prophets came from Jerusalem to Antioch and then, in the text found in most of the most ancient manuscripts, it is stated, “And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world.” But in a sixth-century manuscript that once belonged to Theodore Beza and is now in the Cambridge University Library (a manuscript designated as D), and in a few other ancient sources that are considered to represent “Western” texts, the statement begins, “And there was much rejoicing, and when we were gathered together one of them named Agabus spoke.” If this reading is correct, the same person who was with Paul on several of his journeys and who speaks of events on those journeys in the first person plural was already a member of the Christian community at Antioch at this earlier time. This, again, is in harmony with a remark by Eusebius (Ch. Hist. III 4, 7) that Luke, the author of the Gospel and the Acts, was an Antiochian by race as well as a physician by profession.

The same relationship of Luke to Antioch is also stated in an old prologue to the Gospel according to Luke, in which some additional personal information about the author of Luke/Acts is provided. This prologue is found in several Greek and Latin manuscripts, and it is believed to have been composed in its present form in the third century, incorporating earlier and valuable biographical material. The biographical data are largely in the first paragraph, which reads as follows: “Luke is a Syrian of Antioch, a doctor by profession, who was a disciple of apostles, and later followed Paul until his martyrdom. He served the Lord without distraction, unmarried, childless, and fell asleep at the age of 84 in Boeotia, full of the Holy Spirit.”¹ Boeotia, where this prologue says Luke died, is a district in Greece north of Athens. In his Lives of Illustrious Men (7) Jerome also describes Luke as a physician of Antioch, but Jerome says that in the twentieth year of Constantius (A.D. 357) Luke’s bones were transferred to Constantinople for final burial.

In spite of all this early evidence to the effect that the Book of Acts was written by Luke, the companion of Paul, the belief was advanced in the nineteenth century by members of the socalled Tübingen school of New Testament study that this was not the case. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), professor of theology at Tübingen, thought that Acts was a tendentious and subjective work aimed at reconciling the supposedly antithetical Petrine (Jewish-Christian) and Pauline (Gentile) parties in the early church and, as such, must have been composed at a time far along in the second century A.D.² The successors of Baur carried this line of analysis further: Albert Schwegler (1819–1857) spoke of the “unhistorical, arbitrary” procedure of the author of Acts,³ and Eduard Zeller (1814–1908) dated the book in the second or third decade of the second century A.D. and saw in it much that was invented in order to commend Gentile Christianity to Jewish Christians.⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century Adolf Jülicher (1857–1938) represented rather widely prevailing views along much the same line when he dated Acts just after the beginning of the second century and argued that its picture of the apostolic age was an idealization that represented the nebulous conceptions of a later generation and showed that only meager information was still available to the author at that later time.⁵

In the twentieth century similar assessments of the character of the Book of Acts have been set forth by not a few scholars, each of course shaping his presentation in his own individual way. In his Chapters in a Life of Paul, John Knox argues that the picture of Paul’s career in terms of three great missionary journeys, as narrated in Acts, is very different from what one would deduce from Paul’s own letters and, since the latter are unquestionably the primary sources, the letters are to be used in preference to Acts whenever there is any question of conflict between them. As an example of such conflict, Knox’s reconstruction of the chronology of Paul’s life and work leads him to suggest that Luke may have been entirely mistaken in having Paul appear before the Roman proconsul Gallio on Paul’s first visit to Corinth (Ac 18:12) or that, if the incident did occur, it may have been on a later visit by Paul to Corinth than is represented in Acts.⁶

In his life of Paul, Günther Bornkamm expresses grave doubts about the early church tradition concerning Luke and Acts, he dates the Book of Acts at the earliest toward the end of the first century, and he states that from this later standpoint the book gives a simplified and an idealized picture of Paul. At the same time, in contrast with John Knox, Bornkamm believes that the appearance of Paul before Gallio, as recorded in Ac 18:12, provides the one absolute datum for the establishment of the chronology of Paul.⁷

Again, in this same tradition, deriving ultimately from F. C. Baur, Ernst Haenchen in his commentary on Acts states that the picture of Paul–and indeed the entire picture of the missionary situation in the Book of Acts–shows that no co-worker of Paul is speaking here, but rather a person of a later generation who is trying to set forth things on which he no longer possesses the true perspective.⁸

In the 1800s an event of an entirely different sort took place in respect to the evaluation of the Book of Acts. The famous story has often been told.⁹ In 1876 a young man named William Ramsay, in his last year at Oxford University, was ordered to travel for his health, and in 1880 he received a scholarship for research in Greek lands. He wished to work in Athens, but he landed in Izmir (ancient Smyrna) and was persuaded by Charles Wilson to proceed instead to Phrygia in the interior of Asia Minor. No trustworthy map was available of the region, so William Ramsay undertook to make one and to trace the history of Roman institutions in Asia. At the time he was not interested in the bearing of his discoveries on the New Testament, and he accepted the opinion of German scholars who held that the Book of Acts was a tendentious and largely imaginary reconstruction formulated in the second century A.D. As a result of his discoveries and further studies, however, he was led to a complete change of opinion. He described the course of his research and the conclusion to which it led him in these words:

I may fairly claim to have entered on this investigation without any prejudice in favour of the conclusion which I shall now attempt to justify to the reader. On the contrary, I began with a mind unfavourable to it, for the ingenuity and apparent completeness of the Tübingen theory had at one time quite convinced me. It did not lie then in my line of life to investigate the subject minutely; but more recently I found myself often brought in contact with the book of Acts as an authority for the topography, antiquities, and society of Asia Minor. It was gradually borne in upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvellous truth. In fact, beginning with the fixed idea that the work was essentially a second-century composition, and never relying on its evidence as trustworthy for first-century conditions, I gradually came to find it a useful ally in some obscure and difficult investigations….

I know the difficulties of this attempt to understand rightly a book so difficult, so familiar, and so much misunderstood as Acts. It is probable that I have missed the right turn or not grasped the full meaning in some cases. I am well aware that I leave some difficulties unexplained, sometimes from inability, sometimes from mere omission. But I am sustained by the firm belief that I am on the right path, and by the hope that enough of difficulties have been cleared away to justify a dispassionate historical criticism in placing this great writer on the high pedestal that belongs to him….

Our hypothesis is that Acts was written by a great historian, a writer who set himself to record the facts as they occurred, a strong partisan indeed, but raised above partiality by his perfect confidence that he had only to describe the facts as they occurred, in order to make the truth of Christianity and the honour of Paul apparent. … It is not my object to assume or to prove that there was no prejudice in the mind of Luke, no fault on the part of Paul; but only to examine whether the facts stated are trustworthy, and leave them to speak for themselves (as the author does). I shall argue that the book was composed by a personal friend and disciple of Paul, and if this be once established there will be no hesitation in accepting the primitive tradition that Luke was the author.”¹⁰

Again Ramsay expressed the view that “Luke’s history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness,” and he wrote that “Further study of Acts XIII–XXI showed that the book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world, and that it was written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement. It is marvellously concise and yet marvellously lucid.”¹¹

As we have seen, there are not a few presentday scholars who continue the type of analysis begun by F. C. Baur and, like him, find in the Book of Acts relatively late materials of at least questionable historical value–a view that has come to be a part of what may be called “critical orthodoxy” in New Testament studies. But there are also not a few works of contemporary research that reach conclusions more like those of Ramsay; that is, they find in Acts an essentially reliable historical document.

In his detailed commentary on the Greek text of Acts, F. F. Bruce studies the book as one would study other Greek historical literature and finds that the author’s insistence on accuracy (Lk 1:3) in the recording of important events is shown by the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Plans
• List of Illustrations
• Illustration Credits
• Preface
• Alphabetical List of Ancient Sources
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1/Sources
• Chapter 2/Chronological History
• Chapter 3/Beginnings
• Chapter 4/First Missionary Journey (A.D. 47–48)
• Chapter 5/Second Missionary Journey (A.D. 49–51)
• Chapter 6/Third Missionary Journey (A.D. 51–54)
• Chapter 7/Shipwreck Journey (A.D. 56–57)
• Chapter 8/In Rome (A.D. 57–59)
• Notes
• Index of Biblical References
• General Index