Historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles

Narrative

Luke–Acts is a two-part historical account traditionally ascribed to Luke who was believed to be a follower of Paul. The author of Luke-Acts noted that there were many accounts in circulation at the time of his writing, saying that these were eye-witness testimonies. He stated that he had investigated "everything from the beginning" and was editing the material into one account from the birth of Jesus to his own time. Like other historians of his time, he defined his actions by stating that the reader can rely on the "certainty" of the facts given. However, most scholars understand Luke-Acts to be in the tradition of Greek historiography.

Use of sources

It has been claimed that the author of Acts used the writings of Josephus (specifically "Antiquities of the Jews"), as a historical source. The majority of scholars reject both this claim and the claim that Josephus borrowed from Acts, arguing instead that Luke and Josephus drew on common traditions and historical sources.

Several scholars have criticised the author's use of his source materials. For example, Richard Heard has written that: 'in his narrative in the early part of Acts he seems to be stringing together, as best he may, a number of different stories and narratives, some of which appear, by the time they reached him, to have been seriously distorted in the telling.' Theology professor Craig S. Keener concludes, however, that contemporary scholarship was based more on naturalistic philosophical principle than intentional distortion.

Historicity

The debate on the historicity of Acts became most vehement between 1895 and 1915. German theologian Adolf von Harnack in particular was known for being very critical of the accuracy of Acts, though his allegations of its inaccuracies have been described as "exaggerated hypercriticism" by some. Attitudes towards the historicity of Acts range widely across scholarship in different countries.

Passages consistent with the historical background

Acts contains some accurate details of 1st century society, specifically with regard to titles of officials, administrative divisions, town assemblies, and rules of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, including:

Talbot concludes that the historical inaccuracies within Acts "are few and insignificant compared to the overwhelming congruence of Acts and its time [until AD 64] and place [Palestine and the wider Roman Empire]". Talbert cautions nevertheless that "an exact description of the milieu does not prove the historicity of the event narrated".

Whilst treating its description of the history of the early church skeptically, critical scholars such as Gerd Lüdemann, Alexander Wedderburn, Hans Conzelmann, and Martin Hengel still view Acts as containing valuable historically accurate accounts of the earliest Christians.

Lüdemann acknowledges the historicity of Christ’s post-resurrection appearances, the names of the early disciples, women disciples, and Judas Iscariot. Wedderburn says the disciples indisputably believed Christ was truly raised. Conzelmann dismisses an alleged contradiction between Acts 13:31 and Acts 1:3. Hengel believes Acts was written early by Luke as a partial eyewitness, praising Luke’s knowledge of Palestine, and of Jewish customs in Acts 1:12. With regard to Acts 1:15–26, Lüdemann is skeptical with regard to the appointment of Matthias, but not with regard to his historical existence. Wedderburn rejects the theory that denies the historicity of the disciples, Conzelmann considers the upper room meeting a historical event Luke knew from tradition, and Hengel considers ‘the Field of Blood’ to be an authentic historical name.

Concerning Acts 2, Lüdemann considers the Pentecost gathering as very possible, and the apostolic instruction to be historically credible. Wedderburn acknowledges the possibility of a ‘mass ecstatic experience’, and notes it is difficult to explain why early Christians later adopted this Jewish festival if there had not been an original Pentecost event as described in Acts. He also holds the description of the early community in Acts 2 to be reliable.

Lüdemann views Acts 3:1–31 as historical. Wedderburn notes what he sees as features of an idealized description, but nevertheless cautions against dismissing the record as unhistorical. Hengel likewise insists that Luke described genuine historical events, even if he has idealized them.

Wedderburn maintains the historicity of communal ownership among the early followers of Christ (Acts 4:32–37). Conzelmann, though sceptical, believes Luke took his account of Acts 6:1–15 from a written record; more positively, Wedderburn defends the historicity of the account against scepticism. Lüdemann considers the account to have a historical basis.

Acts 2:41 and 4:4 – Peter's addresses

Acts 4:4 speaks of Peter addressing an audience, resulting in the number of Christian converts rising to 5,000 people. A Professor of the New Testament Robert M. Grant says "Luke evidently regarded himself as a historian, but many questions can be raised in regard to the reliability of his history […] His ‘statistics’ are impossible; Peter could not have addressed three thousand hearers [e.g. in Acts 2:41] without a microphone, and since the population of Jerusalem was about 25–30,000, Christians cannot have numbered five thousand [e.g. Acts 4:4]."

Grant's estimate of the population of Jerusalem relied on an influential study by Jeremias in 1943. However, Grant does not mention that Jeremias calculated a far higher population figure for festival seasons such as passover, at which he calculated Jerusalem would contain up to 125,000 pilgrims. Furthermore, the lower estimate of Jeremias is significantly lower than the lowest of the moderate to high estimates made by Wilkinson in 1974 (70,398 under Herod the Great), Broshi in 1976 (60,000), Maier in 1976 (50,000, with three times that many during festival seasons), and Levine in 2002 (60,000–70,000). Accordingly, Cousland notes that "recent estimates of the population of Jerusalem suggest something in the neighbourhood of a hundred thousand".

Estimates for the number of Christians in the Roman empire by the end of the 1st century range widely from 7,500, to more than 50,000. However, more recent arguments from the archaeological evidence place the actual population of Jerusalem before its AD 70 destruction at around 20,000.

Authors writing during the same period as Acts of the Apostles attributed a far greater population to Jerusalem than that of modern estimates. Tacitus declared that Jerusalem had more than 600,000 people in it when it fell in AD 70 whilst Josephus said more than a million were killed or enslaved, though the population was only so large because the siege occurred during Passover.

Acts 5:33–39: Theudas

Acts 5:33–39 gives an account of speech by the 1st century Pharisee Gamaliel (d. ~50ad), in which he refers to two first century movements. One of these was led by Theudas. Afterwards another was led by Judas the Galilean. Josephus placed Judas at the Census of Quirinius of the year 6 and Theudas under the procurator Fadus in 44–46. Assuming Acts refers to the same Theudas as Josephus, two problems emerge. First, the order of Judas and Theudas is reversed in Acts 5. Second, Theudas's movement may come after the time when Gamaliel is speaking. It is possible that Theudas in Josephus is not the same one as in Acts, or that it is Josephus who has his dates confused. The late 2nd-century writer Origen referred to a Theudas active before the birth of Jesus, although it is possible that this simply draws on the account in Acts.

Acts 6:9: The province of Cilicia

The New International Version translation of Acts 6:9 mentions the Province of Cilicia during a scene allegedly taking place in mid-30s AD. The Roman province by that name had been on hiatus from 27 BC and was re-established by Emperor Vespasian only in 72 AD. All other translations only mention the name of Cilicia, without referring to it as a province. In the original Greek it is "καὶ τῶν ἀπὸ Κιλικίας" (lit. and of those from Cilicia).

Acts 10:1: Roman troops in Caesarea

Acts 10:1 speaks of a Roman Centurion called Cornelius belonging to the "Italian regiment" and stationed in Caesarea. Robert Grant claims that during the reign of Herod Agrippa, 41–44, no Roman troops were stationed in his territory. Wedderburn likewise finds the narrative "historically suspect", and in view of the lack of inscriptional and literary evidence corroborating Acts, historian de Blois suggests that the unit either did not exist or was a later unit which the author of Acts projected to an earlier time.

Noting that the 'Italian regiment' is generally identified as cohors II Italica civium Romanorum, a unit whose presence in Judea is attested no earlier than AD 69, historian E Mary Smallwood observes that the events described from Acts 9:32 to chapter 11 may not be in chronological order with the rest of the chapter but actually take place after Agrippa's death in chapter 12, and that the "Italian regiment" may have been introduced to Caesarea as early as AD 44. Wedderburn notes this suggestion of chronological re-arrangement, along with the suggestion that Cornelius lived in Caesarea away from his unit. Historians such as Bond, Speidel, and Saddington, see no difficulty in the record of Acts 10:1.

Acts 15: The Council of Jerusalem

The description of the 'Apostolic Council' in Acts 15, generally considered the same event described in Galatians 2, is considered by some scholars to be contradictory to the Galatians account. The historicity of Luke's account has been challenged, and was rejected completely by some scholars in the mid to late 20th century. However, more recent scholarship inclines towards treating the Jerusalem Council and its rulings as a historical event, though this is sometimes expressed with caution.

Acts 15:16–18: James' speech

In Acts 15:16–18, James, the leader of the Christian Jews in Jerusalem, gives a speech where he quotes scriptures from the Greek Septuagint (Amos 9:11–12). Some believe this is incongruous with the portrait of James as a Jewish leader who would presumably speak Aramaic, not Greek. For instance, Richard I. Pervo notes: "The scriptural citation strongly differs from the MT [= Masoretic Text, the transmitted Hebrew Bible], which has nothing to do with the inclusion of gentiles. This is the vital element in the citation and rules out the possibility that the historical James (who would not have cited the LXX [= Septuagint]) utilized the passage."

A possible explanation is that the Septuagint translation better made James's point about the inclusion of Gentiles as the people of God. Dr. John Barnett stated that "Many of the Jews in Jesus' day used the Septuagint as their Bible". Although Aramaic was a major language of the Ancient Near East, by Jesus's day Greek had been the lingua franca of the area for 300 years.

Acts 21:38: The sicarii and the Egyptian

In Acts 21:38, a Roman asks Paul if he was 'the Egyptian' who led a band of 'sicarii' (literally: 'dagger-men') into the desert. In both The Jewish Wars and Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus talks about Jewish nationalist rebels called sicarii directly prior to talking about The Egyptian leading some followers to the Mount of Olives. Richard Pervo believes that this demonstrates that Luke used Josephus as a source and mistakenly thought that the sicarii were followers of The Egyptian.

Manuscripts

Like most New Testament books, there are differences between the earliest surviving manuscripts of Acts. In the case of Acts, however, the differences between the surviving manuscripts are more substantial than most. Arguably the two earliest versions of manuscripts are the Western text-type (as represented by the Codex Bezae) and the Alexandrian text-type (as represented by the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus which was not seen in Europe until 1859). The version of Acts preserved in the Western manuscripts contains about 6.2-8.5% more content than the Alexandrian version of Acts (depending on the definition of a variant). Since the difference is so great, scholars have struggled to determine which of the two versions is closer to the original text composed by the original author.

The earliest explanation, suggested by Swiss theologian Jean LeClerc in the 17th century, posits that the longer Western version was a first draft, while the Alexandrian version represents a more polished revision by the same author. Adherents of this theory argue that even when the two versions diverge, they both have similarities in vocabulary and writing style—suggesting that the two shared a common author. However, it has been argued that if both texts were written by the same individual, they should have exactly identical theologies and they should agree on historical questions. Since most modern scholars do detect subtle theological and historical differences between the texts, most scholars do not subscribe to the rough-draft/polished-draft theory.

A second theory assumes common authorship of the Western and Alexandrian texts, but claims the Alexandrian text is the short first draft, and the Western text is a longer polished draft. A third theory is that the longer Western text came first, but that later, some other redactor abbreviated some of the material, probably for Arian-leaning theological reasons, resulting in the shorter Alexandrian text.

While these other theories still have a measure of support, many modern scholars consider that the shorter Alexandrian text is closer to the original, and the longer Western text is the result of later insertion of additional material into the text. Already in 1893, Sir W. M. Ramsay in The Church in the Roman Empire held that the Codex Bezae (the Western text) rested on a recension made in Asia Minor (somewhere between Ephesus and southern Galatia), not later than about the middle of the 2nd century. Though "some at least of the alterations in Codex Bezae arose through a gradual process, and not through the action of an individual reviser," the revision in question was the work of a single reviser, who in his changes and additions expressed the local interpretation put upon Acts in his own time. His aim, in suiting the text to the views of his day, was partly to make it more intelligible to the public, and partly to make it more complete. To this end he "added some touches where surviving tradition seemed to contain trustworthy additional particulars," such as the statement that Paul taught in the lecture-room of Tyrannus "from the fifth to the tenth hour" (added to Acts 19:9). In his later work, St Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (1895), Ramsay's views gain both in precision and in breadth. The gain lies chiefly in seeing beyond the Bezan text to the "Western" text as a whole.

A third class of manuscripts, known as the Byzantine text-type, is often considered to have developed after the Western and Alexandrian types. While differing from both of the other types, the Byzantine type has more similarity to the Alexandrian than to the Western type. The extant manuscripts of this type date from the 5th century or later; however, papyrus fragments show that this text-type may date as early as the Alexandrian or Western text-types. The Byzantine text-type served as the basis for the 16th century Textus Receptus, produced with enormous effort and scholarship by the Dutch Roman Catholic scholar Erasmus and the first Greek-language version of the New Testament to be printed by printing press. The Textus Receptus, in turn, served as the basis for the New Testament found in the English-language King James Bible. Today, the Byzantine text-type is the subject of renewed interest as the possible original form of the text from which the Western and Alexandrian text-types were derived.