Acts: Luke’s Second Volume and the Paul Problem

Season 2 · Episode 16

Full episode description

The Book of Acts is the second volume of the Gospel of Luke. It is the only narrative the New Testament gives us of what happened after Jesus, and for two thousand years it has been read as the official account. It is not the official account. It is one account, written by an author with a particular project.

Part 1 of Acts reads Luke against Paul:

• Luke as historian working in the conventions of his world, where speeches were composed by the author rather than recorded verbatim
• the Council of Jerusalem as Luke describes it in Acts 15, set beside the version Paul gives in the Letter to the Galatians
• Paul’s conversion as Acts narrates it three different times, set beside Paul’s own brief account of his revelation
• the Antioch incident, where Paul publicly opposed Peter and wrote about it furiously, and which Acts entirely omits
• the smaller details where the two accounts disagree, including how many visits Paul made to Jerusalem and on what authority
• the larger pattern, in which Luke turns a fractious movement of competing apostles into a single line of authority

Acts is not lying. Acts is curating. Like the Gospel of Luke, it organises plurality into a single coherent line. The cost is that the disagreements are smoothed, the fractures are healed in narrative, and the Paul Acts presents is a smaller, more agreeable Paul than the man who wrote the letters.

Part 2 will follow what Luke is actually building. The "we" passages. The end of the story. The construction of a founder myth from a movement that had several centres of authority and several lines of theology.

Not from tradition. From evidence.