[Oe List ...] 6/7/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXVI: The Book of Acts

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Thursday June 17, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXVI:
The Book of Acts

In the early manuscripts of the Bible, the book of Acts served the purpose of providing transition from the gospels to the epistles. There was a deep historical fallacy in this assumption though it seemed logical, at least historically, to have stories of the life of Jesus precede stories of the spread of Christianity after the end of Jesus' earthly life. The fact is that the authentic epistles of Paul were written first (51-64) and then the gospels, or, at least, the first three gospels (70-93). John was much later (95-100). Into that framework also needs to be placed the Pastoral Epistles that claim Pauline authorship, but are clearly written in Paul's name long after his death (ca. 64), and the General or "Catholic" Epistles that are called by the names of Peter, John, James and Jude, but which were clearly not written by the one to whom each is attributed and some of which are even quite clearly the products of the second century. Then there is this book of Acts, which purports to tell the story of the Christian movement and how it spread after the Easter event from Jerusalem to Rome. Although its title claims that it is the story of all the apostles, it features stories primarily about Peter, with John appearing in a secondary role before moving to its obvious star, Paul, who is known in the early church simply as "the Apostle." Not only was he not one of the twelve, but there is no evidence that Paul ever met or knew the Jesus of history.
Originally, Acts was designed to be volume two of the Gospel of Luke. The two works are clearly inter-related and are obviously the products of the same author. They agree in vocabulary usage, in common themes and in the fact that Luke's gospel anticipates the book of Acts and the book of Acts looks back on the gospel of Luke. It is unfortunate that, when the New Testament was formed, the gospels — now four in number — were put in the beginning, which necessitated splitting Luke-Acts into two volumes, with the gospel of John breaking their original unity. In this study, however, I will try to rectify that mistake by treating Luke-Acts as one continuous story. We can then move with better understanding into the Pastoral Epistles, the General Epistles and that rather unique epistle we call the Letter to the Hebrews before concluding our journey though the biblical text with the Johannine corpus, which includes the gospel that bears John's name, the three epi stles purportedly written by him and the book of Revelation, which claims to have been written by John while he was imprisoned on the Isle of Patmos. So with that apologia for the placement of this book in both the Bible and in this series, let me bring into focus the Acts of the Apostles.
I noted in our earlier study the impact the synagogue setting had on the organization and the content of the gospels themselves (I am speaking now primarily of the first three: Mark, Matthew and Luke) and raise the question about whether or not the book of Acts might fit into that same liturgical pattern. Please note first that the book of Acts is approximately the same length as both Matthew and Luke, so if Matthew and Luke were designed to enable Jesus stories to be read in the Sabbaths of the liturgical year, as I have suggested, Acts is a similar length so that it would also lend itself to be read in segments over the course of one liturgical year.
We also need to be aware of the practice in the synagogue of reading the Torah first in the Sabbath liturgy. There appear to have been two patterns at the dawn of the Christian era. The pattern in the more traditional synagogues was to read the Torah in its entirety over the Sabbaths of a single year. This would mean a very long first lesson, some five to six chapters from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In those communities of "the Diaspora," in which the Jews were dispersed throughout the empire into pockets in predominately Gentile cities, the pattern developed of reading the Torah over a three year cycle, thereby making the lessons much shorter each Sabbath. Once the reading of the Law was complete, and probably following the recitation of a psalm, a second lesson would be read from the historical books that the Jews called "the Early Prophets" — the books of Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel and I & II Kings. Basically, this portion of the sac red story was the narrative of what happened to the Jewish nation after the end of the life of their founder, Moses. The Jews did not regard these writings as in the same category of importance as the Torah so the passion to complete their reading in a particular period of time was not a matter of great urgency.
It appears to me that the book of Acts was designed by Luke after the analogy of this Jewish practice and was meant to provide Christians with a lesson tracing the history of the church as it moved out of the Jewish orbit and into the wider Gentile world. Like the books called the "Early Prophets," the book of Acts chronicles the life of "the New Israel" following the death of its founder, Jesus. If that is true, we might look for stories in the book of Acts that would be appropriate to the various feasts and fasts of the liturgical year in the synagogue. The first one is obvious for in Acts 2, Luke gives us the narrative of Pentecost in which he tells the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian community. The Jews regarded the Law as the greatest gift God had ever given to Israel and they marked this at Pentecost. Christians, however, wanted to transform Jewish Pentecost into a Christian celebration to mark what they believed was the greatest gift God had given the Christians, namely the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost, which literally means 50 days, was also called Shavuot. When we previously examined Matthew's gospel, we noted that Shavuot was observed by the Jews as a twenty-four-hour vigil focusing on the Sinai experience in which Moses received the law. We also noted that Matthew marked that holy day with the Sermon on the Mount that portrayed Jesus as the new Moses on a new mountain giving a new interpretation of the Torah, together with sufficient material to cover eight segments of three hours each in this twenty-four hour vigil. That is why there are eight beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and eight commentaries or elaborations of each of the beatitudes. Matthew's traditionally Jewish community observed Pentecost in an orthodox way.
We also noted earlier that Luke's community was constituted of dispersed Jews and an increasing number of Gentiles who had been attracted to the synagogue by its theology of ethical monotheism. These Gentile proselytes, however, were not attracted to the cultic elements of Judaism. They would thus not be particularly interested in observing a twenty-four-hour vigil. When we were considering Luke's gospel, we noted that when this author came to the time in which Pentecost was celebrated, he simply had John the Baptist point to the narrative that he planned to write when he got to the second chapter of Acts where Luke would reveal his new understanding of Pentecost. He did this by having John say, "I baptize you with water, but one comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to unloose, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire."
In the fifty day period between Passover and Pentecost in the Jewish calendar, Pentecost will be reached on or near the seventh Sabbath. Luke, therefore, needed to provide six gospel lessons before he gets to Pentecost. As the Easter stories began to proliferate he provided for three of these in his gospel itself. The lesson for the Sabbath after Passover, when the Christians celebrated the resurrection, would be Luke 24:1-12. Next, he added the Emmaus Road resurrection story (24:13-35) that no other gospel writer recorded to be read on the second Sabbath after Passover. Then Luke's gospel has a third resurrection story (24:36-53) in which Jesus appears to the disciples for the first time and commissions them to be his witnesses to "all the nations," before he departed from them.
The early Christian community would then turn to the book of Acts where Luke has three more quite distinct lessons to carry him to Pentecost. First, there is his introduction (Acts 1:1-5) in which continuity with the gospel of Luke is established together with the note that the appearances of the raised Jesus went on for fifty days. Second was the story of the Ascension that brought those appearances to an end (Acts1:6-14). Finally there was the story of the community choosing Matthias to replace Judas Iscariot so that the new Israel, like the old Israel, could continue to have twelve tribes. That brings us to the seventh Sabbath and the day of Pentecost. Right on cue, the reading was the story of how the Christians had turned Pentecost into a Christian celebration of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-13). There are other stories in the book of Acts that seem to be appropriate to the other Jewish holidays and each comes in the correct liturgical order: Stephen is a kind of Ros h Hashanah figure as he points to the coming of the kingdom (see Acts 6:1-8); Yom Kippur is referenced when the Christian movement begins to enroll Gentiles (6:9-15); Sukkoth or Tabernacles is recalled when Stephen recites and recalls the time the Jewish people lived homeless in the wilderness (7:1-36). The festival of Dedication or Hanukkah, which came in the dead of winter, might well be replicated in the story of Paul's conversion in chapter 9:1-22 in which the light of God comes not on the Temple as it did in the Hebrew observance, or even on Jesus as it does in the gospel story of the Transfiguration, but on Paul as he journeyed on the road to Damascus.
When we get to the end of Acts, we discover the trial of Paul also appears to replicate in many places the trial of Jesus and would be read at the time when Passover for the Jews and the crucifixion for the Christians were being observed. My conclusion is that the book of Acts, like the Synoptic Gospels, was written as a liturgical book patterned after the synagogue's holy day observances and in the proper order. Now we are ready to look at the content of this book. 

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Dr. Lennart Peterson of Gainesville, Florida, writes:
I am professor of physics, emeritus, from the University of Florida and I am a Unitarian. Several years ago, I had a conversation with a man who was doing some carpentry work for me and this conversation made a deep and frustrating impression on me. He asked me if I believed in the Bible. I gave the usual Unitarian type of "no" as a reply and proceeded to give an example. I related to him the story of the rainbow that God supposedly made as a promise never again to destroy mankind by a flood. I explained that, as a physicist, I can very easily deduce everything about a rainbow just by applying very basic physical principles. Therefore, if the story was true, then it follows that the laws of physics must have been different after the flood than before the flood. Since this makes no sense to me, the story can not be true. The man had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. This leads me to my question. Fundamentalism requires one to suspend logical thinking. Bu t logical thinking, especially as it pertains to scientific knowledge, is a weakness in the U.S. and in underdeveloped areas. How can people who do not have this scientific knowledge and who cannot apply the logic of science be helped to understand the narrowness of their point of view? How do I as a scientist talk to them in a mutually constructive and humane way?
Dr. Lennart Peterson of Gainesville, Florida, writes:
I am professor of physics, emeritus, from the University of Florida and I am a Unitarian. Several years ago, I had a conversation with a man who was doing some carpentry work for me and this conversation made a deep and frustrating impression on me. He asked me if I believed in the Bible. I gave the usual Unitarian type of "no" as a reply and proceeded to give an example. I related to him the story of the rainbow that God supposedly made as a promise never again to destroy mankind by a flood. I explained that, as a physicist, I can very easily deduce everything about a rainbow just by applying very basic physical principles. Therefore, if the story was true, then it follows that the laws of physics must have been different after the flood than before the flood. Since this makes no sense to me, the story can not be true. The man had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. This leads me to my question. Fundamentalism requires one to suspend logical thinking. Bu t logical thinking, especially as it pertains to scientific knowledge, is a weakness in the U.S. and in underdeveloped areas. How can people who do not have this scientific knowledge and who cannot apply the logic of science be helped to understand the narrowness of their point of view? How do I as a scientist talk to them in a mutually constructive and humane way?



Dear Len,
Thank you for your questions. I enjoyed meeting you at the lecture series that I gave last August at the Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought (HIARPT) in the mountains of western North Carolina.
As a child of fundamentalism, I think the thing that you do not fully grasp is that fundamentalism is designed to enhance security rather than to engage truth. The tragedy is that its tenacious hold on peoples' lives exerts political pressure that keeps education in some parts of this country captive to the religious power structure. The idea that any school board in the developed world would allow "creation science" to be discussed or taught in a science classroom in America only shows how deep this distortion is. This past year, a group of Texas Conservatives objected to the President of the United States speaking in a Texas school because they did not want their children subjected to "socialist propaganda." That is simply another illustration of the same phenomenon.
In my recently published book, Eternal Life: A New Vision, I sought to show how all human religion was developed to help frightened self-conscious human beings cope with the trauma of self-consciousness. Until we understand that connection, we will continue to see fundamentalism as the "suspension of logical thinking."
The cure for this tragedy in education is twofold. One side is that science, in all its persuasive power, must be taught in every classroom in America without compromise. That is the responsibility of the secular world of education. Not to do that is to relegate our children to lives of non-competitive ignorance.
The second aspect to the dilemma is for organized religion in general, and for the Christian Church in particular, to rediscover the necessity for educating their people about faith issues. That is simply not done in the vast majority of congregations. Part of the reason is that we do not know how to do it, but another part of the reason is that we fear the consequences of truth. Until we wake up to this challenge, however, we will force the Christian world to confront the ever-expanding learning of the scientific world with a fourth grade Sunday school Christian education. This will mean that our children will grow up thinking they have to choose between science and religion, not between science and bad religion. As long as churches don't understand these issues and refuse to undertake competent education in our churches, the problem will continue. Because of our inability to confront this problem, we allow bad theology and dated religious concepts to continue to vie f or people's loyalty in the public arena. That is not a winning formula and the church will inevitably lose that fight. Indeed, if the Christian Church continues to choose that tactic, it will almost certainly mortally wound itself.
The Unitarian tradition does this better than most. The other parts of the Christian faith need to move quickly into this arena.
Thanks for your question. 

– John Shelby Spong






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