When was the New Testament’s Book of Acts written? And when
was the Gospel of Luke written? (These two questions go together, since both were written about the same time by
the same author, the gospel first – this being the normal consensus of secular scholars). Scholars
usually have it that 70-90AD is the date range for when they were written. As for exactly when inbetween those years, it’s all a bit arbitrary. Still I
have been content to accept that consensus unquestioningly for many years. And
then I started to look at the actual evidence. And I discovered that other
scholars, on doing so, had changed their minds and decided these books were
written before 70AD. Harnack long ago is a famous and eloquent case of this.
Liberal scholar J.A.T. Robinson did too. What led these erudite men to ruffle
the feathers of the establishment? Was I prepared to change my mind?
Scholars today still normally consider that the Book of Acts
was written some time between 70 and 90 AD, and I will present that case below.
A minority that has persisted over time (Harnack and Robinson are not alone) is
that it was written about 62AD. That seems a bit precise. No arbitrary swinging
between a wide date range. I will deal with the case for 62AD first.
So what is the content of the book? Broadly speaking, in Acts we
read of the first century start of the church and early Christian missions. The
story starts in the 30s of the first century and the book ends about 62AD when
the missionary Paul is awaiting trial in Nero Caesar’s court, where Paul never
stops preaching the gospel. It’s the ending that is potentially valuable for dating the book to 62AD.
WHY THIS IS A BIG ISSUE
This matters not only for dating Acts but also dating Luke’s
Gospel. So this is highly significant stuff. By way of explanation of that:
since Luke’s Gospel and Acts are normally taken by secular scholars to be the
work of a single ancient author, and since scholars also agree that Luke’s Gospel
was written before Acts, therefore establishing a date for Acts being written
establishes a date by which Luke had to have been written too. So if Acts was
written by 62AD, then Luke’s Gospel was written by 62AD too. This is only about
30 years after the death of Jesus. This is earlier than many scholars want to
date any of the four biblical gospels. But not all scholars are so appalled at
that idea.
A couple of well known reasons for late dating. One is a famous presupposition that more or less all early Christians were so eagerly anticipating Jesus' imminent return that they didn't think it worth writing down the story of Jesus: i.e. there was no occasion for early gospel writing. That is a rather romanticised view of early Christian community. (To the contrary, more realistic is that new religious movements in those days were in a competitive market place for members and had to be innovative to stay ahead of competitors who would more than gladly take recruits off their hands. One way of doing that was early use of written content to try to ensure the movement's survival.) A more keenly fought case for late dating is that references to the 70AD destruction of the Jerusalem temple signify that we have post 70AD gospels: i.e. Luke's Gospel has references to the fall of the temple and therefore both this gospel and Acts date after 70AD. That objection is addressed in these posts.
ARGUMENTS FOR EARLY DATING OF ACTS
Argument 1: what is Caesar’s name?
"‘Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand trial before Caesar'" (Acts 27:24)
It is clear from those words that Luke has made Caesar central to the latter part of his story.
Now, I won’t lunge straight in at 62AD. First, some evidence that
Acts was written by 68AD at the latest. This comes from exploring a question
that is not really about trying to date the book at all: simply, which of the Caesars was it who figures in
the overarching story to the end of Acts, the story at the time Paul was headed towards a trial in Rome? Luke doesn't say the personal name of this crucial Caesar. The reason why he doesn't say so is simple. It is because Luke tellingly just casually assumes that his readers know that this important emperor is Nero without having to play guessing games. He does so in the way that you would do if writing while Nero is still the living emperor, and here are a few things that illustrate it.
We know Luke's practice elsewhere. For the context of
former
emperors he does give their personal names in little side notes: Caesar Augustus (
Luke
2:1 “In those days
Caesar Augustus”); Tiberius (
Luke
3:1 “year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar”);
and Claudius (
Acts
11:28 “This happened during the reign of Claudius”). If you know your history, the sequence of the five emperors in the era covered by Luke's Gospel and Acts is as follows: Augustus (27 BC - AD 14), Tiberius (AD 14-37), Caligula (AD 37-41), Claudius (AD 41-54), Nero (AD 54-68). Luke's little notes are each meaningful. The first and second give a historical context for Christ's birth and moment of starting his ministry. The Claudius reference serves to prove that Paul's co-workers are on God's side, uttering prophecy that comes true. Naming emperors is something Luke does when there is significance to attach to it.
So Luke has consigned the first four Caesars to the past, as at his time of writing, and even given three of them a name-check, serving as historical markers for his story. Make no mistake: if Luke as a writer were looking backwards from some time after 70AD, there would have been at least five more emperors in the meantime, and Luke would have needed to provide context for the latter part of Acts (eg “these were the days when Nero was emperor”). After Claudius, there were Nero, Galba, Otho, Aulus Vitellius, and Vespasian who reigned 69–79 AD. (And if we go up to the end of the century, there's a further four emperors.) This makes it very difficult to understand why any post-70AD Luke would not give the emperor's personal name in a note.
As for Caligula's reign, AD 37-41 is a period for which little or no information is recorded in the Book of Acts about anything at all.
As for Claudius' reign, it makes its mark in the story: ‘There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who
had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had
ordered all Jews to leave Rome’ (
Acts
18:2). So Claudius is still emperor until around the time of Acts 18:2. Nero's reign overshadows the latter part of Acts much more than that.
So what of this fifth emperor, Nero? Was he past or present at the time when Luke was writing? His significance is much much greater to the story than the others, but Luke never name-checks him.
So, we've had Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius. We've had 'Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome’. But Luke gives no such detail when it comes to ‘You must stand trial before Caesar' - why doesn't he say? We have the answer.
Whereas Luke gives the impression of the others being past reigns at the time he was writing, this is precisely the impression that Luke never gives about the reign of Nero Caesar, the living emperor of the crucial final chapters of Acts, leading towards Paul's trial in Caesar's court. Of course, this impression is so subtle that it would only really make contextual sense with someone reading it while Nero is still alive, their present emperor.
- Needless to say, Luke is not doing a massive treatise on the life and times of Roman emperors, and doesn't have to do a complete roll-call. But in the books of the New Testament, the three Caesars named by Luke are named by no-one else. This naming is something that only Luke is interested in doing, so it's obvious that he cares about such details more than any other gospel writer does. In each case, he provides a little bit of historical context by inserting a note giving Caesar's personal name. Yet Luke never makes a little side-note to give the personal name of the more crucial Caesar who is mentioned simply as 'Caesar' in speech after speech, page after page, of the latter chapters of Acts. The name: Nero. Why doesn’t Luke insert a little note to identify the Caesar referenced in the crucial dialogue and speeches as Nero, as he has been wont to do?
- It's not just a question of an interest in mentions of a 'Caesar' in speeches. Naturally, in dialogue and speeches, his contemporaries refer to him just as 'Caesar', and not all of these necessarily are of sufficient importance to need a comment. But why does Luke, telling the story of Paul being headed towards Caesar's court, not add a non-speech side note to say that the Caesar he keeps referencing in speeches is Nero Caesar?
Another thing that illustrates this is that whilst Luke has previously in Acts named a past emperor as active, Claudius (
Acts
18:2), scholars know that Luke has moved on in the story to reference the
next crucially relevant emperor, but does so
without distinguishing him from the previously mentioned Caesar. It's not Claudius; but if you didn’t know
your history, that wouldn't occur to you. Claudius is the only one name-checked in Acts.
There is significance in that a reader could be confused by it. If you were not well informed, the modern casual reader would easily get it wrong trying to name this crucial emperor - you might guess it was Claudius if you just went by the text of Acts. You wouldn't know the emperor had changed. Luke's casual assumption that his readers are not ignorant or confused, and know which unnamed emperor Paul is expecting to meet - Nero - is easily explained by it being common knowledge among Luke's contemporary readers. They knew the name of the living emperor.
To reinforce the point, why, unlike the other Caesars who have a place in Luke-Acts, does Nero go unnamed, even though he is the emperor referenced more than any other?
The significance of these things needs our attention.
Of course, an author might give personal names for past and present emperors, but when the author always omits the personal name where one particular Caesar is repeatedly referenced, and where this would be inconsistent with what the author is generally doing in terms of adding notes about emperors, then you are in the realms of a living emperor unless there is unusually strong evidence to explain away the inconsistency.
- In summary then, the most ‘normal’ non-theological explanation for Luke's inconsistency in not adding a note to give the personal name of this crucial much referenced emperor, is this: Luke does not do so because he is referring to the then-living emperor whose name was universally known - Nero is still alive, still emperor, at the time he is writing. No contextual explanation is therefore called for, as his contemporaries reading this would understand the reference. That is the generation it was written for. And as Nero died in 68AD, this means that Acts was written no later than 68AD.
For comparison:
Other examples of people referring to their living Caesar not by name but simply as 'Caesar' can be found in
John
19:12 and Philippians
4:22.
For comparison of the naming pattern: any
current British Prime Minister can be referred to in conversation as the “Prime
Minister” and the identity will be unmistakable even without giving the name
(currently the PM is Teresa May, as I write, so anyone today saying “the Prime
Minister thinks…” means her). But an ex-Prime Minister always has to be named
and sometimes put in context to avoid mis-identification: “former Prime Minister
Tony Blair” or “when David Cameron was the Prime Minister”).
Argument 2: the anti-climax
"‘Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand trial before Caesar'" (Acts 27:24)
How do we narrow it down to about 62AD? Of the arguments for
this, the strongest comes about from trying to answer a different question
which is not really about dating at all (again). The question: why does Luke choose to end the story of
Acts where he does, not telling us a thing about Paul appearing in Caesar’s
court, after a great big build up towards it? It’s the climax that never
comes because Luke closes the book there. As Harnack once expressed, eight
chapters build up to nothing. Why?
Make no mistake: Acts really does build up in
style to the appearance of Paul before the Imperial Court. Indeed, there is a
series of legal hearings heading in the direction of Rome. What’s more,
Jesus
and an angel in turn prophesy his trial will happen at Rome/before Caesar (
Acts
23:11, 27:24). That impels the reader to expect to read of the great trial:
Jesus and the angel prophesied it, so it
has to be scheduled in reality, this is under heaven’s control. Luke
describes several hearings in turn, and these are building up towards the great
moment of the Imperial hearing. But the story stops dead just before it gets
there.
This modest ending to Acts is significant. Paul is promised an audience with Caesar but Luke doesn’t invent a fictional one to cap that off. The sense is that it's too early for that, because it's still only about 62AD, and Luke doesn't know how this will pan out. If it was later, why not finish what he's started?
Yes, Luke has a neat theological point, tying up
the ending to his book in a ribbon and a bow, and some commentators want us to
believe that that is enough of an explanation for the whole ending. But Luke
would do that anyway wherever the story ended. And why the anti-climax? As
Mauck observes, Luke “has no reason after pointing and leading his readership
to a climactic trial to blithely omit the culminating event of the book” (John W. Mauck, Paul on Trial: The Book of Acts as a Defence of Christianity, Nelson, 2001).
The most ‘normal’ non-theological explanation is
that the next episode had not happened
yet at the time of Luke writing. Acts was thus likely completed about
62/63AD, prior to the impending Imperial trial (Mauck, 42-3, 176). Why is such
a precise date available? Well, it’s in the detail Luke gives: he mentions Festus’
role; and Festus was appointed in 59 or 60AD, so the two years mentioned in
Acts 28:30 end in 62 or 63AD (Mauck,
48).
A similar argument was expressed long ago by
Harnack whom Mauck quotes: “The more clearly we see that the trial of St Paul,
and above all his appeal to Caesar, is the chief subject of the last quarter of
Acts, the more hopeless does it appear that we can explain why the narrative
breaks off as it does, otherwise than by assuming that the trial had actually
not yet reached its close. It is no use to struggle against this conclusion.”
(Harnack, Date of Acts, 96f.)
It is not as if Luke even primes us to know what
the result of the legal proceedings will be. Nero’s court could not yet have
ruled on Paul’s case: “if Nero had already ruled on Paul’s guilt or innocence,
then the ruling of the emperor would have been by far the single most important
event to the faith declaration [if the reader were a Christian]. The ruling and,
indeed, all of Acts would need to be explained in the context of that ruling”
(Mauck, 217). So it is not a book written for Christians some years after the
trial in Rome, it is a book written before the ruling, around 62AD.
It may be possible that conditions were never properly met for a trial to take place, but if so, Luke definitely did not see that coming, as he primes the reader to think that a supernatural prediction means that Paul will stand trial before Caesar. Luke says that one condition to be satisfied is for the accused to be able to face their accusers face to face (Acts 25:16), but what if his accusers never travelled to Rome to finish the job? Could that mean the trial never came, which would have taken Luke by surprise? So whether the trial had an important result, or the trial never took place, it looks like Luke just didn't know either way. This fits with Acts being written before it was resolved either way.
Argument 3: does Luke know that Paul will get executed in
Rome?
1st answer: is Acts aware of the tradition of Paul’s execution at all?
There is a good reason - but rarely spoken of - why we should doubt that Luke was aware of Paul getting executed. It comes in the fact that Luke has been paralleling the suffering of Paul with the suffering of Jesus.
Background: rejections of Jesus and Paul are major focal points in Luke’s Gospel and Acts. The parallel is striking. As evidence of this, see Acts 21:10-14, where Paul is leaving Miletus fearing death in Jerusalem:
“After we had been there a number of days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. Coming over to us, he took Paul’s belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, “The Holy Spirit says, ‘In this way the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles.’” When we heard this, we and the people there pleaded with Paul not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, “Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” When he would not be dissuaded, we gave up and said, “The Lord’s will be done.”
The story has clear echoes of Jesus being handed over by Jews to Gentiles for execution in Jerusalem, after ignoring the pleadings of his disciples not to go there, with people weeping over his apparent fate. So this is just like the gospel story of Jesus. Paul says he is ready “to die in Jerusalem”, believing that it might be God's will for him to be executed there. Like his hero, Jesus.
Clearly, Luke sees and draws out the parallel for all it's worth. But what would clinch it would be if he could take the reader right to the point of Paul being executed for his faithfulness to Christ. This would be the perfect opportunity for Luke to write a hagiographical death for Paul. Just in the fashion that Luke tells of the earlier execution of the disciple Stephen in terms of Stephen's face shining like an angel, and his seeing into heaven, seeing Jesus there, speaking to Jesus, even as he dies. So it's obvious what Luke could do with the execution of Paul - he would use whatever material he had to tell the story in a similar way. Paul would be united with Jesus in death, and it would be a fitting climax to the story of Paul. Why doesn't Luke have that? The simplest explanation would be that he didn't have a story of Paul dying at all.
Needless to add, if Luke knew that his hero Paul was killed by the Romans, his evident warm attitude towards the Romans is baffling.
One objection to that, which might be raised, is that Luke foreshadows Paul's death in his story-telling. But there is good reason to reject that objection, which is what my next point covers.
2nd answer: is Acts
aware of the tradition of Paul’s execution in Rome?
It seems not. Actually,
the narrative is full of foreboding about what will happen in Jerusalem, and
optimism about Paul's future in Rome. This points to Acts being written at a
date before Paul’s death. This adds weight to the book being written about 62AD.
Let’s look at the scriptures typically cited on this question, in Acts 20-21:
Acts
20:22-23 has foreboding about going to Jerusalem (with no mention
of Rome). Paul in Miletus says, ‘I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen
to me there.’ The narrative goes on
to show us that Paul leaves Jerusalem alive, having been handed over by the
Jews to the Romans.
Acts 20:38 says, “What grieved them most was his
statement that they would never see his face again.” This is another reference
to Paul’s foreboding about going to Jerusalem, where he survives. Paul
is explicitly not prophesying his
death, as he firmly states: “I only know that in
every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are
facing me.” So there is foreboding, but not of death but of imprisonment
in Jerusalem.
More interesting is Acts 21:10-14, quoted here
at greater length, where Paul is leaving Miletus, and does fear death in Jerusalem:
“After we had been there a number of days, a prophet named Agabus
came down from Judea. Coming over to us, he took Paul’s
belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, “The Holy Spirit says, ‘In
this way the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and
will hand him over to the Gentiles.’” When we
heard this, we and the people there pleaded with Paul not to go up to
Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, “Why are you weeping and
breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to
die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” When he would not be dissuaded, we gave up and said, “The Lord’s
will be done.”
This is still only a prophecy
about what will happen to Paul in Jerusalem. Paul’s fears about it
prove unfounded: he survives in Jerusalem. (The story is not about Rome –
rather it has echoes of Jesus being handed over by Jews to gentiles for
execution in Jerusalem, ignoring the pleadings of his disciples not to go there.)
Paul says he is ready “to die in Jerusalem”, but Luke
tells us that Paul survives in Jerusalem. So this is explicitly not a prophecy of
Paul’s death, it is actually Paul’s misgivings expressed in the moment about
the dangers of Jerusalem, just as was suffered by his role-model Jesus. The
emphasis on Jerusalem without reference to Rome indicates that at the time of
writing, the author did not realise that an accurate prophecy would have been
of execution in Rome. In fact, once Paul is in Rome, the tone becomes more
positive. In Acts 25:11, he declares, “If, however, I am
guilty of doing anything deserving death, I do not refuse to die. But
if the charges brought against me by these Jews are not true, no one has the
right to hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar!”” Well,
unless Luke has got a big line in irony at Paul’s expense, Luke has a positive take
on Paul pinning his hopes on success in Rome, and Luke does not know that it
will end in death. The bullish tone continues in 27:24 where, according to
Paul, an angel says: “Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand
trial before Caesar”. This is not a prophecy of death!
In Acts 28:27-29, it is clear that Paul went to Rome
because he expects fairer treatment from Romans than from his fellow Jews: “I was arrested in Jerusalem and handed over to the Romans. They examined me and wanted to release me, because I was not
guilty of any crime deserving death. The
Jews objected, so I was compelled to make an appeal to Caesar.” Elsewhere,
from place to place, Paul has been running the gauntlet. But now in Rome, there
is optimism, and Paul is expecting the Romans to keep up their good treatment of
him. There is no shadow of doom and death hanging
over these words: the message is that he has escaped Jerusalem and the Romans
are trusted to continue to spare Paul from the Jews. And more or less there, Acts
ends.
It's perhaps worth adding that the ending of Acts was not written to curry favour with Romans decades later (as some suggest). Pointless to end with optimism with Paul in Rome, as if that would impress later Roman officials, if the officials already knew that that they (or their predecessors in office) had executed Paul. It would be an own goal to walk the story right up to the trial in Nero's court, as if to make Christians look good fellows, if they knew Paul had subsequently been found in the wrong in Rome's eyes and worthy of death. If the intention was to show Romans that Christians were living in good standing with Rome, this was not a sensible path to lead the Roman reader up.
- John A T Robinson wrote a few decades back (but has this ever been expressed better?) that the tradition of Paul’s execution in Rome is apparently unknown to Luke: “If the outcome of that trial (or a subsequent one) was already known, it is surely incredible, as Harnack says, that no foreshadowing or prophecy of it after the event is allowed to appear in the narrative… Yet the only hint he gives of [Paul’s] ultimate fate is that 'imprisonment and hardships' await him and that his friends at Miletus would 'never see his face again' (20.24f, 38)” (Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 1976, chapter 4).
In summary, as stated,
the narrative is full of foreboding about what will happen in Jerusalem, and
optimism about Paul's future in Rome. Luke does not signal Paul’s impending
execution, nor in fact what happens (what is said, what is decided) in the trial in Caesar’s court at all. But
Luke’s seeming absence of knowledge of the outcome of the trial, and thus the
anti-climax at the end of the book – and Luke’s seeming unawareness of the bad
news of Paul getting executed by the Romans in Rome - is telling. These factors
point to a date no later than about 62AD.
There are counter-arguments claiming that Acts does foreshadow Paul’s execution in
Rome. I will address these further down below.
So far: the way that Luke leaves unsaid the name of the Emperor to whom Paul is headed is explained by Luke writing whilst Nero was the living emperor; the fact that the story stops dead before it gets to the trial is explained by Luke writing whilst awaiting the trial; the fact that Luke's is optimistic about Paul's future is explained by Luke writing before Paul's execution. Next, we see Luke is writing in a world in which Sadducees and Pharisees were still debating each other, which is explained by Luke writing before the 70AD destruction of Jerusalem.
EIGHT MORE ARGUMENTS THAT NARROW DOWN THE DATING, TOWARDS AN
EARLY DATING OF ACTS
The following arguments are not all as strong as those above,
but added to the weight of the above three arguments, they add some further
support, pointing to Acts being written before 64AD, 66AD, 68AD and 70AD. So about
62AD actually fits nicely.
- 1) The Sadducees.
- 'The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three.' (Acts 23:8)
- If Luke-Acts were written some time after 70AD (scholars suggest around the 90s, remember), then something doesn't make sense about the Sadducees. It's that Luke reports the views of the sect of the Sadducees in the present tense: 'the Sadducees say/are saying'. It's as if the Sadducees are still substantially around, and as if their views are a live issue while Luke is writing. That fits before 70AD, but not very well after 70AD. The views in question are on the resurrection. Thus Acts 23:8: 'The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three.' (Also, Luke 20:27: 'Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him'.) What's the problem? Well, the Sadducees more or less disappear from the map of history after 70AD. They were an elite Jewish party, closely connected with control of the temple, and politically influential. That all ended when the Romans wreaked devastation on Jerusalem - no more temple, no more influence, no more party of the Sadducees. In fact not so much as a single historical text written by the Sadducees has survived, such is their obliteration. Whereas the Pharisees may have survived in a sense by being part of the root of the Jewish rabbinic movement, the party of the Sadducees was finished. You would expect a post-70AD Luke, writing to Theophilus about them, to switch to the past tense, resulting in something like 'the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection' rather than the sense of 'they do not believe in it'. The question of their non-belief in the resurrection was no longer even a live issue because of their demise. Secondly, there is absolutely no sense of foreboding hanging over the Sadducees in the narrative, as if Luke knew they were doomed. It seems that Luke is writing at a time when Sadducees were still debating these views. The inference to be drawn is that Luke was writing before 70AD wiped out their party. After that, the Talmud written a couple of centuries later has reference to them, but that cannot be treated as an accurate reflection of the first century. All that is left of them is notes in Josephus, and the present tense presentation of their views in the New Testament. This point is not as strong as those above, as Josephus uses past and present tenses when talking about the views of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and we know he was writing after 70AD. See: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-18.html But the force of Luke's presentation is very much more that this was still a live debate at the time of writing.
2) The murder of James, the leader of the
Jerusalem church and the brother of Jesus, in 62AD. You would never know
from Acts that in 62AD there would be the murder of James by Jewish authorities
in Jerusalem acting outside the powers granted to them by Rome. When James is
spoken of in Acts, he is dominant, never less than happily in full charge of the
Jerusalem church. There is not so much as even a hint of foreboding, no
prophecy of his ignomious removal. If Luke had heard of James’ murder, there is
not a hint of it in the way he portrays James in Acts. According to John A T
Robinson, “No incident could have served Luke's apologetic purpose better, that
it was the Jews not the Romans who were the real enemies of the gospel. Yet
there is not a hint of James ever falling foul of the Jewish authorities,
unlike his namesake, James the brother of John (Acts 12. if.)” (Robinson,
Redating the New Testament, 1976, chapter 4). Although it would be a strain on
the narrative to drag it back from Rome to Jerusalem, if the murder of James
would have helped to show that the Christians were the innocent party, this
would have strengthened the case for Paul’s innocence too – a big theme of
Acts. I wouldn't insist that Luke should have included it in this book. What is striking at least is that there is no sense of doom hanging over James, the way Luke speaks of him. He is a major figure in Acts, and it would be strange if Luke knew of his murder for that not to show through in some way, some foreshadowing, an oblique reference to his fate, or a tone that knows that all will not be well. There is none of it. Acts was thus likely written by
62AD.
3) Expecting a fair hearing in Rome. Acts
assumes Paul will get a reasonably fair
hearing in Caesar’s court, something no Christian in Rome would suppose
after the Neronian persecution of Rome’s Christians in 64AD (told of by Roman
historian Tacitus). (And that's an angle that surely wouldn't have any mileage with Christian readers after 64AD.) Acts thus likely pre-dates
the 64AD persecution (Mauck, 42). (It might be added that here is Luke telling of Paul in Rome, the centre of world power, just a couple of years before fire ravaged it, and Luke seems blissfully unaware that this was coming on the city where Paul was. Never mind the Neronian persecution this is even bigger! The Great Fire Of Rome for goodness sake! You would never know from Luke that he had the slightest idea that such a thing could be a short time away.)
4) No comparison with the Jewish revolt in
66AD. Acts could have strengthened its key theme of Paul’s peaceful
innocence at the hands of Jewish mobs, if, for example, Luke contrasted Paul’s
peacefulness with the violent Jewish revolt of 66-70AD. They are just a few
years apart. They are in the same decade. But no such comparison is made. Acts
thus likely pre-dates the 66-70AD
revolt (Mauck, 42, 153 n. 10).
5) The Jerusalem temple and Jesus. Stephen’s speech
(see Acts 6) labours a theological point about Jesus himself, rather than the
temple, being the new centre of Jewish religion (Stephen’s speech is actually the
longest of 29 speeches in Acts), but the extensive and complicated labour of
the speech would be a bit over-the-top for a reader post-70AD for whom the
competition was over, as the temple was already a ruin cast down into the ashes
(Mauck, 42, 76, 80).* Why not just give a little prophetic statement that the fall of the
temple will make Jesus the only remaining true focus? Because Luke gives so
much time to Stephen trying to make the point, Acts likely pre-dates the 70AD destruction of the temple. As Mauck also says,
“If Jerusalem had already been destroyed by the time Acts is written, the
narrative of Acts affords dozens of reasons and opportunities to allude to it”
(209). “See Acts 5:42, 7:48-50, 24:6” (212 n.16a).
*Mauck sees the speech as supplied to help gather background facts to show Roman officials that Paul’s religion was part of legitimate Jewish religion, for Paul’s defence.
- 6) Sitz im Leben (this means the context at the time Luke was writing): still on the fall of the Jerusalem temple, a digression to Luke's Gospel pays off. Jesus in the gospels predicts its fall with dire warnings. In relating this, Luke displays some animus towards the temple. Allow me to explain how this sits perfectly with a pre-70AD occasion for Luke expressing it. Luke had reason to have such animus. The prospect of the fall of the temple could have appealed to him, something to wait for. There is a scholarly consensus that Luke was writing with sympathy for Paul. According to Luke, his friend has been almost brutally murdered in the temple. So it’s little wonder that Luke-Acts spends more time displaying negativity about the temple, and imagining its future more darkly than other gospels do. Rejections of Jesus and Paul are major focal points in Luke-Acts. (Jesus’ dire warnings would have resonated strongly with Paul’s sympathisers, seeing their hero rejected like Jesus in Jerusalem.) If we form a view of the best historical-critical reading, was it the case that the occasion for Luke describing dire warnings about the temple in Luke-Acts was when the author was deeply affected by Paul being nearly murdered in the temple? His message:, there will be bad consequences for the temple. In this, we have a naturalistic explanation for the writing of the verses. That is, “Reject our man, who was sent by God, and see what will happen to you!” Of course, the impact of that sentiment on dating Luke-Acts is that it tends it towards being a Sitz im Leben close to the time of Paul’s anguish and pre-70AD. There is no clearer Sitz im Leben.
What is given too little attention by scholars is how the New Testament authors felt about the temple, not just what they thought about it. Sentiment, not just ideas, plays a huge part in the development of a movement. Sentiment about Israel's temple is a case in point. Jesus came to transform the nation, but once it had clearly rejected his message, how did sentiment in his movement change? One of the rising currents in sentiment was a bold demonstrative anger towards the temple elite. Once Jesus had done his very physical demonstration in the temple, turning over the tables of the money-changes, this surely released something in the disciples. All the gospels feature such a scene. It gave them licence to stop being respectful of the temple's elite, and to openly court conflict with it. We see that in Luke's Acts, where Peter and John wilfully ignore official instructions to stop preaching about Jesus within the temple. They treated it as if they owned it. We see similar courting of conflict when Stephen is killed for speaking out against the temple. Something had given them licence to speak and act disruptively against the temple's Jewish leaders, and the Gospels trace that attitude back to Jesus. Every word uttered against the temple is a manifestation of that licence, such that they could now give vent to negative attitudes towards it that had previously been kept in check by Jewish social order. (By way of a comparison, in Britain in 2018, one might consider how there has been more strident anti-EU sentiment after the Brexit vote than before it, as if the vote gave licence to attitudes which many people previously did not feel free to express.) We may see Luke's animus towards the temple similarly released by the near-death of his friend Paul in the temple, and he gives vent to that by foregrounding Jesus issuing dire warnings about the temple in his Gospel.
7) The temple and prophecy. Where the
author of Acts can laud the final fulfilment of prophecy to help his arguments, he
does. So why doesn’t Acts do so regarding the temple (as he easily could do if writing after 70AD)? For example, in Acts 11:28,
Agabus’s prediction of famine is supplemented with the narrator’s explicit
backward-looking comment that this prediction was fulfilled in the reign of
Claudius ("One of them named Agabus stood up and began to indicate by the Spirit that there would certainly be a great famine all over the world. And this took place in the reign of Claudius."); but there is no backward-looking comment from Luke about the fall of the temple
fulfilling early Christian predictions of the temple’s doom. The simplest
reason for Luke not opportunistically seizing upon this is that it hadn’t
happened yet when Luke was writing. So it is likely the writing pre-dates 70AD.
Digression: As impressive as Agabus' prediction of famine might be, imagine how impressive it would have been if Luke could have recalled someone predicting the Great Fire of Rome of 64AD, and then Luke could have said "And this took place in the reign of Nero." Luke doesn't show signs of knowing of any disaster befalling the Roman Empire other than a famine. The impression one has is that Acts was written before 64AD.
8) The temple’s fall and the last days.
The early Christians were anticipating some kind of last days ending to the era they lived in, and the fall of
Jerusalem’s temple to the gentiles was an ending as big as they come in their
era (for Jews/Christians that is - obviously if you were in Rome, then the Great Fire would have seemed a major event!). If you followed Jewish religion and had thoughts about the 'last days', you couldn't ignore the fall of the temple. It was an event that demanded eschatological interpretation,
acknowledgement, and explanation by Jewish and Christian writers of post-70AD if
they touched on the subject of the temple. Acts touches on the Jerusalem temple
many times, but there is no such notice of this particular last days-type event
in Acts. The most ‘normal’ explanation for this is that Acts was written before 70AD.
In summary of these points, there is just nothing in the
narrative - no literary device lending any atmosphere of foreboding - that would suggest that the author of Acts has any knowledge of these
epoch-defining events: the 62AD murder of James; the 64AD Great Fire of Rome and the persecution in Rome;
the 66AD revolt; the executions of Peter and Paul; the 70AD fall of the temple which ended the ruling elites such as the party of the Sadducees; or even just the premature death of Nero in
68AD which may have seemed good news to some Christians. (It was by suicide, by the way.) There was plenty to think about if you were a Christian post-70AD believing you were living in 'the Last Days', so it's almost inconceivable that Luke would have no Last Days meaning to offer about any of it - unless of course none of these things had happened yet, because Luke was writing in 62AD.
Of course, what I'm
not saying is that Luke
should have written up all these stories of the deaths of James, Peter, Paul, Nero, and all these other things. That is asking Luke to write a different book, and there's no reason why he should. So there is no advantage to be claimed there. But what I do say is that if Luke was writing after 70AD and aware of all of these things, it's weird that it does not cast some kind of shadow over the way he writes about them all. There's not so much as an ominous tone, or oblique reference to these things. By way of contrast, you know through much of Luke's Gospel that Jesus has already died even before Luke has told the story of his death. (Likewise, the end of John's Gospel gives a very strong hint that it was written after the death of Peter.)
In fact, for the work of an author whose themes incorporate Peter, Paul, Jesus' brother James, Jerusalem, Rome, Caesar, the tone of Acts just doesn't fit with someone who knew that within a decade tragedy and disaster, premature death and destruction, befell them all. It's just not there in Luke's tone. The tone of Acts is blithely unaware of all of these tragedies. Talking about James with no hint in his tone, or any passing remarks, of any knowledge that James was murdered not too long after the events he describes, is typical of the whole problem. Apart from some animus to the temple and some Jewish antagonists, Luke's tone is blissfully urbane. It is just not the tone of someone who knew what unpleasant and premature ends befell his protagonists. It is also an urbane tone towards Rome that simply has no place after the breakout of violence against God's people in the later first and second centuries, as testified to by Pliny, Tacitus, and indeed the book of Revelation.
Revelation’s tone
about
the Christian dead is far from urbane. It’s tone towards
Rome
(the city on seven hills) is likewise far from urbane. From 64AD onwards, first century Christians couldn't all feel that Rome was necessarily benevolent. Revelation has the anguished desperation for justice of someone who is really aware that people have been meeting premature and unpleasant ends.
And if Luke thought these were the 'last days', such a disastrous sequence of things would demand some theological interpretation - I don't mean telling all the stories - but some interpretation insofar as these characters are part of his story.
J.A.T. Robinson
again, referring to the broader range of events of the 60s of the first century detailed above: “One could never guess from Acts what was to break within a few years”
(Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 1976, chapter 4).
Given that Luke takes meaning from fulfilment of a prophecy of a famine, the fact that he takes meaning from none of the above is telling. He simply did not know about it all because it hadn't happened yet.
TWO MORE ARGUMENTS AGAINST LATE DATING
One can go further still:
1) A very late date is most unlikely because the
accuracy of minor details such as of people and places in the Book of Acts adds
up to overwhelming evidence of authorship closer to the time and place of the
setting of Acts. Examples can be seen
here.
2) A very late date is unlikely because of
the
“we” and “us” passages in Acts. These are where the author is present at events
(as in “we did this”, “we went there” - I make some observations about these passages here: https://gettingtothetruthofthings.blogspot.com/2018/04/what-does-luke-reveal-about-himself-in.html ). These have no more ‘normal’ non-theological
explanation than that the author was actually present in those places at those
moments. Luke Timothy
Johnson (even though he goes for a later dating) persuasively argues the narrator of the
“we” passages really was a companion of Paul. Johnson makes these points about the
authenticity of the “we”, of the author being a companion of Paul:
sometimes the author is without Paul. In some
places, “we” excludes Paul, distinguishing Luke’s group from Paul: so it is not
as if the narrator is saying “we” just to make an emphatic noise about his
relationship to Paul. And it also means that the “we” passages cannot be
dismissed as a literary device to give Paul’s perspective.
the “we” is not ever-present in the book, so it
has the ring of truth. For example, the “we” drops off at Philippi and
reappears later, in a way that is just matter-of-fact and sporadic – not the
mark of someone bigging up his attachment to Paul (Luke Timothy Johnson, cited
in Early Christian Writings.)
SO WHY IS THIS CONCLUSION NOT MORE WIDELY ACCEPTED?
In light of so many reasons, some of which are very strong,
the most natural unforced reading of Acts lends one to think that it was
written round about the time the book ends, around 62AD. If this were anything other than part of the Bible, one feels that such a persuasive conclusion would be uncontested. So why are the
majority of New Testament scholars against it?
First of all, a later dating is desirable to those who would
argue:
that Acts (and with it Luke’s gospel) is of a
later date that gives grounds for being more sceptical of the contents of both
Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts; and
that very late dating removes the possibility of
the author being a companion of Paul, adding to the grounds to be more
sceptical of its contents;
but especially, scholars generally argue that Luke's Gospel post-dates 70AD and therefore Acts has to post-date 70AD. (That is to say, the strongest reason for a late date for Acts is a late date for Luke's Gospel. And, to the contrary, the strongest reason for an early date for Luke's Gospel is an early date for Acts.)
So there is vested interest on
both sides of the debate, depending on whether you want clear grounds to be more
sceptical or less so.
So then, what are the actual arguments in support of later
dating?
1) Well, was the narrator of Acts really Paul’s companion?
How then do the narrator and Paul not tell of the same events or themes in
exactly the same way? For example, as Luke Timothy Johnson asks:
compare the lengths of time in Acts 9:26-28 and
Galatians 1:16-19. How long really?
compare Acts 16:13 (Timothy circumcised) with
Galatians 2:13 (Titus not circumcised on a different occasion). Why the
different treatment of the men?
what about Paul’s attitude in Acts 13:31
compared to Galatians 2:6? How respectful to the Jerusalem apostles was Paul really?
compare Acts 1:21 (criteria would exclude Paul
from being an apostle?) and Galatians 2:2 (Paul later considers himself an
apostle). How are they reconciled?
But the argument for discrepancies is really exaggerated.
There is not that much difference really, not enough to suggest the book of
Acts was written much later. For instance, Paul is actually called an 'apostle' in Acts (14:4). Also look at the different purpose-driven emphases of Paul and
Luke, which could lead contemporaries to tell the stories in
different ways.
2) The argument goes that the fact that Paul’s fate at the
end is left hanging is neither here nor there, because Luke’s theme is not that
but something else. At this point, different themes are suggested, such as: the
gospel has gone to the gentiles; God has proved faithful. But this is a weak
argument as these themes would naturally have a place in the narrative
regardless: before and during and after 62AD! This hardly confronts the fact
that the book ends with a huge anti-climax, with no report of what was said and
decided at the trial in Rome.
3) The ending of Acts is structured as an inclusio with Acts 1:8, proving that
Acts 28 is exactly where Luke wants the story to end. This is a rather weak
argument. Luke can design an inclusio
to fit wherever the story ends. It’s the sort of thing a writer designs
whatever material is to hand. If Luke was writing in 62AD, or any other time, there
is no reason why he would not write an inclusio
to make his point that Paul is part of legitimate Jewish religion.
4) FF Bruce suggests a late date on the basis that the
relationships between Peter, Paul and James are warmer than portrayed in
Galatians. Bruce thinks time must have passed, allowing Luke to gloss over
tensions of the past. But Luke could gloss over them in the present anyway, so
that is not a strong argument. Especially if, as Mauck argues persuasively,
Luke’s very purpose is to prepare a legal case, to show that Paul is part of a
movement within Jewish religion, not
outside it, so it is in his interests not to emphasise fundamental conflicts among
senior Christians, real or otherwise. In any case, against Bruce, the fact is that over the decades,
tensions between Gentiles and Judaizers did not soften but got worse (consider
the polemics of the Letter of Barnabas!). So Luke’s gentle tone is hardly a
sign of late writing.
5) In Acts 25:31, reference is made to a personage
(Bernice), without any introduction, who was famous to outsiders only after her
affair with Titus in 69AD, and so only after about 70AD would Luke’s narrative
think her worth mentioning without any introduction. (This is Eckard
Plumacher’s argument, as taken from the Early Christian Writings website.) This
is a better argument but it falls away if the book was written for insiders, to
a Roman official, as Mauck convincingly argues. To the inner circles in Rome,
it matters not a jot whether or not Bernice is famous to outsiders: and Luke is not
referring to her to make any point.
6) Plumacher also argues for a later date on the basis that
Luke would have needed time to research, reflect and write. Riddle had similar
thoughts: “works which possess literary character come of a period when the
movement which they advance has achieved self-consciousness; when it has a perspective
by which to understand its past and to regard its future; when it is aware of
its own intellectual values... All these factors are present in Luke-Acts”
(Donald W. Riddle, “The Occasion of Luke-Acts” in The Journal of Religion, Vol.
10, No. 4 (Oct., 1930), 545-562). But this verges on the subjective. How long
does a writer need? Such scholars say that Luke’s gospel needs to have been
written about 40 years or more after Christ to enable time for reflection. But
how is four decades enough time and three decades not enough time to digest and
process what Christians were doing and saying in the 30s of the first century?
I don’t see why 30 years apparently is not enough, but 40 years apparently is.
It is an argument so subjective as to be easily open to challenge. Mauck on the
other hand, argues that Luke researched, reflected and wrote during the two
years of Acts 28:30 while Paul was under house arrest. That is as good
an argument as any to the contrary. It is still about 30 years after the key
events of the 30s of the first century, and the more recent events such as
Paul’s string of legal appearances are much more prosaic, with less sign of
majestic sweep. (The sense one gets is that Luke has brought the narrative up to date, to about 62AD.) So this argument for a later date is somewhat stretched.
7) An old argument for a later date is that Luke cribbed off
Josephus’ 93AD work Antiquities of the
Jews. But this argument finds little support nowadays. If Luke did, then
why does he not get it ‘right’ when Luke tells of the same events as Josephus:
his version has discrepancies compared to Josephus. That is just one of the
generally accepted counter-arguments on this point.
8) Plumacher also thinks he has a smoking gun, the whiff of
delayed Parousia anxiety. He cites Luke 17:20-21 (“the kingdom of God is within
you”) as evidence of disappointment that the kingdom has not come and put the
world fully to rights yet. But surely such anxiety could have occurred before
or after 70AD anyway!
9) Some say that Luke’s gospel must date after 70AD – and
therefore Acts too – because of these words in the gospel, Luke 23:26-29:
“As the soldiers led him away,
they seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country, and put
the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus. A
large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for
him. Jesus turned and said to them, “Daughters
of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For
the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the
wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’”
This prophesies dark days. Some suppose it is about the fall of Jerusalem, but this is an assumption. In any case, Jesus has already prophesied that fall earlier in
Luke’s gospel, so it adds little. There are more weaknesses to this argument for late dating, which I assess in detail in another
post.
And it has long been known that Luke’s
prophecies of Jerusalem's destruction are products of Old Testament prophetic language,
showing no actual knowledge of how things unfolded in 70AD. Far from it! (See
C.H. Dodd, “The Fall of Jerusalem and the 'Abomination of Desolation'” in The
Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Parts 1 and 2 (1947), 47-54. This article
has never been bettered on the question of Luke’s lack of acknowledgement of
70AD events, to my knowledge.)
10) Whereas above I argue that Acts has foreboding about
Paul going to Jerusalem and optimism about Paul going to Rome, it is often
argued that there is foreshadowing of Paul’s execution, and that Luke must therefore
have been writing after Paul’s death. Both sides of the argument rely on the
same scriptures, in Acts 20-21:
Acts
20:22-23: Paul in Miletus says, ‘I am going to
Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there.’ But this is only about Jerusalem.
Acts 20:29: Paul says, “I know that after I
leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock.” But
that says nothing about Paul’s fate: Paul is still only on his way to
Jerusalem, where he survives.
Acts 20:38: “What grieved them most was his
statement that they would never see his face again.” But this is still only a
reference to Paul’s foreboding about going to Jerusalem, where he survives. And
Paul is explicitly not prophesying death, as he firmly states: “I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that
prison and hardships are facing me.” Not death, then.
Acts 21:10-14: “The Holy Spirit
says, ‘In this way the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and
will hand him over to the Gentiles.’” When we
heard this, we and the people there pleaded with Paul not to go up to
Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, “Why are you weeping and
breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to
die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.”” This is still
only a prophecy about what will happen to Paul in Jerusalem. Paul says
he is ready “to die in Jerusalem”, but Luke tells us
that Paul survives in Jerusalem. So this is explicitly not a prophecy of
Paul’s death.
Absolutely none of this can be taken to indicate
that, surviving Jerusalem, Paul will be killed in Rome. In fact the emphasis on
Jerusalem without reference to Rome indicates that at the time of writing, the
author did not realise that an accurate prophecy would have been of death in
Rome. The author did not yet know that Paul would die in Rome: “if the charges brought against me by these Jews are not true, no one
has the right to hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar!”; “Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand trial before Caesar”;
“I was arrested in Jerusalem and handed over to the
Romans. They examined me and wanted
to release me, because I was not guilty of any crime deserving death. The
Jews objected, so I was compelled to make an appeal to Caesar.” Elsewhere,
from place to place, Paul has been running the gauntlet. But now in Rome, there
is optimism about Paul's future. There is no shadow of doom hanging over these words: the message
is that he has escaped Jerusalem and the Romans are trusted to continue to
spare Paul from the Jews. And more or less there, Acts ends. Luke’s seeming
unawareness of the bad news that Paul was executed by the Romans in Rome is
telling. So, far from a successful argument for a later dating, the notes of
foreboding centred on Jerusalem (not on Rome) actually undermine later dating – they
point to a date no later than about 62AD.
SUMMARY
I have given many arguments on each side. Arguments for a
late dating are generally wishy-washy, without great impact at all. In comparison, some of the arguments for a
date around 62AD are precise and collectively overwhelming. We can be satisfied that that is where the
evidence points. I don’t see anything on
the late-dating side that is as strong as the first three arguments for an early dating:
that Caesar is not named as Nero because it was written when Nero was still emperor;
and secondly that Acts ends with a huge anti-climax, a big build-up to a great
Imperial trial but then not delivering any of its details – its speeches and its decision
- to the reader; and thirdly, that the narrative is full of foreboding about
what will happen in Jerusalem, and optimism about Paul's future in Rome.
In short, Luke doesn't need to explain which Caesar it is, doesn't have anything to say about the outcome of the trial, and is optimistic about Paul in Rome. This internal dating information puts the writing of Acts no later than 68AD,
and in fact about 62AD.
The internal evidence for dating Acts to 62AD has some dating
precision, stronger – it may be noted - than internal evidence in the gospels
themselves for when they were written. So dating Acts becomes a cornerstone of
dating both itself and Luke’s gospel. Therefore it is unsurprising that it is
contested ground. The minority view towards 62AD deserves a proper hearing again.
Summary in bullet points
It
is impressive that one single and simple explanation – simply that Luke wrote
Acts in 62AD – accounts for all of the following highly varied phenomena:
that Luke, unusually for him, leaves never-mentioned the
name of the Emperor to whom Paul is headed
that the story, with an unexpected anti-climax, stops dead
before it gets to Paul’s trial
that Luke is optimistic about Paul's future
that Luke is writing in a world in which Sadducees
and Pharisees were still debating each other
And the
absence of any atmosphere of foreboding about:
And the missed
opportunity to apply 'Last Days' thinking to so many of these things.
Not to
mention of course:
no
hint of the death of Nero in 68AD which may have seemed good news to some
Christians
the
abundance of highly accurate first century data unique to Luke
the
apparent authenticity of the ‘we’ and ‘us’ passages
The single simple solution of Luke writing in 62AD
accounts elegantly for all of the above. But if we were to try to force the date
of the writing post-70AD, then we need to justify lots of individual solutions –
some of them complicated – for so many varied things. How would that be
preferable? Occam’s razor surely favours the plausible explanation that accounts for all the
data with the greater simplicity.