Scholars have usually dated Luke-Acts to the 90s A.D., but a number of scholars have convincingly argued, more recently, for a date well into the second century A.D.6
The unabashed hero of the book of Acts is Paul, so much so that the work might be more properly named “The Acts of Paul,” with a few preliminary remarks about the rest of the apostles. Peter and the others show up in the early chapters, but seldom again. The author’s main intention is to glorify Paul as the apostle who brings the Christian message to Rome. Paul’s enemies in Acts are the Jews, not the Romans or other non-Jews that he encounters. Acts is a remarkably pro-Roman book, and the author’s implied context reflects a period many years after the destruction of the city of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70, with the crushing of Jewish national and messianic hopes and the scattering of the original Jerusalem church (Luke 19:41–44; 21:23–24).
This is not to say the book of Acts lacks historical value. For one thing it is all we have. It covers the critical period from the death of Jesus to Paul’s journey to Rome (A.D. 30–60). As such, despite the author’s strongly pro-Paul bias, it can serve as a source for a critical reconstruction of those missing “lost decades” of early Christianity. In fact it reveals much more than the author perhaps intended, once we factor in what we know from Paul’s letters as well as some of our newly discovered other sources. The author apparently has access to some materials that go back to the days in the Jerusalem church, when James the brother of Jesus led the movement, even as he tries to mute influence of James. The cracks of his presentation show through since we have the other side of the story from Paul, and even a bit from James.
Unfortunately, Acts is seldom read critically. It is usually taken at face value and the portrait of Paul presented therein has become the dominant narrative. If people know anything about Paul, what they know is more than likely drawn from hearing about or reading the book of Acts.
Imagine the implications. Our primary source for the story of the origins of the Christian Church was written by an anonymous devotee of Paul decades removed from the events he purports to narrate. Some scholars have even called the book of Acts the great “cover-up” and as we will see, this language might be considered relatively mild.7 Is it possible that this anonymous author has become, unwittingly, one of the most influential writers of the past two thousand years? Has he shaped our view of Jesus and early Christianity in ways that don’t conform to the historical facts? As we will see, the author of Luke-Acts knew precisely what he was doing, and his deliberate obscuring of the original version of “Christianity before Paul” is one of our great cultural losses. So long as the portrait of Paul in Acts prevails, it obscures for us the Christianity of Jesus and his earliest followers.
Ironically, one need only go to Paul’s own letters to recover a more authentic and reliable account of his relationship with James, Peter, and the Jerusalem church—what came to be called “Jewish Christianity” by later generations. Paul’s seven earliest letters—1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon, read carefully, tell the entire story, no holds barred. Most scholars consider these seven to be authentic and relatively free from later interpolations.8 They occupy just fifty pages in a typical printed English New Testament totaling 275 pages, but implications of what they say are far-reaching. In this book I try to take Paul very much at his word. When he is allowed to speak for himself, without any predetermined assumptions about the essential unity of early Christianity, the results are clear and unambiguous, but also quite shocking and provocative.
It is also from these authentic letters of Paul that we can most reliably begin to reconstruct the bare biographical outlines of Paul’s life. Paul calls himself a Hebrew or Israelite, stating that he was born a Jew and circumcised on the eighth day, of the Jewish tribe of Benjamin (Philippians 3:5; 2 Corinthians 11:22). He was once a member of the sect of the Pharisees. He states that he advanced in Judaism beyond many of his contemporaries, being extremely zealous for the traditions of his Jewish faith (Philippians 3:5; Galatians 1:14). He zealously persecuted the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6; 1 Corinthians 15:9). Sometime around A.D. 37 Paul had a visionary experience he describes as “seeing” Jesus and received from him his gospel message as well as his call to be an apostle to the non-Jewish world (1 Corinthians 9:2; Galatians 1:11–2:2). Paul was unmarried, at least during his career as an apostle (1 Corinthians 7:8, 15; 9:5; Philippians 3:8).9 He worked as a manual laborer to support himself on his travels (1 Corinthians 4:12; 9:6, 12, 15; 1 Thessalonians 2:9). The book of Acts supplies many more biographical details, some of which might be historically reliable while others have been questioned by critical scholars. I address these issues in the appendix, “The Quest for the Historical Paul.” In terms of method I have chosen to begin with what Paul says about himself, so that we get Paul, first and foremost, in his own words.
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Based on Paul’s authentic letters I have isolated six major elements in Paul’s Christianity that shape the central contours of his thought—and thus my presentation in this book. Before considering each in detail it will be helpful to get an overview:
1. A New Spiritual Body. For Paul the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead was a primary and essential component of the Christian faith. He states emphatically: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). His entire understanding of salvation hinged on what he understood to be a singular cosmic event, namely Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Paul’s understanding of the resurrection of Jesus, however, is not what is commonly understood today. It had nothing to do with the resuscitation of a corpse. Paul must have assumed that Jesus was peacefully laid to rest in a tomb in Jerusalem according to the Jewish burial customs of the time. He even knows some tradition about that burial, though he offers no details (1 Corinthians 15:4).
Paul understood Jesus’ resurrection as the transformation—or to use his words—the metamorphosis, of a flesh-and-blood human being into what he calls a “life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). Such a change involved “putting off” the body like clothing, but not being left “naked,” as in Greek thought, but “putting on” a new spiritual body with the old one left behind (2 Corinthians 5:1–5). So transformed, Jesus was, according to Paul, the first “Adam” of a new genus of Spirit-beings in the universe called “Children of God,” of which many others were to follow.
What is often overlooked is that Paul is our earliest witness, chronologically speaking, to claim to have “seen” Jesus after his death. And his is the only first-person claim we have. All the rest are late and secondhand. His letters were written decades earlier than Mark, the first written gospel. This means that Paul’s view of Jesus’ resurrection has profound implications for how we read the later gospel accounts—from the empty tomb to the “sightings” of Jesus reported in Matthew, Luke, and John. Most people read the New Testament “backwards,” chronologically speaking, beginning with the gospels and then moving on to Paul, but Paul actually comes decades earlier and offers critical insight into what the earliest resurrection faith entailed. Once reexamined, the entire history of what happened “after the cross” is transformed and a new understanding emerges of what James, Peter, and the rest of the original apostles experienced and believed.