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In Acts 2, St. Peter gets up at Pentecost and declares that (a) Jesus’ Tomb is empty because He is risen, and (b) that the Apostles are all witnesses of the risen Christ.
Do we have any good reason to believe that this really happened? How do we know that St. Peter was telling the truth? How do we know that Acts 2 is historically accurate? (Did St. Luke just invent this Pentecost sermon?)
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi and welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Last week for Easter, it was Easter Thursday, I did a video call, did the resurrection really happen? I looked at what we might call the negative case. In other words, I looked at the major alternatives. If you say Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, what do you think happened? Did he not really die on the cross? Was he not really buried in the tomb? Did somebody steal his body? Did the apostles make the whole story up? Did they lie? Those are basically the theories that are out there. I did my best to try to respond to the major theories out there just to say how strong is the case for any of these alternative theories?
I think when you really dig in, none of them are very compelling. None of them are very strong, but those are just the negative case, right? That the case against the resurrection isn’t particularly good if you actually have to get into the history and say, “Well, if that didn’t happen, what did?” I want to start to lay out the positive case this week and then for a series of videos, I don’t know how many, and I want to do that piece by piece. Not trying to lay out every argument for the resurrection, but looking at particular arguments I find interesting, arguments that I think are easy to overlook because we often look at so much of the big picture, the 20,000-foot view that it’s worth it to just say, “Let’s look at one piece of evidence. Let’s look at one detail.” What do we make of that?
I want to start this by looking at St. Peter and his Pentecost sermon and what it reveals about the empty tomb because I think it’s actually really striking, but again, so often when we talk about it, it’s in the context of all these other pieces of evidence that kind of get lost in the mix. The argument for the resurrection from St. Peter in the empty tomb goes something like this. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then the tomb wasn’t empty. If the tomb wasn’t empty, then St. Peter couldn’t have said it was on Pentecost and if Peter didn’t say that the tomb was empty on Pentecost, then St. Luke couldn’t have said that he did when he wrote Acts.
That’s the argument in a nutshell. In Acts chapter two on the Feast of Pentecost, St. Peter gets up before a crowd of thousands of people, 50 days after Easter Sunday and declares that Jesus has risen from the dead and that he and all of the other apostles present are witnesses to the resurrection. Not that they saw Jesus leave the tomb, but that they saw the resurrected Christ. It’s a twofold claim. The tomb is empty and where eyewitnesses of the resurrected Christ, because you might say, “Well, maybe the tomb is empty for another reason, grave robbers or dogs or something like this,” but no, that doesn’t really work because they’re saying we not only saw the empty tomb, we also saw the guy who was supposed to be in the tomb. That’s the argument in a nutshell.
St. Peter says that. There’s a couple possibilities if you’re going to deny that. You could say, “Well, St. Peter’s making it up.” That’s a hard case to believe because he’s writing so close to the time, meaning this 50 days after Easter Sunday, 53 days, 52 days [inaudible 00:03:34] after Good Friday, it would be very easy to walk from where the upper room is, where the Pentecost sermon was delivered to the crowds from there to Calvary. It’s very much a walkable distance and you could walk over. You could go into the tomb. You could see the body of Jesus and say, “He’s right here. He wasn’t resurrected.” Game set match Christianity’s over by lunchtime. That’d be all it takes. It doesn’t seem like that’s going to be the weak point in the chain.
Another theory you could say, “Well, maybe the tomb is empty because the apostles stole the body.” Sure, there’s an empty tomb and sure the apostles all claim to be eyewitnesses, but they’re all lying about it. Well, that’s not a very strong theory either because again, you have to account for what is their motive for doing this and why are they willing to be tortured and killed for this? I’m not going to go too far down that road, but hopefully it’s self-explanatory that this is a baffling theory of a crime that without any clear motive, these seemingly pious Jews have not a get rich quick scheme, but a get ostracized, exiled, tortured and murdered slowly scheme.
It’s really the opposite of a good crime, but the dimension that we often lose today with kind of a more secular mindset is as pious believing Jews, they took the idea of the afterlife very seriously and yet you would be cut off forever from God. Their Messiah, the guy they’re following is really clear about the existence of hell. For them to go to their deaths for a blasphemous lie, which is what this would be, that is no way to prepare to meet your maker.
Again, it’s to hold that view strikes me and I think it strikes a lot of people as really implausible kind of theory of what happened on Pentecost and what happened for that matter on Easter. It just doesn’t really work. Nobody cracks. Nobody ever says, “Sorry guys, it was all a lie.” Again, Christianity would be over so quickly if they just said, “Yeah, this didn’t really happen,” or even if they showed signs of being charlatans.
In another video, I’ll kind of contrast the eyewitnesses that we have for Christianity compared to the eyewitnesses we have for Mormonism, for Islam, for the Branch Davidians, for any number of other groups where people have a lot more to gain by lying about it in those other religious groups and are behaving in a way that seems externally a lot more sketchy, where the apostles don’t seem to have anything to gain from lying and their behavior seems credible. Their behavior seems like they believe what they’re saying. That’s the second kind of way you could explain away the evidence and say maybe Peter’s lying on Pentecost. He doesn’t seem like he’s lying.
Then, the third way, and this is where we have to get into the weeds a little bit on scholarship, there’s just no way around it, is that you could say, well, maybe Peter’s not lying. Maybe Peter never said this at all. Maybe Luke just invented this whole story as an author. It only appears in one place, Acts of the Apostles. The problem with that theory is that the best evidence points to the Acts of the Apostles being written in the early 60s AD, which is to say this is not Peter having rented the backroom of a restaurant in Jerusalem, said to a group of 50 people who had come around for the occasion that Jesus had risen from the dead.
No. The Pentecost sermon is that Peter gets up before thousands of pilgrims and proclaims Christianity and we’re told where these pilgrims are coming from and we’re told 3,000 of them convert. This is a massive historical event and it’s only about 30 years, even a little under 30 years prior to the time Acts of the Apostles is written. It’s 2023 right now as I’m recording this video. Imagine something happening in like 1998, 1999. It’s not that far removed.
To completely invent a historical account like this, would be very implausible and it matters that these pilgrims are from all these different places because Luke is pointing to the origin of a lot of different local Christian communities and local churches that they can trace their origins to Pentecost. The readers of Acts of the Apostles would know whether the Pentecost sermon really happened or not because it’s the foundation of their church.
Hopefully, that makes sense that you’ve got a bunch of people in these little towns from all over Europe and North Africa who returned from Jerusalem that year bringing Christianity with them, and that was the seed that then flourished into that local church. Twenty-five years later, people are still going to remember that. You’re going to have people who were alive for that or people who remember when so-and-so came back from Jerusalem with this amazing story of a new Messiah. Again, it doesn’t seem like Luke could be lying about that.
Then, the fourth kind of theory, and this is where we have to go deeper into the scholarship is maybe Luke didn’t really write this or maybe he didn’t write it in the early 60s. It’s from much, much later. I’ll tell you, I hate debates about when is a particular book dated because the scholarly arguments are typically pretty weak in all directions, but I think in this case, there’s a partial exception. There’s actually some pretty decent evidence for this being from the early 60s or before a few important events and we’ll get into how we can kind of speculate that, but there’s really no way around it. Like I said, we’ve got to just talk about when was Acts written.
Just so you know, if you’re not familiar with kind of the scholarly debates, Richard Pervo, who is actually one of these people who argues that it’s written in the early 100s, not obviously by Luke in his book Dating Acts between the evangelists and the Apologist, he does a really good job of compiling the scholarship up to his time. Now, the book’s a little dated, but he looks at like a hundred and some odd years worth of scholars and just what have those scholars estimated.
For the most part, there are a couple exceptions in each direction as outliers, but for the most part, everybody says somewhere between about the year ’64 to about the year 130. As you’ve already heard, I think the beginning of that early 60s and maybe mid-60s is going to be the best evidence, ’64, ’65 probably. He obviously doesn’t go that direction for a lot of reasons.
Actually, before I get to why I would argue for an earlier date, one of the common things that you’re going to see for people arguing for a later date is Acts is very clearly the second part from the Gospel of Luke, who’s clearly the author of both, or at least we would say the author of the Gospel of Luke is also the author of the Acts of the Apostles and makes that fairly clear at the beginning of Acts. The Gospel of Luke alludes to the fact that the temple in Jerusalem is going to be destroyed.
These scholars say there’s no way Jesus could have known that ahead of time. There’s no way he could have predicted that, and therefore Luke must have written his gospel sometime after 70 and invented this prophecy and put it in Jesus’ mouth that Jesus never really said. Then, since Luke’s gospel is now sometime after 70, we have to say the Acts of the Apostles is even after that, maybe a couple years, maybe much longer. You can’t have it dated in the 60s. That’s the argument. Now, I want to point out just how weak that argument is. Now, there are other arguments. That’s one of the most common kind of recurring arguments you’ll hear for a late dating.
What are the problems with it? Number one, it presupposes Jesus isn’t God. He isn’t even a prophet. He isn’t someone who can foretell the future. That’s a bad scholarly assumption. I’m not saying you have to assume Jesus is who he says he is, but if your methodology presupposes the falsity of the thing you’re reading, you’re not likely to read it well, whatever you’re reading. If you distinct, “Hey, this thing claims to be a historical account,” I assume that the authors are a liar. Probably, you’re not going to do a good job of reading that. That’s first.
Second, even leaving aside Jesus’ divinity, Jesus’ prophetic abilities, Jesus’s ability to predict the future, the fact that the temple might be destroyed is not an insane kind of idea. Now, understand, in the Gospel of Luke, there’s nothing indicating that this has already happened. It’s simply that Jesus says this is going to happen. Now, remember, this is the second temple in Jerusalem. What happened to the first temple? The enemies of Israel crushed Israel and destroyed the temple.
Now, at the time, Jesus and everything around Jesus is taking place, we know there are a number of other Messianic movements. There are a number of other revolutionary movements and the idea that one of these movements might be big enough and aggressive enough to really take the Romans off that they might destroy the temple, it’s not an insane thing. If you know anything about Israel’s history prior to this point, and that’s of course, exactly what happens in the year 70, that the Romans finally have enough and they destroy the second temple.
If you know anything, not just about Israel’s history, but even about Rome’s history, look what they did to Carthage salting the ground so no one can even grow crops there, it’s not insane, like when Jesus is saying not a stone will be left upon another stone, there’s ample historical precedent from both Israel’s history and Rome’s history without even having to presuppose that Jesus is a prophet, is just reasonable prediction.
Third, we can look at real life examples in recent history. Tom Clancy, the novelist has a novel in which a pilot hijacks a plane and crashes it into the Pentagon using this critical historical method. You never said, “Well, clearly that was written after 2001 when that really happened,” but it wasn’t. It was written in the ’90s, and it sure it’s eerily reminiscent of what actually happened. No one’s claiming either that the book is from post 2001 or that Tom Clancy is the son of God, neither.
In other words, the claim for the late date that there’s no way Luke could have this prediction of the destruction of the temple unless it was written after 70, is just a weak argument. It’s one possibility, but there are several other possibilities that Jesus is a prophet, that Luke or Jesus knows Israel’s history or knows Rome’s history or just got lucky the way Tom Clancy, I wouldn’t say got lucky, but had this scenario that ended up being eerily close to life. That’s a sample for the late dating and again, the negative case here, why I don’t think the late dating arguments are very strong.
The other ones are often that, “This thing in Luke or this thing in Acts sounds kind of like this thing elsewhere like Josephus said or something,” and those are weak arguments. Two people saying similar things and therefore we’re going to guess that the Christian one was written later. Again, there’s two very obvious alternatives. One, the Christian thing was written earlier and the non-Christian thing was based on that. Josephus was influenced by Luke rather than the way around, or there’s a coincidence. Just two writers to expressing similar ideas at a time when these are au courant ideas.
In other words, these are not strong arguments for the late dating. Why do I believe that Luke is written early in the 60s? Well, there’s a few details. One, there’s this portion of Acts of the Apostles, which is called the travel log, where it goes from this third person description of the church mostly in Jerusalem, to switching from following really the journey of St. Peter to following the journey of St. Paul. People say, “Well, why is that? Is this because St. Peter doesn’t matter anymore? Now, it’s all about Paul.” It’s like, “No.” That’s because Luke switches from third person to first person plural. He goes from saying they did such and such too. We did such and such.
It’s very clear if you look closely at the text where Luke starts to actually accompany Paul. It’s not just that he says that he’s accompanying Paul and that he does it in this kind of subtle way. It’s also that the details he includes read like the actual details. We’re get into the methodology for why we can say that and it’ll give you a warning, it’s boring, but that’s actually one of the details that true stories are often more boring than fictional ones, and eyewitness accounts are often more boring than third party accounts.
Imagine if you’re telling the story of what happened to you, you’re likely to include a lot of details that matter to you that don’t matter to somebody else. If your friend is retelling the story, they’re likely to either exaggerate it or cut out the extraneous details. When we get to the travel logs, we’re going to see Luke doesn’t exaggerate and he doesn’t cut out what we would describe as extraneous details. That’s all evidence of his historicity. It’s all evidence of its authenticity and then, there are several things that Luke doesn’t mention. He’s going to include these really specific details and he’s not going to include some massive details.
Acts of the Apostles, unlike the Gospel of Luke, has no mention of or illusion to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem looks fine and dandy by the end of Acts, which is really striking because in a few years, the temple will be destroyed and the Jewish diaspora will have begun, meaning the Jews are just sent out of the area because the Roman government has just had enough. There’s also no mention, no hint of the great fire of Rome, which was a major event in the history of Rome and the history of really Christianity and there’s no mention bizarrely of the death of St. Paul.
That’s the roadmap of where we’re going to go, that these things all point to an early date. It’s very hard to explain why those things wouldn’t have been included in Acts, even if you’re writing in 80, even if this is Luke, right, these would be important enough details for him to mention. It’s bizarre. It’s baffling why he wouldn’t mention them unless they hadn’t happened yet. That’s where we’re going. Let’s go there.
First, I want to explore this idea called reality monitoring and apply that to the travel log portion of Acts. Reality monitoring, there’s a couple interesting articles in this. In the journal, Frontiers in Psychology, it’s called Predicting Accuracy in Eyewitness Testimonies with Memory Retrieval Effort and Confidence. That’s in 2019. The European journalist psychology applied to legal context has a meta-analytical review of forensic practice looking at how reality monitoring studies have worked. It’s a meta study. It’s a study of studies showing how accurate is this method. What we find is it’s pretty accurate.
What is reality monitoring? Reality monitoring is just something called source monitoring. Is it memories of real and imagined events differ that when people are describing something that actually happened external to themselves, they describe it very differently than when they describe something that they’ve invented or imagined or dreamt. Real memories include more contextual information. They include more sensory information. What did it smell like? What did it taste like? What did it touch? It includes more semantic information.
On the other hand, imagine memories include more references to cognitive operations. What was I thinking? What was I imagining? What was I feeling at the time? Where it’s more of what’s going on inside my head for the simple reason that the whole story is going on inside your head. If it feels more psychological, it’s because, well, the whole thing is exercise in psychology, not something you actually witnessed.
Hopefully, that makes sense that there’s a lot. I’m cutting to kind of the heart of it. There’s much more detail and I’m not doing it full justice, but that’s the idea that when someone tells a true story, they’re more likely to include, as I mentioned, more of these kind of contextual details, just the extraneous stuff, the exact location of things, all of that. If you are describing an actual car ride you went on, you’re more likely to have a specific memory of the parking spot or there was some litter and there was an orange cone in the lot, if you’re just inventing this, you’re less likely to include those kind of details because you can’t really paint the scene as accurately, especially if you’re painting the scene you’ve never actually been to, right?
With all that said, take a look at Acts 27. This is, like I said, potentially boring, but that’s actually the point. “Luke is looking at the decision to sail for Italy when Paul has been arrested. Paul, some other prisoners are taken to Centurion of the Augustine cohort named Julius. That’s great detail. We know his name and embarking in a ship of Adramyt’tium, which was about to sail to the ports along the coast of Asia, we put to see accompanied by Aristarchus, a Macedonian from Thessalonica.”
Look, these are incredible details where the ship’s from, this guy, this Macedonian who was also on board. The next day we put in a sight on Julius treated Paul kindly and gave him leave to go to his friends and be cared for and putting to sea, from there, we sailed under the lee of Cyprus because the winds were against us. Those sensory details like the direction of the wind, all of that stuff. Julius, there’s no reason Luke needs to tell us that Julius was nice to Paul one day and let him go offshore and some friends took care of him.
If you and I were told, “Write a book report about Paul’s missionary journey,” or “Write about his arrest,” you’re not going to say, “One day, Julius was nice to Paul and let him go see his friends on shore,” because that is not the kind of stuff that matters to a third party. That’s not the kind of stuff you would make up either. Yet, this is the kind of stuff we find in the account.
I’ll continue, “When we’d sailed across the sea, which is off Cilicia and Pamphylia, we came to Myra in Lycia. There, the Centurion found a ship of Alexandria sailing for Italy and put us on board. We sailed slowly for a number of days and arrived with difficulty off Cni’dus and as the wind did not allow us to go on, we sailed under the lee of Crete off Salmo’ne. Coasting along with difficulty, we came to a place called Fair Havens, near which was the city of Lase’a.”
Now, I want to just stress here, we’re talking about some really fine details about the coast of Crete and places like Fair Haven that you’ve never heard of. It’s fair to guess. All of this detail is accurate in Luke’s account. All of this makes sense. You can actually look at a map and see exactly where he’s talking about, I mean, exactly where he’s talking about. He has an intimate knowledge of this journey that really only makes sense if he’s there on the boat with Paul because there’s no way the tale being told over and over and over in oral tradition is preserving this level of accuracy.
If you step away from this video and somebody asks you, “Where did Paul go?” You don’t remember. I don’t remember. We don’t care. Luke, who was there, does care. Those details matter to him in a way they don’t to us. That’s the idea. That’s really good evidence and there’s good psychological stuff supporting this. This has been used in court. That kind of detail we can see with a fair degree of reliability is a sign that it really happened rather than was just invented. It goes on from there.
I won’t belabor it much, but he mentions that, much time had been lost. The voyage was already dangerous because the fast had already gone by. Paul advised him saying, “Sir, I perceived the voyage will be with injury and much loss, not only have the cargo in the ship, but also of our lives, but the centurion paid more attention to the captain and to the owner of the ship than to what Paul said.”
Again, the level of detail like the internal politics on the ship because the harbor was not suitable to winter and the majority advised to put to sea from there on the chances somehow they could reach Phoenix, a harbor of Crete looking northeast and southeast in winter there. Again, the exact harbor, right? You’ve got Fair Havens, you’ve got Phoenix. You’ve got all these little places. That’s an incredible knowledge and there’s lots of details like this.
I’m focusing on just this one in Acts 27 where you look at this stretch and you say, “This is really rich in very specific sensory information.” It is not. I thought this and I reacted that and all of this. Luke doesn’t place himself in the center of it. It doesn’t read like a fictional account. It doesn’t read like an invention from his mind and it doesn’t read like a third person retelling of somebody else’s story. It reads like an eyewitness account.
Again, that’s the kind of evidence you’d actually look for in court and it makes, to my estimate, a much stronger case for an early dating than Jesus predicted the fall of the temple. It must have been after the fall of the temple is an argument for the late dating. Given the level of detail Luke has with things like the fall, excuse me, where are we going to harbor for the winter, all of these little places along Crete, it’s really remarkable as I mentioned earlier. All of the massive things he doesn’t cover. Let’s talk about those.
First, you’ve got the destruction of the temple. I mentioned that he talks about this as a prediction in the Gospel of Luke. He says Jesus is very clear, the temple is going to be destroyed at some point. There’s no specific timeline. There’s no exactly when it’s going to happen, just that the days are going to come when this will happen. There’s no mention of that in Acts. There’s no even illusions to it.
You can imagine, even if, take the late date kind of theory, the late date theory is that Luke is inventing predictions after they’ve already happened to make Jesus seem more prophetic. Well, if that’s what he’s up to, how could he resist doing that in Acts? Because in Acts, there are often these moments where it would be really easy to do that. I’ll give you one, in Acts 22, St. Paul has a vision. He said, “When I’d returned to Jerusalem, I was praying in the temple,” notice he’s in the temple in Jerusalem. “I fell into a trance and saw him, Jesus saying to me, ‘Make haste and get quickly out of Jerusalem because it will not accept your testimony about me.'”
Hold that thought. If he’s writing in the wake of the destruction of the temple, how could he not mention the destruction of the temple here? If he’s making up prophecy, why would the prophecy not be, make haste and get quickly out of Jerusalem, they will not accept your testimony about me and I’m going to punish them by destroy in the temple or something like or get out of Jerusalem because the Romans are going to destroy it really soon. There’s nothing of it. There’s not even a hint. There’s not even an illusion that just around the corner, Jerusalem and specifically the temple, will be destroyed.
Instead, Paul says back to Jesus, “Lord, they themselves know that in every synagogue got imprisoned and beat those who believed in me. When the blood of Stephen, my witness, was shed, I also was standing by and approving and keeping the garments of those who killed him. Jesus then replies, ‘Depart, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.'” There’s nothing about the destruction of the temple. He’s in the temple in Jerusalem being told to leave to go among the Gentiles, to go to Rome, ultimately.
That’s, I think, a major issue that if this is written after 70, I find it hard to believe that Paul wouldn’t include that. Remember, if he’s writing after 70, he doesn’t have to, I mean, he could just say, remember how the temple was destroyed? It would be very strange for Luke to be writing after 70 and not mention this, right? It’s bizarre to hold to the view that he’s writing after the destruction of the temple. He mentions the temple and yet there’s not even an illusion to the fact that temple’s going to get destroyed, but you might say, “Well, acts isn’t really a story about the temple in Jerusalem.” It’s not even really a story about Jerusalem. There’s a couple theories about what Acts is about.
One theory is that it’s about Peter and Paul. Another theory is that Acts is about the spread of the gospel. If you read the beginning of Acts, it’s very clear that there’s this story of the gospel going from the Jews to the Samaritans to the Gentiles, that it goes from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and then to the Roman lands ultimately to Rome.
The arrival of the gospel in Rome is actually a symbolically important event. I think that’s actually true. That’s a good way of reading the gospel. You can read it as a story of the gospel coming to Rome, or you can read it as a story of Peter and Paul in the other apostles. However you read it, it would be very strange not to mention if you read it as a story of Rome, that there’s a big fire in Rome and that it gets blamed on the Christians.
Karl Leslie Armstrong in the book Dating Accidents, Jewish and Greco-Roman context points out that maybe even more important than the oversight of not mentioned the fall of Jerusalem is that in the last recorded event in Acts, Paul is in Rome under house arrest and Luke doesn’t say anything about the great fire in Rome in 64, nor did he say anything about the subsequent persecution of Christians under Nero. Given the untold thousands of casualties to both the Roman and Christian population that is well attested by several non-Christian authors, it remains extremely far-fetched that any irrational motive could exist for Luke’s silence on what happened to Rome and its populist in 64 AD or C.
That’s, I think, a very good argument for a late date. If he’s writing after 64, how’s he not mentioning? Hey, I’m telling you a story about the gospel coming to Rome and either right now or a few years ago, this went dramatically badly for us because Nero started persecuting us for fun. When Armstrong mentions that non-Christian sources do tell this story, for instance, Tacitus, he’s writing the Annals, which is the history of Rome. He is born in 55. He’s like nine when the great fire of 64 happens and he’s writing this towards the end of his life, maybe around the year 117, he dies in one 120.
This is somebody who is not sympathetic to the Christians. He’s actually very clear about that in his account and he’s remembering an event from when he was nine, and yet he says that to get rid of the report, meaning the report that Nero had been the one who lit the fire, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations called Christians.
Then, he explains badly that Christus, from whom the name had his origin suffered the extreme penalty, that means crucifixion, during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurers, Pontius Pilate and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again, broke out not only in Judea, the first source of evil, but even in Rome were all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.
He’s saying Christianity is this horrible religion. It’s superstition and it started in Judea and it spread to Rome and has something to do with this guy Christus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Nero, to deflect the blame onto these hated Christians, arrests all of those who pleaded guilty and then tortured them for information. Then, they arrest a whole multitude of people who are convicted, not so much of the crime of fire in the city, as of hatred against mankind.
Mock of every sort was honored to their deaths covered with the beast, the skins of beast. They were torn by dogs and perished or nailed to crosses or doomed to the flames and burnt to serve as nightly illumination when daylight had expired. Nero even offered his gardens for the spectacle and was exhibiting a show in the circus while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer sort of loft on a car, meaning like a chariot, not like an automobile.
In other words, Nero tortured and killed huge numbers of Christians in a very spectacular fashion, so much so that Tacitus, who again, has no love for the Christians says, hence even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion for it was not as a scene for the public good but to glut one man’s cruelty that they were being destroyed. I think it’s a really telling account and look, that is just a good gripping sort of account of mass murder. Why does Luke not include that?
If you’re telling the story of how the gospel got to Rome, if you’re talking about how Rome becomes immersed in the gospel, how do you not include that detail that a bunch of these new Christians went on to become martyr for the faith very quickly, very quickly, within a matter of a few years, they went and died for the faith. That is a great story. It’s a better ending to Acts of the Apostles than it actually has from a literary perspective because the actual [inaudible 00:34:43] it has as we’re going to see is Paul on house arrest and we don’t know what’s going to happen next.
If Acts is about Rome, which is one of the theories, how do you not mention this? On the other hand, if Acts is about Paul or Peter and Paul or the apostles, how do you not mention the martyrdom of Paul? We could add to that had not mentioned the martyrdom of the other apostles, but let’s look specifically at Paul because as I alluded to, in Acts 28 in verse 11, it says, “After three months, we set sail in a ship which had wintered in the island, a ship of Alexandrian,” I love that he always knows where the ships are coming from. “With the twin brothers its figurehead. Putting in at Syracuse, we stayed there for three days.”
These are all irrelevant details, but the kind of details an eyewitness cares about. “From there, we made a circuit and arrived at Rhegium and after one day, a south wind sprang up and on the second day, we came to Puteoli. There, we found some brethren, and we’re invited to stay with them for seven days, and so we came to Rome.” This is the story of how the gospel gets to Rome with St. Paul. I mean, it’s already there in one way as we’re going to see from people coming back from Pentecost.
You have the first seeds already being planted from Peter’s sermon. We’ll see that in Acts 2, but you’ve got Paul, the apostle, arriving here in Rome. The brethren there, when they heard of us, came as far as the Forum of Appius and three taverns to meet us.” The level of detail here, again, how’s he doing this if he wasn’t in these places. “On seeing them, Paul thanked God and took courage, and when we came into Rome, Paul was allowed to stay by himself with the soldier that guarded him.”
That’s another one of those eyewitness kind of details that he’s very cognizant of exactly what’s going on with St. Paul, with the ship, with all other Christians they bump into and exactly where they ran into them, it’s an incredibly detailed account. I don’t know, true crime is very popular right now, and if you compare this to a fictitious account, you don’t see that kind of detail. This is the whole reality monitoring thing. This is what it’s looking at. Fictional accounts tend to be really vague on the details, where the details kind of move around. This is really specific.
After three days, St. Paul then gets together the local leaders of the Jews and he says, “Brethren, though I had done nothing against the people or the customs of our fathers, yet I was delivered prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans. When they examined me, they wished to set me at liberty because there was no reason for the death penalty in my case. When the Jews objected, I was compelled to appeal to Caesar, though I had no charge to bring against my nation. For this reason, therefore, I’ve asked to see you and speak with you since it is because of the hope of Israel that I am bound with this chain.”
I actually really like that kind of speech. What makes the speech kind of funny is the people he’s speaking to are like, “We have no idea what you’re talking about.” Their response is, “We’ve never heard of you. We’re interested in what you’re saying, but we’ve not heard some bad report of you.” He’s worried that the local Jewish community is going to think he’s a horrible anti-Semite or anti-Judaic, and instead, they’re just like we’ve got no such report. This is all news to us.
Then, the chapter ends and the book ends that Paul lived there in Rome two whole years at his own expense and welcome to all who came to him preaching the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered. It’s a nice, it’s a pleasant kind of ending, but it doesn’t tell us what happens to Paul because what happens is not, as you might imagine from reading the end of that, Paul just lives the rest of his life on house arrest. We know from other early Christian sources that very shortly after this, they decide to execute him and they cut off his head. This is just history.
It’s really bizarre for Luke not to mention that if that’s what actually happened. There’s not even a hint that that’s got to happen. You’ve got all these things that are these major events from the period between 64 and 70. You’ve got the great fire. You’ve got the death of Paul. You’ve got the destruction of the temple. These are enormous in Jewish history and Roman history and Christian history, and none of them get hinted at, alluded to, or referenced, in Acts of the Apostle.
All of that makes me think that it must be written before these events have happened. I go with early of the early days. This is probably written in 64, maybe even slightly before that because it can’t be written much before that because he has pretty detailed knowledge up to about 60 or so, and then it seems like he doesn’t know much of anything after that. I don’t know. That’s the kind of stuff that when you’re dating a document, those are the things you look for.
Last thing, and then we’ll move away from the dates, Ben Witherington III, he was a Protestant scholar, in his book, the Acts of the Apostles says, “On the one hand, Acts seems to be a simple chronological account. What happened to the church between Jesus’ ascension and Paul’s arrival in Rome, roughly between the year 30 AD and 60 AD, it’s the only document in the New Testament that it appears to be given a historical record of the time after Jesus’ life, but it does not even carry us up to the end of Paul’s life, probably in Rome in 64 to 68 or up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70.”
Again, if you posit that Luke is probably writing this as an actual eyewitness to a lot of this stuff in the early 60s, then all of that makes sense, but if you’re trying to explain why someone writing in 75, 80 or 100 or beyond, those are really weird things for them not to either mention either as history again or as at least these really powerful prophecies that obviously wouldn’t really be prophecies since they’re written after the fact. That’s the dating.
I think based on all that I lean heavily towards the traditional view that Acts is actually written by an eyewitness, probably Luke and is from the early 60s. Why does that matter? What’s the testimony of Acts? Well, I alluded to this as the beginning of the episode, but in Acts 2 there’s this account of Pentecost and the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place and suddenly a sound came from heaven, like the rush of a mighty wind and it filled the house where they were sitting.
Now, I want to just point out something here. Luke is not as detailed in this section. He literally just says they were all together in one place. You know why? Because he wasn’t an eyewitness to this part. This is stuff he’s all getting secondhand. He’s accurately reporting what he knows, but he doesn’t say, “This is the house. This is the corner. This is exactly where we were.” There’s none of that. It does not read like an eyewitness account, unlike the latter part of Acts, which is an incredible detail because remember, if you think this isn’t really Luke writing it, you have to imagine an author is writing this with such a sensitivity to the difference between third party accounts and eyewitness accounts that he’s literally 2,000 years ahead of the game because this is a very recent, like 1990s and beyond is when this kind of model of forensic examination is from.
The fact that it passes this test that wasn’t a test for nearly 2,000 years, it seems like it was an actual account from Luke. Anyhow, Holy Spirit sends tongues of fire. They’re all filled with the Holy Spirit, begin to speak in other tongues of the spirit, gave them utterance. Now, there were dwelling in Jerusalem, Jews devout men from every nation under heaven. Now, why? Why do they dwell in Jerusalem? Because Pentecost was not originally a Christian holiday. It was originally a Jewish holiday and it made your holidays. You would often have pilgrims come into Jerusalem. You could offer sacrifice only in the temple.
We see this in Jesus’ own life. Remember the finding in the temple? He and his family go up to Jerusalem every year at Passover. It’s a major holiday. You’re going to likewise have people who are coming in at Pentecost, if not as big a holiday as Passover, but nevertheless, it’s an important holiday, especially in like an agricultural one. You’ve got people from all over the empire. You also just have people from all over the empire because this is the hub of Judaism. If you are a Jewish person living anywhere in the empire, the idea that you might want to go to Jerusalem, makes sense. I mean, that still happens today.
A multitude gathers and they’re bewildered because they each hear the apostles speaking in their own language. There’s a miraculous gift of languages here, and they’re amazed and wondered, saying, “On all these who are speaking Galileans and how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language?” Then, Luke mentions where they’re from, Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene.” I don’t know why that’s such an important detail, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and Proselytes, Cretans and Arabians.
Why does that matter? Well, I actually do know why that matters because these are the people who brought Christianity home with them that if you were to put this all on a map, you could just draw a bunch of little arrows going from Jerusalem to all of these different places, both in the Roman Empire and even outside of the Roman Empire. If you look at the Arabians that you are seeing the first spread of Christianity 50 days after Easter that these laypeople, these people who are just pilgrims convert and bring this home. Some of them are already saying, “What does this mean?”
Others are already skeptical saying, “Well, they’re filled with new wine,” but St. Peter then gets up, and I’m jumping quite a ways down because I know this is already a pretty detailed episode, St. Peter gives an incredible homily and he says, “Men of Israel hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs, which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know that.”
Now, what I like about this is this is a really gutsy sermon. He is calling people out in a really aggressive, kind of direct way, and that’s going to get a lot of attention. People are going to say, “What is he talking about,” because some of them were probably in the crowd saying, “Crucify him,” and others were probably just tourists and pilgrims saying, “What is going on? Who is this guy and what is he accusing us of?”
If that’s not enough, St. Peter then directs his fire at the greatest king of Israel. He quotes the psalm in which David says that he won’t let his holy one see corruption. He says, “Brethren, I may say to you confidently that the patriarch David, that he both died and was buried and his tomb is with us to this day.” This is an interesting detail, by the way, because Josephus reports that they knew where the tomb was and this knowledge seemed to have gotten lost with the destruction of Jerusalem.
This is another detail that points to this being pre-70, that he’s able to talk about the location of the tomb. Anyway, they knew where it was at the time. We don’t really know where it’s now. Being there for a prophet and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that, we are all witnesses.”
That’s the kicker. He is saying to a group of pious Jews, Hey, you know King David the greatest king? Well, there’s a Messiah king who’s greater than him. That’s already going to be the kind of thing that puts your antenna up or gets your eyer up. He’s proving this by the fact that, well, we know where David is dead and buried, but Jesus isn’t dead and buried at all. In fact, Jesus rose again. He was raised up. He’s resurrected. What’s more, we are all witnesses. They are presenting themselves. It’s not just Peter. It’s a whole group of them presenting themselves as witnesses of their resurrection and using this to show Jesus’s superiority to David. This is an incredible claim.
Again, if this isn’t true, this is the easiest thing to disprove. You just say, “Hey, I was here a few weeks ago. I saw where he was buried. Come over here guys. Here’s the body of the guy they’re talking about. He’s also dead and buried.” Christianity’s over by lunchtime. We all go home. That’s it. That’s all it would take. That doesn’t happen. You know what happens instead, 3000 of them convert, 3000. We know that’s not just made up because they bring Christianity home with them, and they started these little Christian enclaves in these various places throughout the Roman Empire.
You have this situation by 64 when Nero wants to kill Christians, there are thousands of Christians even in Rome in the heart of the Empire. How did they get there? Well, it starts right here in Acts 2 with the Pentecost conversions. That’s the idea. To bring all this home, we can safely say, I think, that Acts is written early, and because of that, we can safely say that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then the tomb wasn’t empty. That if the tomb wasn’t really empty, then St. Peter couldn’t say that it was on Pentecost. If St. Peter didn’t say it was on Pentecost, then St. Luke couldn’t have said that he did in Acts.
That last detail I’m just going to spell out in case it’s not obvious, this is a memorable event and Luke is writing about it within the lifetime of the people who it happened to and certainly of many people who they would’ve gone back and told about. We know just from the fact that Acts was accepted, from the fact this wasn’t written off as some crazy fiction, but was treated as accurate from the fact that this book was preserved and copied and treated as scripture, all of this points to the fact that the resurrection actually happened, or it’s very difficult to explain.
Why would Peter get up on Pentecost and say these false things, or why would Luke invent a bunch of false things and put them in the mouth of Peter? Neither of those, I think, can be very convincingly explained away. The best evidence for all of this is Peter said these things and Luke said these things because that’s what actually happened. Meaning, Jesus suffered, died, was buried, rose from the dead and appeared to the 12th, and all the apostles. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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