Søren Kongstad

@soren.kongstad.net

223 Followers 453 Following

Love Road cycling - try to stay away from politics, but I fail often

When was the anonymous author writing? Since Acts is a companion volume to Luke, and since Luke is usually dated to 80-85 CE or so, it has long been thought that Acts was written soon after that, some time before 90 CE. In recent decades, however, some scholars (especially Josephus scholar Steve Mason and Acts scholar Richard Pervo) have argued that the author of Acts knew the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, that some portions of Acts show dependence on Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, produced in 93 CE. They have suggested a later date of up to 120 CE for Acts. A number of scholars have found this view persuasive, but I’m afraid I do not. I’m not opposed to it in principle; but I don’t think there’s much support for it. About a month ago I decided to I re-read their arguments carefully, and again I found them interesting but rather thin. Between Acts and Josephus you don’t find anything like the verbatim agreements in extenso that make you think, for example, that Matthew used Mark. What you find are some oddities they share, e.g., they both discuss the Jewish rebels Theudas and Judas the Galilean, and in that order, even though chronologically Judas was much earlier. That is indeed intriguing – and they see it as their strongest piece of evidence – but there are obviously ways to explain it other than literary dependence. If Acts was written in 120 CE, one would then have to decide what to do about the Gospel of Luke. Was it written that late as well, by the same author? That’s hard to imagine, since it may well be quoted earlier, around 100 CE (by the Didache), as I pointed out. Was Acts written by a different author who was trying to imitate the Gospel written three decades earlier, so they are not actually companion volumes? Possibly. Did Luke write the volume two decades later? Maybe. My view, though, is that there’s no compelling reason to date it that late. I still think it dates to the 80s.
Orange tom cat curled in a ball on a duvet.
An Image showing a a bridge over a river in a mountainous landscape
Men's Madison race