RE: MERGED: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part 1) & (Part 2)
December 19, 2014 at 1:00 pm
Quote:Burton Mack gives another exam ple of how Luke's version of the history of early Christianity in Acts is wholly unreal istic: 'Luke says that the standard sermon was preached to the Jews on the day of Pentecost and often thereafter, whereupon hundreds converted and the world became the church's parish overnight', but this is 'a story that does not make sense as history by any standard'. Not only in respect to its absurdly hyperbolic growth, but even just in the context of how people would really behave. As Mack puts it:
No Jew worth his salt would have converted when being told that he was guilty of killing the messiah. No Greek would have been persuaded by the dismal logic of the argumentation of the sermons. The scene would not have made sense as h istory to anyone during the first century with first-hand knowledge of Christians. Jews, and the date of the temple in Jerusalem. So what do we have on our hands? An imaginary reconstruction in the interest of aggrandizing an amalgam view of Christianity early in the second century. Luke did this by painting over the messy history of conflictual movements throughout the first century and in his own time. He cleverly depicted Peter and Paul as preachers of an identical gospel. . . . That is myth making in the genre of epic. There is not the slightest reason to take it seriously as history.
In short, the narrative we have in Acts is so unrealistic, it cannot have been based on anything that actually happened. It's what Luke wishes to have happened, maybe what he wants people to believe happened; but it's certainly not what happened, even in outl ine. And as for this instance, so for all others in Acts.
This conclusion should not surprise us, since all other Acts literature written by Christians was wholly fabricated as well. The Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Andrew, the Acts of John and the Acts of Thomas all look substantially like the Acts of the Apostles in the NT, yet are obviously not based on any kind of history. They are literary creations, telling stories the authors wanted, using known legendary characters (the various apostles after which they are named, plus in each its own cast of characters, some historical, some mythical, some invented to the purpose). There is really no reason we should privilege the Acts in the NT as somehow more historical or more reliable than any of these others, which were all written within decades of each other. Indeed for this very reason we should have presumed Acts to be fiction all along, albeit historical fiction, just like the Maccabean literature before it and other purported works of religious history. Prior probability favors no other conclusion.
Carrier pgs. 363-64
