Apostle of Doom

Why Luke does not seem to know Paul’s letters

Dale B. Martin’s notes on “Luke” and Paul break off at a heading: “E. Why does Luke not seem to know Paul’s letters?” He had set out the contradictions between the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s own letters at length, and he stopped where the explanation had to begin.

This essay takes up his question. It accepts his findings, adds what the Greek text of Acts shows, sets out the answers scholars have given, and states the answer this site draws from the evidence.1

What Acts leaves out

Acts gives more of its length to Paul than to any other figure, and it never mentions that he wrote a letter. The Greek word for a letter, epistolē (ἐπιστολή), occurs five times in the book.

It names the letters Saul carried from the high priest to Damascus, the letter of the council in Jerusalem, and the letter of the tribune Claudius Lysias to the governor Felix.2 The letters that carried Paul’s authority to his churches while he lived have no place in the story.

The title Paul claimed fares no better. He opens his letters by naming himself an apostle, and he defends the claim at length.3 The word apostolos (ἀπόστολος) occurs in twenty-nine verses of Acts.

In twenty-seven of them it means the Twelve in Jerusalem, a body to which Paul is brought as a newcomer and whose decrees he later delivers to the churches.4 Only twice is Paul called an apostle, in a single episode at Lystra, and both times jointly with Barnabas, as envoys of the church at Antioch.5 Acts also sets its own test for the office: an apostle must have been with Jesus from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up.6

Paul fails the test by definition.

Two further silences follow the same line. By Paul’s account, he withstood Peter to his face at Antioch and saw Barnabas carried away with the hypocrisy of the others; in Acts, Paul and Barnabas part over John Mark, and the scene with Peter never occurs.7 The collection for the poor in Jerusalem, which fills whole chapters of Paul’s letters, survives in Acts as one phrase in a speech before Felix: “alms to my nation.”8

Three answers from the scholars

The first answer holds that the author of Acts had never read the letters. The distance between the two portraits was set out in its classic form by Philipp Vielhauer, who compared them on natural theology, the law, Christology and the last things.9 For many readers the distance settled the matter: a writer who drew Paul so differently could not have read him.10

The second answer reverses the first. Richard Pervo argued that the author knew the letters and drew on them, mining them for Paul’s characteristic language, and that he wrote in the second century, about 115.11 On this view the gap between the two Pauls measures the distance between the apostle and a later admirer who read him through the concerns of his own church.

The third answer asks what Acts was written to do. Joseph Tyson placed Luke and Acts in the years 120 to 125, when Marcion was proclaiming Paul as the one true apostle and setting him against the law and the God of Israel. Tyson accepts that Acts made use of Paul’s collected letters, and he reads its portrait of a law-abiding Paul, bound to the apostles in Jerusalem, as an answer to Marcion’s Paul.12

The answer this site draws

Martin’s own evidence tells against the first answer. A writer who had never read the letters would depart from them at random, sometimes agreeing and sometimes differing. Acts departs from them by pattern.

Each silence falls where the letters speak most insistently about Paul’s own claims: the title he fought for, the letters that carried his authority, the independence from Jerusalem to which he swore, the public rebuke of Peter and the purpose of the collection. Each addition falls where the letters would have made the portrait impossible: the mission that begins in the synagogue, the orator admired by governors, the persecutor known in every house in Jerusalem.13

Michael Goulder, reviving the older Tübingen reading of the early church, reached the same judgment by another road. Paul, who was there, is the primary source; and “it was Luke who invented the united virginal church theory, and Acts is his steady and skilful attempt to paper over all the cracks.”14

Silence was the most economical course for a writer who knew the letters and needed to tell a story they contradicted. To name the letters would have sent readers to them. Left unnamed, they could be quietly outrun by a narrative that gave the church the Paul it needed: an envoy of Antioch who deferred to Jerusalem, preached first to the Jews and never claimed an apostleship of his own.

The letters were already disputed property. A writer of the second century, writing in Peter’s name, concedes that they contain “things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest,” and Marcion would make them the core of a scripture set against the God of Israel.15

The consequence reaches beyond Acts. The Paul whom the church received into its history is the Paul of a writer who could not quote him without undoing his own portrait. Either the letters are true and Acts is a construction, or Acts is true and Paul, who wrote “before God, I lie not,” swore falsely to the Galatians.16

Martin’s notes established the first half of that choice. The silence of Acts suggests that its author knew the other half. Those who harmonise the two defend a Paul that neither source supports.

  1. Dale B. Martin, notes on “Luke” and Paul, 2019, final heading, published on this site with his permission: dale-b-martin-luke-versus-paul. ↩
  2. Acts 9:2; 22:5; 15:30; 23:25, 33. ↩
  3. Romans 1:1; 1 Corinthians 9:1–2; Galatians 1:1. ↩
  4. Acts 9:27; 16:4. ↩
  5. Acts 14:4, 14. ↩
  6. Acts 1:21–22. ↩
  7. Galatians 2:11–13; Acts 15:36–40. ↩
  8. Romans 15:25–28; 1 Corinthians 16:1–4; 2 Corinthians 8–9; Acts 24:17. ↩
  9. Philipp Vielhauer, “On the ‘Paulinism’ of Acts,” in Studies in Luke-Acts: Essays Presented in Honor of Paul Schubert, ed. Leander E. Keck and J. Louis Martyn (Nashville: Abingdon, 1966), pp. 33–50. ↩
  10. Robert M. Price, review of Richard I. Pervo, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists, 2009, https://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/reviews/pervo_dating_acts.htm. ↩
  11. Richard I. Pervo, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2006); idem, “Acts in Ephesus (and Environs) c. 115,” Forum, third series, 4.2 (2015), pp. 125–51; on the use of Paul’s language, see Price, op. cit. ↩
  12. Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), p. 23; see the review on Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/235171, and the publisher’s summary, https://uscpress.com/Marcion-and-Luke-acts. ↩
  13. Martin, op. cit., sections on chronology, missionary practice and rhetoric: dale-b-martin-luke-versus-paul. ↩
  14. Michael Goulder, St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), pp. x–xi. Goulder presents the Two Missions thesis as his own reading, “not an amalgam of standard opinions,” and as a revival of the proposal Ferdinand Baur made in 1831 (p. 194). ↩
  15. 2 Peter 3:16; see Answers to missionary claims; on Marcion, Tyson, op. cit. ↩
  16. Galatians 1:20. ↩