Travellers' Tales and After‐dinner speeches: The Shape of Acts of the Apostles

Extract

Acts is a good story. But what kind of a good story it is has exercised scholars. For a long time Luke was regarded as an historian, but he was an historian who reported unhistorical speeches and constructed unlikely journeys. Theologians have tended-to sum up Acts as (I quote from the New Oxford Annotated RSV) ‘the triumphant narrative of the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome’. More recently, scholars with literary interests have begun to argue that Acts is not meant to be historiography. Richard Pervo argues in Profit with Delight, that Acts is like ancient novels in its conventions and structures; therefore its fictionality is legitimate, and not a little bit of its agenda is to entertain.

Brian Reardon points out many elements of ancient romance in Acts: its setting in a near-contemporary familiar world, travel with the aspect of purposeful journey (quest) which generates plot, adventure with trials and successes, rescue or salvation. Richard Pervo finds in the ancient world a sizeable body of prose fictions which he calls ‘novels’ and which display numerous conventions easily discoverable in Acts: adventures (including arrests, persecutions, plots, trials, shipwreck and snakes), miracles, riots and rowdy scenes, exotic and utopian elements, an active providence, a robust hero, an episodic plot. We may assume, then, that ‘Luke’ was a fiction-addict, also steeped in Biblical narrative and prophetic literature, who employed received conventions of historiography and fiction-writing to make Acts a readable story with recognizable features. He structures his story through a progress which gets Christianity—largely in the briefcase of the apostle Paul—from Jerusalem to Rome.