The Irritable Bible

About five years ago I undertook a study of Acts in a series of emails for some friends. I was basically blogging on the DL; I was teaching at a Christian college at the time and wanted to go places I wasn't sure would sit well with my employers. I called my missives the "Troxell Broadsides" (which sounds pretentious, but I meant it in mostly a tongue-in-cheek way, I swear), and the study of Acts ended up being called "Broadsiding the Bible," which I rather liked. In some ways I've moved away from where I was five years ago, but in some ways I've turned back to where I was then, so I thought this might be a good place to revisit that old study and finally finish it. 

It's also a way for me to explore this turning back, to rehearse some of my thoughts on faith and belief and scripture and all that. For a little while I tried to indulge in the luxury of not caring all that much about the Bible. As I move back into a more overtly theological way of thinking about things, I no longer have that luxury. I'm no Bible scholar, but I've read a little. Neither am I a theologian, though some theologians are notorious for seeming to ignore the Bible altogether. Still, I think this will be fun.

First I need to lay out some of my assumptions about Acts. The consensus seems to be that same author wrote Luke and Acts, whether that person was really Luke or not. I think the text implies Lucan authorship, but pseudopigraphy was common enough back in the day that this sort of thing is hardly conclusive. One argument in favor of tradition is that attributing a work to an unknown like Luke seems unlikely (though writing as one of Paul's sidekicks does have a certain cache to it). Moreover, the switch from third person to first person plural in the course of the narrative, while not beyond the capacities of a clever 1st-century writer, seems an elaborate ruse. I'm torn between the skepticism of questioning traditional authorship and a cynicism that says nobody wanted to work that hard. I will assume the same person wrote Luke and Acts, and I will call this person Luke, without claiming any certainty as to the identity of the author.

My other assumption is that Luke and Acts come out of a particular community, and reflect the vision of that community -- a vision that may not be exactly the same as that of other communities that generated or influenced the books we call the New Testament. The crucial questions for me, far beyond those of historical probability, are questions of intent: why would communities tell these stories, and why would Luke choose to preserve them? Why were Luke's effort preserved when surely others were neglected or destroyed? If I'm not comfortable calling myself a theologian or a political theorist (even though my main interests are in political theology), I can't deny being a writing teacher, and thus questions of author and audience and purpose are ones I instinctively reach for. I can't shut off my curiosity about the rhetorical angles, and I'm not sure why I'd want to.

Acts -- and I would say the same for the Gospels -- is not straightforward history the way we might think of it. For one, we live in a different world. Luke's stated intent was to write an orderly account, and we need not doubt his earnestness, but he saw a different world than we would even if we were to travel back in time and capture the scene on our smartphones. Our social situation is very different. Our historical location is very different. Our context is very different. The way we see the world is very different. There are limits to the "social construction of reality" -- I'm sure a socially constructed bus would hurt like hell if I jumped in front of it -- but I do think our sociocultural context determines the interpretive horizons of our subjective experience. We have encounters and conversations with people who are, almost literally, living in a different world from our own. Imagine, then, almost two thousand years of intersubjective toothpaste that won't go back in the tube, and filter accordingly.

Because Luke lived in and saw a different world, and had different reasons for telling or repeating stories than some of the reasons we might write histories (not to mention that our own histories are always already interpretive reconstructions), and because it is quite likely that even if he was an eyewitnesss to some of the events he might describe things differently than we would had we been there, Acts is not history as we know it. A closer analog might be propaganda -- political propaganda at that, since religion and politics were not really differentiated at the time. Even in our own time, I would submit, politics is always already theological and vice-versa, but we have ways of hiding that from ourselves that would not have occurred to Luke or Paul or Jesus.

As we'll see from the text, some early Christian communities seem to have been cells of nonviolent anti-imperial resistance. They were derided as "atheists" by the Romans, not because they bore any resemblance to what we call atheism today, but because they did not show deference to the Roman gods -- particularly, of course, the imperial cult. Maybe they weren't exactly rebels, but they were dissidents of a sort, and self-consciously countercultural (which suggests that the Paris Commune might be a more apt analog to the early church than the Southern Baptist Convention, but that's not important right now).

As propaganda, Acts also seems bullish on Paul. One fairly conservative suggestion is that the text is legitimately Lucan, written by Paul's erudite physician friend as a kind of dossier for the purposes of Paul's trials before Roman authorities. This assumes a bit much for me, but the text does seem to have a feel of pro-Pauline advocacy. Luke wants Paul to be taken seriously, which suggests that the Lucan community was, in addition to being an anti-imperial group, also a Pauline one to some extent. This makes possible the suggestion that Luke is the most Pauline of the Gospels, but I haven't run across anyone trying to interpret Luke in that light.

John Dominic Crossan and Neil Elliot (among others) reject Acts as a source of information on the historical Paul -- Crossan for reasons of historical continuity and Elliot for reasons of theological continuity. In both cases Acts doesn't line up with their desire to rehabilitate Paul as a more liberal and tolerant voice than comes out in the Pauline corpus overall. This also assumes a bit much for me, though I appreciate their efforts. Acts may not reflect the historical Paul, but it certainly represents the view of a community that seems to have lionized Paul whether they've got their history right or not. Moreover, if Paul comes across as a somewhat provincial first century thinker versus a cosmopolitan postmodern liberal, I think there are probably good reasons for that.

So here's where I offer what semioticians call an "extensional bargain": if you accept the premise that Acts comes out of a community that was part of an anti-imperial movement, and keen on Paul, I can take you on a little ride. Along the way, we'll see if this premise makes sense, and to what extent we might have to modify it to be fair to the text. And we'll see where it takes us.