Tenth Saturday after Pentecost

Before we move back to the text of Acts, I want to deal with some questions that Glenn sent me a couple of weeks ago on email. Here is his email:

"Christian, I wanted to comment on your problems with Acts but since that blog is several days past, I am sending my comments to you in this email.  You may comment on them or reprint items from them as you consider appropriate.

Who was Luke and what was a physician in the Roman empire?  I believe he wrote the Gospel of Luke before he wrote Acts and with the accepted dates for the Gospel of Luke he most likely did not live during the time of Jesus.  For the Gospel of Luke, it is believed he used Mark and a source labeled L.  If there were other sources, I am not aware of them.  Did he have another source for the Acts?  Could he have traveled with Paul or some of the others to get knowledge of the events that happened?  I do tend to believe Acts is an accurate history of the early church, but I believe Luke communicated and collaborated with several others to compile the information contained in Acts.  Luke’s ending of Acts reminds me of the ending of Mark’s gospel which gives very little information on the resurrection. I look forward to more blogs with information on Acts.Glenn

Luke the beloved physician is mentioned in Colossians 4:14 but nowhere else in the NT. He may or may not be the author of the Gospel and Acts. Loukas is a fairly Greek name in the first century. His having a Greek name does not mean that he is a Gentile. Jews in Greek speaking countries and some even in Palestine often had Greek names. Paulos, Paul is a Greek name. 
Physicians in the Roman Empire treated the sick with herbal remedies, set and immobilized broken bones, did sutures, did amputations,  did massive quantities of strong alcoholic drink for anesthetic, etc. Medicine in the first century was not that different from medicine in early nineteenth century.

For the Gospel Luke used one at least one other source you did not mention. Scholars call it Q. Q is an abbreviation for the German word "Quelle," which means source. The Q hypothesis was developed by German scholars in the nineteenth century. E.J. Holtzmann coined the term. Q is a hypothetical document, containing primarily sayings of Jesus. It was used by both Matthew and Luke. Some scholars think it was also used by The Gospel of Thomas. There is strong agreement among scholars that Matthew and Luke did not know each others gospels. They did both know and use Mark. Q contains material common to Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark. The fact that most of the material occurs in the same order in Matthew as in Luke is a strong indicator that it came from a written source, not oral tradition. That's the short of it. There is a vast scholarly literature on Q with many problems and possibilities. Q is not a source for Acts.

Starting in Acts 20:13 Luke has a number of stories and sections that use the pronoun "we." From early Christianity to the present most folks have seen these "we" sections as times when Luke was traveling with Paul and others. Today most scholars see the we sections as either from a diary from some traveling companion of Paul that Luke found and used or as simply a literary invention of Luke. This has been my position until the last few weeks. I reread Martin Hengel's book Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity. Hengel accepts that the we sections are Luke's first hand recollections of his own travels with Paul. We'll talk more about this issue when we get to chapter 20. 

We left off last time in the midst of Peter's Pentecost discourse in Acts 2. A key verse is 2:21, "then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." Peter implies a lot here. Salvation is not limited to the Jews. Salvation is not limited to those who have done good deeds and led a holy life. Salvation comes to everyone who believes in Christ, regardless of any other factors, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. Much of the rest of Acts illustrates that point. 

Peter is speaking to an entirely Jewish crowd. He himself is of course Jewish. He accuses the Jews, his own people, of being complicit in the crucifixion of Jesus by the hands of the Romans. This wrong understanding has led to many centuries of anti-semitism on the part of Christians. It was a very small group of powerful Jews, the Sanhedrin under the leadership of the High Priest Caiaphas, who handed Jesus over to the Roman governor Pilate, who authorized and  carried out the execution of Jesus by Roman soldiers, not Jews. 

We'll finish chapter two next Tuesday and learn more about the daily lives of the earliest Christian community. 

Faithfully,

Christian