What Luke got right, and why it matters

Walter: Sounds like you answered your own question. Acts of the Apostles is more than likely a second century document of dubious historical value.




VR: This flies in the face of some hard evidence. Acts contains to much detailed first-century information that has been confirmed by archaeology to be accurate. Luke gets the titles right for the leaders for various cities before whom Paul appeared. This is especially interesting since in some cases the governmental forms changed in the middle of the first century. That was the whole point of my rhetorical "How did Luke research his novel" question I posed to Steven. This information is detailed in F. F. Bruce's "The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable. You would have to go around the Mediterranean world getting arrested on a regular basis in order to know that much about the political and judicial systems of the time. And since those changed, nobody in the second century would have had that information available to them.



You can bring up problems with Luke's account that have to be dealt with if you are an inerrantist, but this is not about inerrancy, or calling Luke the greatest historian of the ancient world, or anything like that. All I am doing here is putting a cap on the idea that Acts is a late, legendary product. Luke had to be in a position to know exactly who you deal with in Cyprus, Achaia, Asia, in Ephesus, in Thessalonica, in Philippi, in Athens, and in Malta.



Now, whenever I bring this stuff up, I get told that, of course, Luke could get this stuff right, but the supernatural stuff wrong. Yes, he could. But the evidence takes the "late and legendary" option away from the critic.



A lot of these archaeological discoveries were made by Sir William Ramsay, who had originally subscribed to the late-dating theories of the Tubingen school. He abandoned that position when he found extensive archaeological evidence that confirmed the reliabilty of Luke's account, over and over again.



I'm not saying a supernatural explanation is proved by all of this, but the options for developing a skeptical counter-story are reduced considerably by this kind of evidence.

I am linking to the relevant chapter of Bruce's book.