The witness of the disciples, moreover, has a definite shape. In the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew Jesus summons his disciples, gives them explicit instructions, and then sends them to the lost sheep of Israel.19 They are to go as witnesses to Jesus in whom the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. And they have work to do: cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse leapers, and cast out demons. Furthermore, they are to receive no compensation for their work, nor are they to travel weighed down by money or clothing. They should not be deterred by those who do not respond to their mission, but rather they should see such rejection as an invitation to go to others.
These instructions indicate the character of the witness given throughout the New Testament. The disciples of Jesus are sent out as bearers of news; they have received a message to spread, but they themselves are also the exemplification of what they have to say. However, this is not really their doing. That is to say, whatever actions are theirs as faithful disciples, and to whatever degree their lives bear truthful witness, this is always also the result of a gift they have been given. This is why the news or story they have to tell turns out always to be inseparable from what has happened to them. The story they tell is about them insofar as they testify in the telling to what has happened to them. But it points past them, or through them, to the God they believe they have met in Christ Jesus.
To be sure, as they tell their story the disciples often provide inadequate witnesses to Jesus, but the inadequacy itself is also a kind of witness. They have been called to live lives that point to Christ — lives that are unintelligible if the one they follow is not the Son of God. Sometimes the pointing is off direction. But this is revealed precisely as the intelligible Christ is unveiled and their inadequacies are marked in relation to him. Like the sleeping disciples in the garden or Peter warming himself by the fire, even their failures are given focus in relation to Christ to whom they witness. The disciples’ very identity is tied up in what they witness to. In this way Christian witnesses are unlike those “witnesses” who might appear in a court of law to testify dispassionately to events they may have seen or heard, like bits of facts that have no bearing on their own lives and that they pass over to judge or jury to do with as they please. Instead, they are more like people who have witnessed a horrible accident that cannot be forgotten; it lives with them daily, shaping the contours of their lives henceforth.20
Yet the witness of Christians does more than carry forward from what has happened; it also carries back from what will happen. The disciples of Jesus are called to be witnesses to the reality of a new age, a new time, constituted by his life, death, and resurrection. Apocalypse is the name given to describe the inauguration of this new beginning. The story of Jesus is the story of a new creation, the telling of which cannot but challenge the reigning stories that legitimate the practices of the old age. This is present not in overcoming force or power but rather precisely in witness. Indeed, that witness is the form in which the new age is revealed indicates why what has happened requires that a people exist who exemplify the new reality. The existence of the church is itself the determinative (although not the only)21 witness to an alternative politics to that of the old age.22
The new politics is a politics of speech — and so also of act. But it begins in the speech of the church, which is a story we Christians believe is not just ours but everyone’s. As such it cannot but be a complex story with many subplots. Nevertheless, it begins simply in a meeting with the Christ. This story is told in hope that it will be received, that those who hear it will be able to recognize how all that is exists as a witness to God. Spoken as witness, its purpose is not definitive; it does not end all arguments but rather opens space for them to appear. Here is the story — now what do you think? Indeed, witness is a first step in introducing arguments we need to have, ones that could not have been discovered until each particular witness was offered.23
While witnesses expect they will be heard, they also know that sometimes they will not. Genuine witnesses to the Christian gospel are fully aware that it can and might be rejected. Indeed, to be a “witness” in the New Testament is also to be a martyr — or, better put, the term “martyr” is the New Testament Greek term for witness. Of course, “martyr” subsequently came to mean that one died in the act of witnessing — although it was not so narrowly circumscribed for the first Christians.24
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles uses the term “witness” twenty-three times.25 This frequent use is fitting since the book’s task is to describe what the first followers of Christ told others about him. Yet the usage is not generalized; witness is not so much treated as a concept as it is displayed in a story. Moreover, the Book of Acts is a narrative that carries its story not principally, as the Gospels do, by following the story of one person, but rather by focusing on first one act and then another of a crowd of witnesses. Those who witness understand themselves to have been uniquely claimed by Christ. Indeed, the witnessing we hear in Acts frequently takes a highly personal form: this is what happened to me, or us, as we encountered the Christ. These encounters are then drawn up into the whole story, becoming pillars of support. Following on the Gospels, Christ remains the center of the narrative in Acts, yet now through these others who witness to him. As their stories are told, they point to his. However, and crucially, the details and particularities of the stories are not obliterated in the pointing, nor are the characters whose stories they are.
As Kavin Rowe suggests, “readers do not have to labor long in the book of Acts until they come across its programmatic thesis: after receiving the power of the Holy Spirit, says the risen Jesus, the disciples ‘shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth’ ” (Acts 1:8).26 Such a program, however, depends on there being particular people who respond to the call to witness, each in his or her peculiar manner. Nearer the end of his narrative Luke dwells especially on St. Paul.
Intriguingly, Paul often witnesses by telling his own story. This is not only because it is interesting but also because it describes Paul’s own call to be a witness. The story is well known, one of the most reported in the New Testament. We hear it first within the sequence of Luke’s narrative in chapter 9 of Acts, and then it is retold twice in considerable detail by Paul himself (as Luke has it) in chapters 22 and 26. Finally, Paul alludes to the episode in his letters more than once, that is, in Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 9 and 15. So many references invite comparative study. Yet our interest here is focused on the two accounts Luke accredits to Paul when he retells the story of how he became a witness. These are especially interesting since they are also cases of witnessing, that is, Paul is witnessing about becoming a witness.
In the first case, in chapter 22 of Acts, Paul has just been arrested in Jerusalem amid a cloud of confusion. As they are about to take him into the barracks and away from the angry crowd, the arresting Roman soldiers are surprised to discover that Paul speaks Greek; they had been operating under the mistaken assumption that he was a notorious Egyptian revolutionary.27 The surprise seems to help Paul, since the soldiers grant him his request to “speak to the people” (22:39) — namely, the Jews. He tells the interesting tale of his life, focusing on the road to Damascus experience. Here he accents the part of the story where, after the encounter, he is put under Ananias’s wing in Damascus. It is Ananias who tells him: “The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will and to see the Righteous One and to hear words from his mouth. You will be his witness to all men of what you have seen and heard. Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name” (22:14-16, emphasis added).28
Ananias’s role is important in this telling not only because it is from him that Paul gets his charge to be a witness, but also because he (Ananias) can perform something of a witnessing role for Paul’s listeners. Paul’s encounter on the road is not his to interpret; he needs others to place the strange event in a fruitful context of meaning. Indeed, Ananias speaks for the church, and so for the God who is calling it forth throughout the progression