Many modern scholars have attempted to find some middle ground concerning Acts. One example of this is Marion Soards. While he does not accept Acts as a primary source for establishing a chronology for Paul’s life, he does believe that the book has value as a secondary source. Soards says that Acts, “may be used cautiously as a supplement to the primary materials when it is not in conflict with the letters.”31 He believes that it is important that both sources be used, Paul’s letters and Acts, when attempting to develop a chronology of Paul’s life and ministry.32
Johannes Munck also acknowledges that both Acts and Paul’s letters are important if one wants to gain a clear picture of the early church, especially where Paul was concerned. However, Munck does believe that Paul’s letters hold more weight than Acts even though he argues that in many places Acts is a valid primary source for information on the early church.33 In arguing strongly against the Tübingen point-of-view of Acts, Munck says,
Freed from the load of tradition, [Acts] gives us a much clearer picture of primitive Christianity, and that its presentation of Jewish Christianity does not open between Paul and Jerusalem the deep chasms that the Tübingen School took for granted . . .34
C. K. Barrett is another scholar who appears to occupy this middle ground concerning Acts. While Barrett accepts much of Acts as a valid source for how the early church developed, he is much more critical in the way he examines Luke’s presentation of Paul. Barrett concludes that Luke’s Paul is so different from the Paul that one sees in his own letters, that Luke resorted to “degrees of fictitiousness.”35 Barrett believes that if the author of Acts were actually a personal companion and admirer of Paul his presentation of him would be more consistent with the Paul who wrote the letters.36
The speeches that are put in the mouths of Peter and Paul are another area in which Barrett believes the author of Acts exercised creativity. Barrett is one of many scholars who thinks that Luke attempted to create a speech that Peter or Paul might have spoken, but he believes that Luke completely missed the mark with Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Athens in Acts 17.37 Barrett believes that Paul would never have preached a message like this and there does not appear to be any flexibility in Barrett’s thinking that Paul might have preached in different ways to different audiences.38
Barrett’s conclusion concerning the historicity of Acts is interesting. He appears to contradict his own views when he says,
We cannot prove that it happened in the way that Luke describes, but if it did not it must have happened in a similar way or the result could not have been what it was—the result that a Christian church came into being in Jerusalem, and that in tentative, diverse, uncoordinated ways it spread out into the Mediterranean
world . . . 39
A third group of scholars that will be mentioned are those that are conservative in their outlook and have continued to treat Acts as an accurate historical narrative of the growth of the early church. They also hold to the traditional view that it was written by Luke, the companion of Paul.40 This has been the accepted tradition of Acts throughout church history. The first mention of Luke’s authorship goes back to the Muratorian Canon in AD 190.41 The traditional view went unchallenged until the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of the Tübingen School. While most scholars who hold to the traditional view of Acts would acknowledge that there are problems in developing a chronology of events based on Acts, they do not see these conflicts as insurmountable. Colin Hemer, for example, does not see Acts as an exhaustive history of the early church but rather a framework for the historian to build on.42 By accepting this view of Acts as a framework, it is much easier to answer the arguments of those who believe that Luke was not an adequate historian because he was so selective in what he recorded. Luke never intended for his work to be a comprehensive account of church history.
Hemer also challenges the notion that Paul’s letters are unbiased and that Acts is not a trustworthy source. The argument can be made that Paul also had an agenda in his writings and it would have affected his objectivity to the events that he was describing. He was not an unbiased observer, for example, in the meetings with the apostles in Jerusalem that he writes about in Galatians. Both Acts and Paul’s letters must be used and tested by the canons of historical criticism.43 Hemer also argues that the “we” sections in Acts should be included in the primary source category. The author’s participation in the narrative elevates the material from a secondary to a primary source.44
Another important point to remember when dealing with Paul’s writings is the fact that even in his “autobiographical” passages, he was not attempting to write a chronology for his readers. In these passages, he is attempting to make certain points, not present a history of his life. In Galatians 1:13—2:10, for example, Paul is interested in showing his independence from the Jerusalem apostles, not in providing a detailed chronology for his early life.45
W. M. Ramsay, while accepting Acts’ accuracy, acknowledges that Luke was not interested in documenting everything that the modern reader wishes he would have. “He dismisses ten years in a breath, and devotes a chapter to a single incident. His character as an historian, therefore, depends on his selection of topics.”46 This idea of Luke’s being selective in his choice of topics is one that will be dealt with later on when the focus of the study turns more specifically to Peter and Paul. It was Ramsay whose archaeological research at the end of the nineteenth century marked the end of Tübingen School’s “reign” in the theological world.47 Ramsay’s research verified the historicity of much of Acts and even over one hundred years after it was first published, continues to hold its own among modern scholarship and research.
Another scholar who holds to the traditional view concerning Acts is Luke Timothy Johnson. While readily acknowledging that Luke was a selective writer, he concludes that,
Taking into account his fidelity to the one source we can check, his general accuracy in matters we know about from archaeological or documentary sources, and the overall agreement between his description of Paul’s movements and the description in the Pauline letters, we conclude that Luke is accurate in what he tells us.48
In Johnson’s view, Luke did have an agenda that motivated his writing both a Gospel and an account of the early church. Merely having an agenda, however, does not make Luke a bad historian. It just means that he only covered the part of the story that fit with his purposes.49 One example of this is that Acts is devoted almost exclusively to the ministries of Peter and Paul. There were other apostles and missionaries in the early church, but Luke was not concerned with telling their story. Martin Hengel echoes this idea when he says, “In reality, the writers in the New Testament make their