Baur argued that Acts was written in the mid second century, around 140-150 C.E.
Baur saw Acts as an attempt to heal a rift in Christianity between two factions originally led by Peter and Paul. Christianity in Baur’s view had been divided between Jewish Christians who saw Jesus as the hope of their historical expectations, who held to the Torah and allowed gentiles into their ranks if they adhered to the Torah too, on the one hand, and gentile Christians on the other, who taught salvation by faith in Jesus only, and dismissed the Torah as ineffective for salvation.
Baur was influenced by the work of his student, Schneckenburger, who demonstrated extensive parallels between Peter and Paul in Acts. They both:
- perform similar miracles
- experience life-changing visions
- deliver apologetic and evangelistic speeches
- undergo imprisonments followed by miraculous releases
Further, Peter’s speeches sound like Paul’s letters, with stress on good conscience and salvation by faith — Acts 10:34-35; 11:18; 15:11
While Paul’s speeches with one exception (13:39) sound very unlike his letters. They are instead fundamentally Jewish, with emphasis on monotheism, creation, resurrection, observance of Torah, identification with Pharisees — Acts 21-26; 21:17-26; 23: 6, 8; 26:5
Baur saw Acts as an attempt to make Peter sound like Paul and Paul like Peter. The reason was to heal the breach between the two factions and make their differences seem trivial. Acts, it was thus argued, was an attempt to reconcile the Petrine (Jewish) and Pauline (gentile) factions.
Acts was believed to be written by a member of the Pauline faction extending an olive branch to the Jewish faction, showing a willingness to compromise or cover over past differences.
Baur believed the rift between the Jewish and gentile factions lasted well into the second century, so Acts was not produced until then. Much depended on the dates of Matthew and Luke, and Baur was convinced that Matthew was written in the 130’s c.e. Baur believed Matthew was the first gospel to be written.
The Gospel of Matthew dated at 130-134 c.e.
For Baur, references in Matthew 24 best fit the time of the second Jewish war in the time of Hadrian (117-138 c.e.), and testified to being authored at the time Hadrian’s new city, Aelia Capitolina, was being built on the site of Jerusalem:
- False messianic and false prophet claims in Matt 24:5 & 11 best refer to Bar Kokhba, leader of the Jewish rebellion who was regarded as the Messiah.
- The “abomination of desolation” (Matt 24:15) best described Hadrian’s plan to build a temple to Jupiter on the site of the old Jewish temple.
- The tribulation of Matt 24 best fit the beginning of Rome’s construction of a new pagan city on the site of Jerusalem.
Followed by Luke and Acts
Baur understood Matthew to be the first gospel, and believed it was used by the author of Luke for his gospel.
He also shared the general conviction that Marcion used an early version of Luke, along with the letters of Paul, as his authoritative scripture.
The canonical form of Luke was subsequently produced as an anti-Marcionite text.
Acts only appeared after canonical Luke.
Hence Acts was the product of some time in the mid-second century.
Lightfoot (see notes in previous post: Dating the Book of Acts: 2, Evidence for an intermediate date) challenged Baur’s view by arguing that the letters of Ignatius (and 1 Clement) were from the period of Trajan — late first-early second century — and that they demonstrated no tension between Petrine and Pauline factions. Baur’s argument depended on the rift continuing well into the second century.
(Next post will look at a more recent reconsideration of the late date of Acts.)
Above notes taken from pages 3-5 of Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle, by Joseph B. Tyson (2006)
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Neil,
I was looking through some of your past Vridar posts and came across this one from 2007. I noticed in the post that “Baur believed Matthew was the first gospel to be written.” And that he put it at “130-134 c.e.” But as far as I know Baur thought the original Petrine-Pauline rift occurred nearly a hundred years earlier than that. I haven’t read Baur but I am wondering whether he ever considered the possibility that the real rift was in the second century but was literarily projected back into the first century. Did your source for these notes say anything about that?
I was able to find access to one of Baur’s books online. He did indeed think that the rift was a long-running one, lasting from its start in the 40s until its resolution by Acts of the Apostles around 150. He seems to have dated the rift that early because saw Galatians as being early and accepted its description of the disagreement pretty much at face value.
I find the idea of a hundred-year rift unlikely. And I doubt the rift started early. If it had, I expect the author of Matthew would have put something on Jesus’ lips regarding circumcision for Gentiles. I think it more likely that the early rift scenario was invented by whoever (Cerdo?) put Galatians together around 145 and the intent behind the fiction was to create an early support for independence from the Mattheans of his own day who appealed to the Twelve.
(By the way, Baur subscribed to the Griesbach sequence of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, but some other members of the Tubingen school, e.g., Holsten and Hilgenfeld, subscribed to a Matthew, Mark, Luke sequence.)
Yet Baur placed Matthew’s composition 130-134. At least in his 1847 work: https://vridar.org/2026/04/03/the-abomination-of-desolation-in-jesus-prophecy-more-scholars-who-support-its-surprising-identity/
Who “invented” the Twelve? Where do they first appear in our sources?
If the Paulines only come into view with Marcion/Cerdo, it may be that Matthew is the earliest mention of the Twelve.
So let me float this scenario based on the fact that Matthew alternates narrative with discourse and some have always suspected that Matthew was preceded by a collection of logia of the Lord. Perhaps Matthew was the first to create a narrative for the logia. The Twelve were part of the narrative he created.
Any obvious problems with this float?
It occurs to me that this scenario might also account for the puzzling saying: “This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled” (Mt. 24:34). As part of the collection of logia the verse had no timestamp and so was not a problem. The problem arose when the logia were placed in the new narrative and in that setting it had either passed or was close to passing its shelf life. It may have been left in thinking there were ways around the problem, e.g., it was a later saying from the risen Jesus and only lodged with the apocalyptic sayings due to similarity of subject matter. Thus the clock would only start ticking from the time that the risen Jesus delivered the prophecy.
Has the saying ever been a problem for the faithful — at any time in history?
For scoffers, yes, (2 Peter 3:4), but not for the truly faithful. For them Matthew does seem to have taken care of any potential problem right in the text, by having Jesus foresee a delay:
“But if that wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed…… ‘” (Mt 24:48) and
“As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept.” (Mt 25:5)
So if Jesus himself foretold delay, the faithful need never file a missing persons report.
Paul mentions the 12 in 1 Corinthians 15:5, but are you thinking that to have been an interpolation?
Of course it is interpolated, as already seen from a comparison with what the patristic writers pretended to be Marcionite text. The deceptive interpolation of 15:5 through 15:10 serves the purpose of feigning a Jerusalem-based origin of the apostolic mission, as pretended especially in the Gospel according to Saint Luke (24:44 – 49) and the Acts of the Apostles.
Regardless of whether interpolated or not, the Paulines as a collection of letters (including 1 Corinthians) only surely come into view with Marcion/Cerdo. The Ignatians and 1 Clement appear to know at least some parts of 1 Corinthians but I’m not convinced those writings are really earlier. (Carrier would disagree about 1 Clement).
It appears to me that “in the beginning everything was logia”, Mark, too, according to Papias, iirc. I quote below from Markus Vinzent.
We don’t encounter the Gospel of Matthew until the 140s (excluding logia that appear in Matthew — logia references leave open the question of an actual narrative gospel of Matthew.) If the Gospel of Matthew is known to exist around the same time as controversies over Marcion, it is tempting to suspect a link of some kind there. If we have been naively reading Tertullian (taking his rhetoric literally and missing what his rhetoric implies about the actual claims of Marcion — as per Vinzent) there is a good case (I think it’s at least very reasonable) that Marcion was the first to arrange logia into narrative contexts.
Matthew was horrified and rewrote the narrative context and some of the logia to put them back into an Old Testament context — and in so doing reestablished the Twelve. (Were the Apostles up till then linked to various logia?)
Matthew at the same time rehabilitated the Twelve with a vengeance — ensuring the representatives of Israel, or the New Israel, took the lead, the Rock of authority, over Paul.
From MV’s Marcion and the Dating… pp 92f,
And from Tertullian’s Preface on Marcion’s Gospel (p. 388)
I am not aware that any of the heresy hunters ever said Marcion claimed to have written the first gospel. My understanding is that he claimed to have written the original Luke, and that judaizers subsequently tampered with his gospel. And that contention appears to be correct. But I can’t recall any supposed Marcionite claims about his having produced the first written gospel.
The way I read Galatians is that the Simonian Paul acknowledges that there were apostles “before” (Gal 1:17) him. And so, since he “had been entrusted with the gospel of the uncircumcised, even as that of the circumcised had been to Peter” (Gal. 2:7), he is acknowledging that Peter beat him to the punch at least as far as the oral gospel message was concerned. Peter’s apostleship was earlier and so the gospel Peter preached to the circumcised was earlier.
So, am I understanding correctly that, according to Vinzent, Marcion claimed that Paul had beat Peter into print?
I have had a post on the front/back burner for a little while and will try to get it up soon. That will explain what I mean. In short, Vinzent sees Marcion has having written the first gospel (setting logia in a narrative) but it was not meant to be published (hence no name, no title attached) but used in his school. Others responded to this with their own written gospels that were published. Marcion responded to them with his Antitheses along with Paul’s letters and his own gospel (possibly partly revised in response to the four others) for publication.
I put the origin of the twelve into pre-synoptic tradition.
The feeding miracles with 5000 people leave twelve containers of remains, whereas those with 4000 people leave seven containers of remains.
So the feeding of 4000 leads to the twelve apostles, while the other one leads to the seven deacons. The deacons are largely ignored in the NT,: The Acts of the Apostles mention briefly the deacons, such as martyred Saint Stephan; but this is a really minor role.
The traditions, yielding different etiologies for the liturgical ceremony of bread-breaking, must have developed in various region, and a decision between them had to be made by the gospel writers.
I suppose that the feeding of the 4000, devoid of specifically messianic midrash, leads to John or some promised prophet rather than the Messiah as the primary protagonist of an etiological tale for the holy mass: No specifically messianic prophecies are employed.
Do you mean that Mark took two different etiologies from two different communities and put them both in his gospel?
Certainly I mean that. It is somewhat similar to the doubling of claims about Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the Book of Acts.
What would Paul have thought of these two traditions being maintained alongside the Last Supper trad, if that’s what they were?
I have already explained in some other place how I see the evolution from an early Last Supper narrative (with no bread, and only an eschatological cup of wine) to the very late doctrine of bread and wine as messianic flesh and blood — a long road paved with misunderstandings and plot twists. The infamous lines in the First epistle to the Corinthians, referencing somewhat the narrative of the last supper, have been suspected as interpolated by even much less radical people such as Winsome Munro (or similar).
The second chapter of The Book of the Acts of the Apostles is actually involved in the procedure:
The verses following 2:42 pretends to describe the practice of early Christians. I break this into two types of practice: 2:42-45 describes the life of gentile monastic communities, 2:46-47 that of believers living as Jewish family men. These could be the fractions assigned to Saint Paul and Saint Peter, respectively.
The mentioned lines from 1 Co 11 can be seen as an attempt to reconcile those practices. The interpolator knows of a still rudimentary account of the last supper and gives it a new spin, which in turn caused later gospel redactors, for whom the however fake Paul was considered an authority, to update their respective accounts.Jo
I don’t know the grounds on which we justify assuming strands of traditions behind this and that text. Are there not simpler explanations — and some more in accord with tangible or independently confirmed evidence — that do not require assumptions of some rationalized “historical truth” behind various theological writings?
Markan priorists also existed in the school of Baur, most notably G. Volkmar. This site already contains some of his works.
By the times of authoring the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, several liturgical variants have developped; whence the authors (main or interpolations) were compelled to evaluate variants and make decisions.
It takes quite some time for divergent practices (and the etiologies for justifying them) to develop and to become a problem requiring the intervention of the intellectuals of the church.; which exclusdes a too early completed authoring of the canonical form.
Nevertheless, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles provides a window for inspecting a posteriori the evolution and distribution of community practice.