Category: Biblical Studies

The first we-passage: Acts 16:10-17

“Now after he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them. Therefore, sailing from Troas, we ran a straight course to Samothrace, and the next day came to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is the chief city of that part of Macedonia, a colony. And we were staying in that city for some days. And on the Sabbath day we went out of the city to the riverside, where prayer was customarily made; and we sat down and spoke to the women who met there. Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira, who worshipped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul. And when she and her household were baptized, she begged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.” And she constrained us. Now it happened, as we went to prayer, that a certain slave girl possessed with a spirit of divination met us, who brought her masters much profit by fortune-telling. This girl followed Paul and us, and cried out, saying, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to us the way of salvation.”” (New King James Version)

The First “We” reference:
The anonymous “we” intrudes unexpectedly here after Paul’s party, hitherto addressed as “they”, have completed their Jerusalem-ordained mission. After delivering the Jerusalem decrees (Acts 15:23, 30, 41) to these churches and seeing them all now duly strengthened and prospering happily — “so the churches were strengthened in the faith, and increased in number daily” (16:5 – c.f. 2:46-47; 5:42; 6:7; 12:24; 14:21-22) — Paul’s party, “they”, suddenly find themselves lost in a maze. Everywhere they turn leads to a dead-end. Continue reading “The We-Passages in Acts: a Roman Audience Interpretation. Pt 5”

Features shared by all we-passages

1. The “we” are never identified by name or specific role. At best they are left as ambiguously identified with a group associated with the author. (One of the reasons, but not a necessary one, for associating the narrative’s “we” with the author is because the author appears to introduce himself as the singular first person “I” in the prologue. This “I” must also be read as a “narrative voice” but that is another topic.) Despite this apparent indentificaion with the author, there appears to be a studied design by the author to avoid personal identification: the author addresses his patron by the otherwise unknown Theophilus (“Lover of God”) but unlike known historians does not identify himself. This cannot be explained by modesty. If the auhor was really so modest why would he use “we” at all? But it is characteristic of fictional works. Nor can the abrupt usages of “we” be explained by the author copying and pasting portions of sources written with that “we” into his account. His literary competence clearly exceeds such crude copy and paste methods.

2. The we-passages are travel itineraries. The “we” disappears soon after the author’s attention turns again to Paul’s central role in a new adventure.

3. All we-passages are found in voyages that begin at Troas and that accompany Paul, as a result of divine calling, as he ultimately heads for Rome or a city that represents or is an extension of Rome. (The second voyage is broken by several adventures and speeches of Paul yet the we-passages maintain the readers’ consciousness that these breaks are merely pauses in what is essentially the one long journey to Rome (Acts 19:21).) I will also argue that the broken we-passages of the second voyage are held together by parallel events in Ephesus and Jerusalem, and three two-year periods of preaching by Paul, in Ephesus, Jerusalem and Rome.

4. Both extended we-passages result in Paul being made a prisoner among the Romans in the Roman city, even though the prison in both cases is an open one through which he can preach and make conversions.

I argue below that the deliberate lack of personal identification serves the function of appearing to be a rhetorical invitation to a Roman audience to vicariously identify with those re-enacting their founding voyage from Troas to a new spiritual home in Rome. Not that the author was consciously writing only or mainly to a Roman audience. The wider original audience or readers would also have read this “history” as emanating from Rome or the Roman church, and they also would have read the we-passages as pertaining primarily to that provenance.

The travel itinerary, the divine calling, the point of departure (Troas) and destinations (whether to the Roman colony in Macedonia or to Rome itself via the lengthy detour and detention in Jerusalem) all follow the template of the Roman founding myth popularized by Virgil’s Aeneid. Acts, I will attempt to demonstrate, is a blending of the founding myths of both Rome and Israel. When we recognize these respective founding myths in the subtext of Acts we find our perenniel questions over such oddities as the we-passages and sudden ending of Acts are readily resolved.

We-passages testify against, not for, genuine eyewitness account

It is commonly asserted (rarely actually argued) that the most natural way of understanding the we-passages is to read them as eyewitness reports, and that as such they testify to the historicity of the events they describe. While the author’s use of “we” inevitably leads a reader to imagine an eyewitness account, at the same time it simply breaks all rules of literary rhetoric and common reading experience to say that it logically follows that the “we” indicates a genuine historical record. Everyone knows that fiction written in the first person “I” or “we” is still fiction. (And this applies to ancient classical literature as much as to modern novels.) No-one believes that a first-person narrative is a criterion for genuine historicity in any other field of literature, so when an exception to this common knowledge is made in the case of Acts one may fairly conclude we are confronting a case of theological apologetics.

Ancient historians were conscious of their need to establish credibility and to this end they identified both themselves and their sources. As Robbins notes of the historian Thucydides, he was strongly conscious of presenting himself as a trustworthy and accurate historian, even using the third person to tell of events in which he was personally involved. The historian Xenophon did the same. To impress readers with his accuracy and objectivity he speaks of himself always in the third person “he”, never as “I” or “we”. The historian Arrian likewise described a sea-voyage, for which he had a personal account, in the third person. The author of Acts avoids both citing any sources and allowing the reader to know his or her identity. Even the we-passages are anonymous. Even by the standards of ancient historians that simply does not rate as history. It is, rather, the rhetoric of fiction. Acts makes no pretence to match the historical tone of the more reputable ancient historians. Its third person narrative lacks any reference to the author’s identity, sources used and alternative accounts of events – characteristics common to Hellenistic histories. Its tone and rhetoric are those of a Hellenistic adventure novel. [Pervo]

Before continuing with the next section of this I will add to the above some extracts from the authors referenced and add full citations to demonstrate the argument.