Luke as historian — the archaeology of Acts

Luke wrote more of the New Testament than any other author — over a quarter of it, in the two volumes of Luke and Acts. He is also the writer who most invites testing. He names governors, cities, ships, officials and dates. Every one of those is a place where he could be caught out.

This article is about Luke in depth: his method, the places where archaeology and inscriptions have checked him, and the places where real difficulties remain. For a broader survey of biblical archaeology, see Archaeology and the Bible in this library.

Luke tells us what he is doing

Luke opens his Gospel with a single, carefully built Greek sentence:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.— Luke 1:1-4

This is the language of ancient historical writing. Like Thucydides, Polybius and Josephus, Luke refers to his predecessors, appeals to eyewitnesses, claims careful investigation and dedicates his work to a named patron. Josephus does the same thing in the preface of Against Apion, dedicated to a patron called Epaphroditus.

Loveday Alexander, in a careful study of the preface, argued that it resembles the prefaces of technical and scientific writers more than the grand openings of political historians. Either way, Luke is presenting himself as a researcher, not a storyteller. Acts opens by picking up the same thread (Acts 1:1-3).

That claim can be tested.

Ramsay changes his mind

Sir William Ramsay (1851–1939) was a classical scholar and archaeologist at Aberdeen who spent years travelling in Asia Minor (modern Turkey). He had absorbed the view, then influential in German scholarship, that Acts was a second-century work of theology dressed as history.

His own account is that fieldwork changed his mind. One famous example: Acts 14:6 says Paul fled from Iconium to "Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia" — implying Iconium was not in Lycaonia. Some ancient writers spoke as though it was. Ramsay found evidence that, at the time of Paul's visit, Iconium was indeed reckoned as Phrygian. Luke had the boundary right for the period.

Detail after detail went the same way. Ramsay concluded, in The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (1915), that "Luke is a historian of the first rank".

Hemer's catalogue

The most thorough modern study is Colin Hemer's The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (1989), completed after his death by Conrad Gempf. Hemer went through Acts, especially chapters 13–28, and catalogued details that can be checked against inscriptions, coins, geography and other literature. Popular books — notably Norman Geisler and Frank Turek's I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist — distil this into a list of 84 facts. The list comes from Hemer's far longer and more nuanced discussion.

A sample of the kinds of details involved:

The point is not any single item but the pattern: a writer moving through a dozen different jurisdictions, each with its own constitution and titles, and consistently getting them right.

Politarchs in Thessalonica

When the mob in Thessalonica drag Jason before the city authorities, Luke calls them politarchai, "city rulers" (Acts 17:6, 8). The word is almost absent from surviving Greek literature, and nineteenth-century critics could treat it as a sign of an uninformed writer.

Inscriptions have since settled the matter. Dozens using the title have been found, mainly in Macedonia, several from Thessalonica itself — including one from the Vardar Gate, now in the British Museum. Luke used exactly the right local term.

Gallio and the Delphi inscription

Acts 18:12-17 describes Paul being hauled before "Gallio, proconsul of Achaia", who dismisses the case as a matter of Jewish law.

Gallio was a real man: Lucius Junius Gallio, elder brother of the philosopher Seneca. At Delphi, fragments of a letter from the emperor Claudius were found and published in the early twentieth century. The letter names Gallio as proconsul and is dated by Claudius's twenty-sixth acclamation as emperor, which places it in AD 52. Since proconsuls normally served a year, Gallio's term was most likely c. AD 51–52.

This is one of the most important finds for New Testament history. It anchors Paul's eighteen months in Corinth (Acts 18:11) to around AD 50–52, and from that fixed point scholars reconstruct the rest of his chronology. It also shows Luke placing a real official in the right province at the right time.

Sergius Paulus

In Paphos, Paul meets "the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, a man of intelligence", who believes (Acts 13:6-12). Inscriptions show that a Lucius Sergius Paullus served as a curator of the Tiber banks in Rome under Claudius, and members of the Sergii Pauli family appear in inscriptions near Pisidian Antioch — which Ramsay suggested might explain why Paul went there next (Acts 13:14). An inscription from Cyprus mentioning a proconsul named Paulus is also sometimes cited, though its date is debated.

The identification of Luke's proconsul with any one of these is likely but not certain. What is clear is that the name and the office fit.

Erastus

Paul sends greetings from "Erastus, the city treasurer" in Corinth (Romans 16:23), and Acts names an Erastus among Paul's helpers (Acts 19:22). In 1929 a paving stone was found near the theatre in Corinth with a Latin inscription recording that Erastus laid the pavement at his own expense in return for his office as aedile.

Many scholars identify him with Paul's Erastus. Others are cautious: the inscription's date is debated, and it is not certain that "city treasurer" (Greek oikonomos) and aedile are the same office. It is a striking possible match, not a proven one, and should be presented that way.

The Asiarchs

During the riot in Ephesus, "some of the Asiarchs, who were friends of his", urged Paul not to enter the theatre (Acts 19:31). Asiarchs were wealthy dignitaries connected with the provincial council of Asia and the imperial cult, attested in many inscriptions. Luke's plural fits a major city like Ephesus, and the detail that such men were friendly to Paul is the sort of thing no later writer had any reason to invent.

The "we" passages

At four points Acts shifts from "they" to "we" (Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1-28:16). Interpretations:

• The author was present. The traditional view, going back to Irenaeus: Luke joined Paul at these stages.
• A travel diary from a companion, used as a source by a later author.
• A literary convention. Vernon Robbins argued that first-person narration was a convention for sea voyages. Critics such as Hemer have replied that many ancient sea voyages are written in the third person, so the supposed convention is not well established.
• A deliberate fiction claiming eyewitness status.

The simplest reading, and the one most consistent with Luke's preface, is that the author was there.

The voyage and the shipwreck

Acts 27 is one of the most detailed accounts of a sea voyage surviving from antiquity. In 1848 James Smith of Jordanhill, an experienced Scottish yachtsman and amateur scholar, published The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, testing the account against what he knew of ancient ships, the prevailing winds and the coastline.

He found that a ship driven by a north-easterly gale (Acts 27:14) from the lee of Cauda would drift, at the rate he estimated, about the right distance to reach Malta in roughly the fourteen days Luke reports (Acts 27:27). He also argued that the soundings of twenty and then fifteen fathoms (Acts 27:28) and the "bay with a beach" (Acts 27:39) fit the approach to what is now St Paul's Bay. Later writers have debated some of his specifics, but the account has repeatedly struck sailors as the work of someone who was on board.

The real difficulties

A writer who is careful in many places still has to be tested in the hard ones. There are two well-known cases.

Quirinius and the census (Luke 2:1-2)

Luke says Jesus was born at the time of a registration ordered by Augustus, "the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria". Both Luke and Matthew place the birth under Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC.

The difficulty: Josephus (Antiquities 18.1.1) records that Quirinius became governor of Syria in AD 6 and conducted a census of Judea when it came under direct Roman rule — about ten years after Herod's death. Luke himself knows this later census: Gamaliel mentions "Judas the Galilean... in the days of the census" (Acts 5:37).

Proposed solutions:

1. "Before Quirinius." The Greek prōtē can mean "before" when followed by a genitive (compare John 1:15, "he was before me"). Luke 2:2 would then read: "This registration took place before Quirinius was governor of Syria" — distinguishing it from the famous one. Grammatically possible; many think it strained.
2. An earlier role for Quirinius. Quirinius was active in the East earlier, campaigning against the Homonadenses. Ramsay and others argued he held an earlier command in Syria; an inscription found near Tivoli mentions an unnamed official who governed Syria "again", but the name is missing and the identification is disputed.
3. An earlier registration under Herod, perhaps linked to an oath of loyalty to Augustus that Josephus mentions, with Luke naming it after the better-known official. Tertullian, interestingly, says the census of Jesus' birth was taken under Sentius Saturninus, a governor of Syria in the last years before Herod's death (Against Marcion 4.19).
4. Luke was mistaken, conflating the AD 6 census with the time of Jesus' birth. This is the majority view in critical scholarship.

Theudas (Acts 5:36)

In Acts 5:36-37, Gamaliel, speaking in the mid-30s, mentions a rebel called Theudas and then "after him" Judas the Galilean (AD 6). Josephus (Antiquities 20.97-98) describes a Theudas who led a movement to the Jordan under the governor Fadus, around AD 44–46 — after Gamaliel's speech, and long after Judas.

Proposed explanations:

• Two different men. Theudas was not a rare name, and Josephus says there were numerous uprisings after Herod's death in 4 BC. Gamaliel's Theudas could have been one of these, before Judas.
• Josephus is wrong. Josephus makes chronological errors elsewhere.
• Luke is wrong, perhaps misremembering or misusing a source. A few have argued Luke misread Josephus, but that requires Acts to be later than Josephus's Antiquities (c. AD 93) and is a minority view.

Again, this is unresolved. It is fair to say that where Luke and Josephus overlap elsewhere — Herod Agrippa I's death (Acts 12:20-23), Felix and Drusilla, Festus, Agrippa II and Bernice — they agree remarkably well.

What this shows

Archaeology cannot prove that the resurrection happened or that Paul's gospel is true. What it can do is tell us what kind of writer Luke was. On the evidence, he was a careful one: a man who knew the right titles in the right cities, who could be anchored to a dated inscription, and whose account of a shipwreck reads to sailors like the work of someone on deck.

That matters because the same writer tells us that the risen Jesus "presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs" (Acts 1:3). Luke asks to be read as a historian. The evidence suggests that request deserves to be taken seriously.