I was asked by a patron to evaluate an article by Neo-Christian theologian Greg Boyd on the book of Acts being “a reliable history” (“Is the Book of Acts Reliable?,” which you can find at his mission website ReKnew). Of course I have extensively argued that Acts is revisionist history—as have many specialists in this book, like Richard Pervo, who wrote the current Hermeneia commentary on it, which I highly recommend, along with his brief The Mystery of Acts; and Gregory Sterling, in Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts, and Apologetic Historiography; Clare Rothschild, in Luke-Acts and the Rhetoric of History: An Investigation of Early Christian Historiography; John Crossan, in The Power of Parable, pp. 196-217; Thomas Brodie, in Birthing of the New Testament, pp. 377-445; and even the famed Hans Conzelmann and Ernst Haenchen, whom Boyd even acknowledges (see also The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting, to which several scholars contributed; and the Westar Seminar Report on Acts and its associated publication Acts and Christian Beginnings).

Acts is highly fictional. It is propaganda. It is not critical or honest history. I provide details (and cite scholarship concurring) in Not the Impossible Faith (esp. Chs. 7 & 13) and On the Historicity of Jesus (esp. Ch. 9). But here I will provide a point-by-point rebuttal to the false or dubious claims of Boyd.

The Other Way Around

Apologetics operates on three primary rules: (1) straw man (don’t describe or respond to the actual arguments of real experts, but only fake arguments that are easy to tear down); (2) then leave evidence out (everything that undermines your narrative and you can’t explain away, don’t mention it); (3) then argue backwards: rather than subjecting a hypothesis to bona fide falsification tests, decide what you want to be true, and then cherry-pick any evidence you can spin to support that narrative (ignore everything that doesn’t fit; distort anything that can be made to fit; and fallaciously argue from whatever is left to the conclusion that you need to be true). If you feel you have to, you can deploy a fourth rule: (4) make up whatever you need to explain away any evidence that uncomfortably refutes you, and yet, for whatever reason, you can’t conceal from your audience (and that means, indeed, “make up,” rather than prove true, or even likely—with evidence—that your excuse is even plausible, much less true). We’ll see all these rules deployed by Boyd.

If one needs Acts to be a reliable history, and not revisionist history (a.k.a. “bullshit”), one needs to “leave out” all the evidence that it repeatedly contradicts the eyewitness testimony of Paul, and in precisely the ways that suit its author’s agendas, and that it mimics known tropes and features distinctive of fiction and propaganda, and conspicuously omits all the actual markers of reliable histories (for a demonstration of all these points, see OHJ, Ch. 9.1). One also needs to not treat it in the same critical way you would every other historical or journalistic account; such as conveniently “not noticing” (much less actually honestly mentioning) that it violates the standards exhibited in even the poorest—much less the best—ancient histories (for a demonstration of this point, see NIF, Ch. 7). Indeed, one must assiduously ignore all relevant contextual markers for the actual content of Acts and the methods of honest vs. dishonest composers of historical tales in the ancient world. That people routinely tried to pass off lies as genuine history was a major problem regularly complained of at the time (see Lucian’s How to Write History and Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus; for more examples, see T.J. Luce, “Ancient Views on the Causes of Bias in Historical Writing,” Classical Philology 84.1 (1989), pp. 16-31).

Which also means you have to pretend all the other fake Christian histories don’t exist. Yet there are over twenty other “Acts” in ancient Christian literature all of which even most fundamentalists (and all actual experts) agree are bogus—making “bogus” by far the normal status of any Christian “Acts.” Besides the Acts of Peter, the Acts of John, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Andrew, the Acts of Peter and the Twelve, the Acts of Pilate, the Acts of Carpus, the Acts of Apollonius, the Acts of Thomas, and the Acts of Perpetua, we also know of yet more Acts of John and of Pilate and of Peter and of Andrew and of Peter and Paul, as well as an Acts of Barnabas, Acts of Thaddeus, Acts of Timothy, Acts of Philip, Acts of Xanthippe, Acts of Mar Mari, Acts of Matthias, and what must have been an Acts of James. (For context, see: Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom; M. David Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths; Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture; Bart Ehrman, Lost Scriptures and Forgery and Counterforgery; and Alan Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World.)

Our Acts contains no indication of being any more honest or reliable; to the contrary, it’s rife with indications of being no better. Indeed, we have two entire versions of it, one some ten percent longer—and scholars cannot honestly tell which is actually the original. That is how freely Christians were willing to doctor it to suit their wishes. In actual fact, faking histories was the norm for Christians; even beyond the damning example of the entire Acts genre, the religion was always awash with forgery and lies (see for example How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity and The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies; for more examples and discussion, see OHJ, Ch. 5, Element 44). We therefore have no a priori reason to trust the canonical Acts at all.

So this is the context always left out that we have to put back in, before evaluating any Christian apologetics on the point—which we can expect will certainly never tell you any of this. Boyd is no exception.

Boyd’s Agenda

Greg Boyd opens by spelling out his agenda (which is honest of him): he needs the modern view of Jesus as God to be provably the belief of the first Apostles, and to get that result he needs Acts to be reliable. But he maneuvers into this program with a non sequitur built on top of a straw man: he falsely depicts the contrary “liberal” argument as the view that back then no one, least of all Jesus himself, thought he was divine in any way, but just an inspiring leader; ergo, any evidence that they thought differently, proves Boyd’s theological dogma that Jesus and his Disciples all preached that Jesus was in fact God. Q.E.D.

This is of course a non sequitur, because the false dichotomy he’s set up—either “just a guy” or “totally God”—is a straw man. There are liberal scholars who argue as he described (he cherry-picks examples); but most in fact don’t. The majority view today is in the middle, between the two extremes Boyd has falsely listed as the only options: that the first Christians (and possibly Jesus himself, although this is not considered knowable on the evidence we have) preached that Jesus was an incarnation of a pre-existent angelic being—not literally God (so, no Nicene creed), but a subordinate creature assigned some of the powers and properties of God (see Philippians 2:5-11, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Hebrews 1:1-2, Colossians 1:15-20, etc.; see OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 10), who only assumed a mortal body temporarily, so he could be crucified and raised from the dead (thereby fulfilling a secret end-times prophecy), all at what was then thus signaled to be the end of days (making Jesus “the firstfruits” of the general resurrection, soon to put a final end to it all).

The Book of Acts never contradicts this, the actual dominant position of liberal scholarship; so even if Boyd could rescue Acts as reliable, he can’t get from there to his desired dogma that Jesus “is God.” That’s simply not there. Likewise, you’ll notice Boyd will continually conflate “taught that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead” with “taught that Jesus was God.” Those are not the same thing. No mainstream scholar today doubts the former. All mainstream scholars today doubt the latter. Boyd falsely claims liberal scholarship doubts both (which is false); and illogically claims that, therefore, Acts proves the earliest Christians believed Jesus was God (which is a non sequitur, because these claims are not the same thing). Boyd likewise conflates “is the Son of God” with “is identical to God,” a mistake no expert on this subject makes, liberal or otherwise (see Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus? and Was Jesus-Is-Michael an Early Christian Mystery Teaching?). And so on.

Of course, what Acts evinces as this cult’s beliefs at the time is not evidence those beliefs are true, but that fallacy requires no further critique. In the end, his entire project fails even in its core logic. It simply can’t produce the results he wants. But he acts like it does, by relying on those four “methods” of disingenuous apologetical reasoning. Nevertheless, here I am only interested in the premise that Acts is reliable. So, that its being reliable won’t help Boyd get what he wants shouldn’t deter us from continuing. All sorts of apologetical aims could be advanced on that premise, so we still need to know if it’s true.

The Author of Acts

Competent scholars all admit: we do not know who wrote Acts. But when identifying the author of a book who conspicuously chose not to put their name on it or even say who they were (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts), Boyd wants us to believe unsourced and implausible legends about Acts dating half a century after it was published (which was then a whole human lifetime, given average life-expectancies). This is the opposite of a reliable historical methodology. So it might not surprise us that Boyd can’t tell a reliable history from an unreliable one—he himself is an unreliable historian! If we assumed Luke worked the way Boyd did, we could dismiss Luke-Acts entirely as based on unsourced anonymous hearsay. Not the result Boyd would want.

But observe the way Boyd’s disingenuous rhetoric operates: he says “the traditional authorship of Acts is unanimously attested to in the early Church” as “Luke, the ‘beloved physician’ and companion of Paul.” He wants us to think that “unanimous” means multiple independent sources. In fact it does not. He means one story, originating from one unnamed person, who cited no sources or evidence and was a lifetime removed from the book’s authorship—which continued to be repeated. That actually means the opposite of what Boyd wants us to conclude. Whereas having multiple independent corroborations of a detail is indeed evidence for it being true (even if not itself a proof; that would always depend on the particulars), seeing everyone just repeat the same, late, unreliably-sourced tale means none of these people knew who actually wrote Luke. They clearly had no sources at all; just an anonymous urban legend. We should therefore not conclude this legend is true. (For examples of how this “trusting unsourced hearsay” method was used to fabricate all manner of history for Christianity, see How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity; as well as: Did Polycarp Meet John the Apostle? and Why You Should Not Believe the Apostle John Wrote the Last Gospel, and The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies.)

Boyd is impressed that Luke is the name of one of Paul’s several companions in Philemon 24 (although Boyd seems not to know that Col. 4:14 and 2 Tim. 4:11 are forgeries: see Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics). But most scholars believe the name assigned to this Gospel came from these texts, specifically to invent an authority to credit it to (see Ehrman’s series beginning with “Problems with Luke as the Author of Luke” and his discussion in Forgery and Counterforgery, pp. 51-52 and 264-82). They do not believe that these texts refer to an author. Because they don’t—not even the forgeries say the Luke they name wrote anything, much less this.

And that is damning to the legend. Because the idea that this Luke was “a doctor” appears only in the forgery (Col. 4:14), not the (possibly?) authentic letter to Philemon. That means the same story every Church father kept retelling was spun out of a text that invented the idea of Luke being a doctor, yet still never said this “Dr. Luke” wrote Luke-Acts, so even the forger of Colossians had never heard that. That legend thus sits at the end of a typical telephone-game of fabrication: first, Paul had a companion named Luke (among others); a lifetime later, the idea that this Luke is a doctor gets invented; and only then, yet another lifetime later, is the idea invented that this fictional doctor is the guy who wrote Luke-Acts. And we never get to hear who invented this tale, or why they believed it or where they are supposed to have heard it. This is the very worst kind of information we could possibly have. It is simply unusable for reconstructing who really wrote Acts.

In actual fact the name “Luke” is not attached to the Acts of the Apostles. It is literally anonymous. It does refer to a previous volume as being written by the same person, and most scholars believe, from good stylometric evidence, that that’s true. But that book is titled Kata Loukan, “According to Luke” (the word “Gospel” is not present), a formula in Greek that did not designate author, but source. So the author cannot have added that title; this is an attribution, being added later by someone else. This unusual way of titling a book is unprecedented, and appears only after the Gospels began circulating together as a fourfold unit (see David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament; and my brief in Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts), which means these titles were assigned to them only then. Which means when the Gospels originally circulated separately, they had no such titles—and thus no such names. This is supported by the fact that when a version of Luke circulated before the one we have was published as Kata Loukan, it was then indeed unnamed. Tertullian even complained that Marcion’s Gospel lacked the name of Luke—of course, Tertullian could not countenance the likelihood that this was because it had no name yet.

For all these reasons, the fact that the author chose not to identify themselves (as they certainly don’t, anywhere in the actual text of either Luke or Acts) should signal to us that any external claims as to who he was are dubious. This is confirmed by the fact that, unlike many other histories of the era, the author never identifies themselves in the text. They never state their name; they never explain who they are; they never articulate why we are to trust them; they never talk about their involvement in anything they report; and they never appear in the story as an identifiable character or observer, a participant in any conversation, or even contemplator of events. I already addressed in my last article the three brief sections where an anonymous and unexplained first person plural arises in the text, where “we” do some of these things (for example, they collectively speak one sentence in Acts 21:14). But the author never identifies themselves there either, which violates every convention of genuine eyewitness reporting in ancient historical accounts. It still leaves us wondering why he never explains who he is, why he is there sometimes and not others, why he disappears and reappears where he does, and why he never interacts individually with any characters or events in the story (why we never get the first person singular).

Boyd of course wants to spin yarns out of this, insisting “the most impressive indication of” the author’s “companionship with Paul is the incidental way the author switches from the usual first person singular to the first person plural at certain junctures in his narrative.” Note the rhetoric: a fact that is actually damning to his thesis he is painting as “the most impressive indication” of it. Of course there is no narrative “first person singular” in Acts (it appears only outside the narration, in Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1-2); so I hope Boyd meant “third person” and just mistyped (both the singular and plural third person is the regular mode of writing across Luke-Acts; except of course in speeches, where a speaker will refer to themselves in the first person). But this is precisely what is weird: for a narrative to go from third person to first person plural and back again without any explanation makes no sense on any theory of it, least of all Boyd’s. But I addressed this last time.

This wouldn’t help identify the author of Acts anyway. None of these “we” is said to be Luke or a doctor; and we have no evidence they even existed. Inventing eyewitnesses was a well-known custom in ancient myth and history. There is a whole chapter on this in Cameron, Greek Mythography, and an infamous example is the recent suspicion that Josephus invented his witnesses to the Gamala and Masada suicides. I’ve similarly presented evidence the authors of the Gospel of John invented the “beloved disciple” (originally the fictional character Lazarus) as an eyewitness whose imaginary diary they claim to have consulted (On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 10.7). So even if the author of Acts meant for us to regard those (and for some reason only those?) passages as eyewitness accounts, we still have no reason to believe that’s even genuine.

When we look at the whole of Acts (below), we don’t get the impression of an author being honest with us about anything. He’s writing myth, not history. So we can expect any witnesses he is supposed to be claiming are just as mythical. But since he never cites any of these people, or anyone anywhere, as witnesses, we should abandon even that notion. When the presence of a witness mattered to them at all, real ancient historians typically named them or explained or indicated why they trusted them (or why we should, if they even thought we should). The author of Acts never does this. Which negates any inference that that’s what he wanted us to infer. It is often overlooked that in Luke 1, the author never actually says he consulted any witnesses—he says, rather, that he is slavishly reproducing a tradition handed down by them, through an unstated and thus unknown number of intermediaries (see my analysis in NIF, Ch. 7). And even that we know to be a lie—Luke routinely alters the traditions we know to have preceded him (namely, those of Matthew, Mark, and Paul).

In the end, as I explained last time, I’m pretty sure the “we” passages are a dramatic convention, popular then among sea voyage narratives, and drawing the reader in to events as part of the “we” (reflecting the same device Luke began his two volumes with), constructing a figurative three-part death-and-resurrection narrative for his audience to participate in. Be that as it may, one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that the author of Acts was in no way present during these events, nor likely even alive at the time. So at best, he’s being clever and fashionable in his narrative construction; at worst, he is just lying. Boyd has no evidence to the contrary. Whereas, as we’ll see, we have ample evidence of Luke not being a reliable narrator, nor a person even of Paul’s time.

When it comes to actual evidence scholars advance against the notion that the author of Luke knew Paul, Boyd conspicuously never mentions any of it. Instead, he only tackles a straw man, speaking of “supposed discrepancies between Paul and Luke’s theology” not being indicative (and he’s right; a companion could disagree with Paul or paraphrase him inexpertly), rather than the more damning fact that Luke repeatedly (and egregiously) contradicts Paul’s own eyewitness testimony, and thus gets historical and narrative facts wrong, not just “theology.” Likewise, as apologists do with Gospel contradictions, Boyd falsely claims “the supposed differences are all minor,” but that is not true for the historical contradictions, which are quite major; in fact, impossible for anyone actually there—or willing to tell the truth if they were. Boyd is thus cherry-picking, to construct a straw man to “refute,” and hiding from his readers all the actual reasons scholars reject Boyd’s case. Typical apologetics.

For example, Boyd cherry-picks the feeble argument that “the Paul of Acts was willing to have Timothy circumcised” whereas the Paul of the Epistles was uncompromising about such things, thus suggesting a contradiction in theological stance. Boyd dispatches this straw man by noting that, actually, Paul “was extremely flexible on matters of social propriety (1 Cor. 9:19–23; Rom. 14:5–23).” But the real problem here was not some abstract theological point, but the fact that Acts is contradicting history. This is what Paul, an actual eyewitness, says happened:

Then after fourteen years [after a brief visit of only two weeks, never otherwise even having stepped foot in Judea], I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. I went in response to a revelation and, meeting privately with those esteemed as leaders, I presented to them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. I wanted to be sure I was not running and had not been running my race in vain. Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. This matter arose because some false believers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves. We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.

Acts gets the guy wrong (it was Titus, not Timothy, who was under pressure to circumcise), as well as the place and time (Acts has this happen after the event Paul himself relates, and far from Judea where it makes even less sense for any such pressure to exist), and completely reverses what happened (he is circumcised, indeed even on Paul’s own initiative and direction). In Acts there is no Titus or Timothy at the Jerusalem council at all where Paul says he feared (but admits he evaded) pressure to circumcise the Gentiles in his retinue. Indeed in Acts, Timothy never even visits Jerusalem.

The author of Acts is inventing a story contrary to events as related by Paul. Moreover, this invented story completely contradicts Paul’s entire mission statement: Paul explicitly says he was not flexible about this, that this was his line in the sand, such that had he caved “the truth of the gospel” would not “be preserved.” In other words, resisting this pressure was of dire existential importance to Paul and his entire mission. It is thus impossible that he would suddenly cave in on the point, and without even any direct pressure to (such as he says he faced at Jerusalem, yet none of which is mentioned in Acts). Indeed, a real companion of Paul would be so aware of this that he’d have to comment on it, so as to explain why Paul completely reversed course after already winning the point he says he actually fought for at Jerusalem. Instead, Paul’s real position and story is erased by the author of Acts, and history is then revised to depict Paul doing and enacting exactly the opposite (and conveniently by picking an alternative companion to be targeted and thus circumcised, elsewhere). There is no evidence in Paul that Timothy was ever circumcised; in fact, there is evidence against it. Because had he been, he’d have thus become a Jew; yet Paul only knows Timothy as a Gentile in his last letter, written before his final sail to Rome, refuting any possibility of his having been circumcised when Acts imagines.

Acts thus gets history totally wrong here, contradicting Paul’s own eyewitness testimony, blatantly and in multiple ways. Its author was clearly uninterested in recounting anything true about Paul and his companions, actions, and mission; but to the contrary, only in “rewriting” history to make Paul conform to the author’s own agenda to unify the factions of Christendom, by depicting its Jewish and Gentile wings as always in harmony and willing to cooperate. To create that fake story, he has to fabricate a history whereby Peter is convinced to admit Gentiles by direct celestial vision, and thus begin admitting Gentiles before Paul ever even speaks to him. Whereas in Paul’s account, no such thing happened, and Paul had to convince Peter even to allow Paul to do this, without any support from heavenly communications to Peter in advance. In Paul’s account, there were serious tensions within the church over this, not a harmony, and it was all an innovation of Paul’s own, which he then had to fight for, and where key to his winning that fight was absolutely never caving on the point. The author of Acts erases all of this, and replaces it with a completely bogus alternative history that entirely reverses it. This is a fabricator contriving propaganda to a particular contemporary purpose generations after the fact; this is not a historian concerned to accurately relay anything that really happened.

Luke does this a lot. For example, we know from his own eyewitness account that Paul “was unknown by face to the churches of Judea” (his exact words) until many years after his conversion; yet immediately after his conversion he went away to Arabia before returning to Damascus, and still didn’t go to Jerusalem for at least three years. But Acts has him known to and interacting with the Jerusalem church continuously from the beginning, even before his conversion; and instead of going to Arabia immediately after his conversion, in Acts he goes immediately to Damascus, and then back to Jerusalem just a few weeks later. He never spends a moment in Arabia. And yet we have the truth from Paul himself. Acts has thus erased the truth and replaced it with a fictional alternative narrative.

Luke also uses other stories to fabricate tales in Acts, ranging from lifting and adapting stories from Homer and the Aeneid (I gave only some examples in my last article) to the Septuagint—for instance, the Peter and Cornelius episode (which I just noted this author fabricated, to have Peter miraculously initiate the Torah-free Gentile mission before the real Paul says he convinced Peter merely to allow it over a decade later) is based on a storyline in Ezekiel:

• Both Peter and Ezekiel see the heavens open (Acts 10:11; Ezek. 1:1).
• Both are commanded to eat something in their vision (Acts 10:13; Ezek. 2:8-10).
• Both twice respond to God, “By no means, Lord!” (using the exact same Greek phrase, mēdamōs Kurie: Acts 10:14 and 11:8; Ezek. 4:14 and 20:49, cf. LXX).
• Both are asked to eat unclean food, and both protest that they have never eaten anything unclean before (Acts 10:14; Ezek. 4:14).

As another example, Robert Price has noted:

Peter and Paul are paralleled, each raising someone from the dead (Acts 9:36-40; 20:9-12), each healing a paralytic (3:1-8; 14:8-10), each healing by extraordinary, magical means (5:15; 19:11-12), each besting a sorcerer (8:18-23; 13:6-11), each miraculously escaping prison (12:6-10; 16:25-26).

Stories are also made up in Acts that have Paul parallel and exceed Jesus in accomplishments (again per Price):

• Both undertake peripatetic preaching journeys;
• Culminating in a last long journey to Jerusalem;
• Where each is arrested in connection with a disturbance in the temple;
• Then each is acquitted by a Herodian monarch and Roman procurators;
• Both are also plotted against by the Jews;
• Yet both are innocent of the charges brought against them;
• Both are interrogated by “the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin” (Acts 22:30; Lk. 22:66)
• And both know their death is foreordained and make predictions about what will happen afterward, shortly before their end (Lk. 21:5-28; Acts 20:22-38; cf. 21:4).

Likewise, as Burton Mack explained, Peter’s Pentecost sermon to the Jews of Jerusalem “does not make sense as history by any standard.” And Acts’ depiction of the trial of Stephen impossibly contradicts known court procedures of the Sanhedrin of the time. When the author is adding local color unrelated to Christianity (geography, names and titles of magistrates, and the like) he often gets things right (though not always; we’ll examine his most glaring error in a moment), yet when actual Christian history is at issue, we often get implausible fictions and inaccuracies. Clearly the author of Acts was not writing actual history but revisionist history; a mythology, woven from clever fictions, depicting a message he wants to convey, not a real sequence of events.

Which is what we call pseudohistory. This author simply made things up, with little care for historical accuracy or fact—yet he clearly was aware of some facts. For example, his reversals of all of Paul’s accounts demonstrate he knew Paul’s letters and deliberately rewrote history in light of them. He also uses a lot of material from those letters, such as to construct Paul’s travels and encounters and companions and speeches; even to invent details, like assigning Paul the name of Saul, a popular name from the tribe of Benjamin—Paul only says that he was of that tribe, Luke then then spins the former out of it, conveniently choosing the name of David’s “predecessor” (founder of the kingdom David would soon possess) to parallel Paul to Jesus, David’s “son” and “heir.”

We also have evidence Luke had other sources, but didn’t stay true to them either, because his public narrative, beginning at Acts 2, honestly omits entire facts and persons that he forgot to invent material for—such as: there is no empty tomb or escaped convict the authorities are worried about or investigating, Paul can only reference scripture and visions as evidence in his trials, Jesus has no family (neither parents nor brothers), Pontius Pilate is gone, Joseph of Arimathea is gone, and so on—which suggests Luke was using some source material closer to real events that did not agree with the story Luke wanted to tell, so he has rewritten or overwritten almost all of it. Likewise, the extent of the parallels drawn between Peter and Paul, and between Paul and Jesus, are altogether improbable as history. As are the parallels between several stories in the first fifteen chapters of Acts, and the saga of Elijah and Elisha in the Kings literature (documented by Thomas Brodie); and the parallels between several stories in Acts, and in Homer and Virgil (documented by Dennis MacDonald and Michael Kochenash and Marianne Palmer Bonz; for an instance of this, see last). And beyond: see, for example, Bilby & Lefteratou’s article, “A Dramatic Heist of Epic Proportion: Iphigenia among the Taurians in the Acts of the Apostles,” Harvard Theological Review 115.4 (2022), pp. 496-518.

There are a great many examples of all these points and more; I discuss a large sample of them in OHJ, Ch. 9.1, and more in NIF, Chs. 7 & 13, and even that isn’t a complete list. So you can’t try to “explain away” the few samples I just gave here and hope to make this fact go away. The evidence stacks quite high that the author of Acts is fabricating a mythological history for his religion, and didn’t have any personal knowledge of what he relates, but is relying on old sources that he deliberately alters, reference books that he uses only for local color, and his imagination. There is simply no way a companion of Paul wrote this, or anyone of his generation. Indeed he conspicuously never claims he was—and since he would have claimed any authority he actually had, his silence proves he couldn’t claim this.

Confirming all this, we need only look at the second problem Boyd tries to make go away: the probable date of Acts’ composition.

The Date of Acts

Boyd needs Acts to be early. Scholars now conclude it’s not. So he deploys a common apologetic tactic: ignore all the most recent scholarship, reach back decades or even a century until you find a scholar saying something you want, then quote that scholar as if they are describing the contemporary state of scholarship on the question. In reality, if you have to do that, you are arguing backwards: recent scholarship usually corrects and refutes old, not the other way around. Apologists want it to be the other way around. Which it simply isn’t. And you have to honestly argue for any exception to this rule, not just pretend it doesn’t exist. They just pretend it doesn’t exist. Hence we get Boyd saying this:

Robertson sums up the matter succinctly when he notes: “It may now be stated definitely that the second-century date for the Gospel and Acts has been abandoned save by a small number of exceedingly radical critics.”

Gosh. That sounds like an impressive point. Except when you check, and realize A.T. Robertson wrote this half a century ago. Then you will start to get how Christian apologetics works like a con game. Boyd doesn’t want you to notice that this remark cannot possibly refer to the current state of Acts scholarship. Most scholars today weren’t even alive when he wrote this! And certainly no current study of Acts existed then. In actual fact that tide has turned. A second century date for Acts is now the majority position among specialists. Like many Christian apologists do, Boyd often tries to “refute” contemporary scholarship by citing antiquated obsolete scholarship—the actual scholarship that has actually been refuted (like von Harnack 1907 and Plummer 1901 and Meyer 1921, Boyd’s antiquated go-to’s).

This is a manifestation of rule three: cherry-pick what supports you; and dismiss everything that doesn’t, even when it is superior and vastly more recent. This also happens when Boyd relies a lot on Colin Hemer, even though Hemer’s work was panned by critics when it came out (I quote the devastating points made by John Lentz and Christopher Matthews, for example, in NIF, Ch. 7), and has been uniformly rejected by mainstream scholars now, being embraced only by Evangelical apologists—because he said what they want. Of course, simply naming people who support you, and quoting their opinions, is the fallacy of Argument from Authority. The only thing that matters is the evidence, not opinions. So let’s look at that.

First off, following rule two, Boyd never even mentions the most convincing evidence of Luke-Acts having an early second-century date: its obvious employment of the Antiquities of Josephus as a sourcebook for local and period color, which settles its date of composition after 93 A.D. Luke also used his Jewish War, written in the 70s, producing similarities in their descriptions of the siege of Jerusalem, such as including mention of slaughtered children (compare Luke 19:43-44; JW 6, cf. 6.271). But much else comes from the later Antiquities, from the Quirinian census to the fate of Herod Agrippa and the romantic and family relations of kings and magistrates. As Steve Mason put it, “More than any other Gospel writer, Luke includes references to the non-Christian world of affairs,” and yet, “Almost every incident of this kind that he mentions turns up somewhere in Josephus’ narratives.” You can find many lists of examples. I picked the best that Mason listed. Only the section of Acts that takes place in the Aegean rather than Judea does not get color detail from Josephus, because he only documented Judean affairs; but we can infer Luke did the same thing there, using some (now-lost) historian of the Aegean for his color detail, or other reference books we know were readily available in public libraries of the time (such as periploi, a commonly available genre of annotated sea and land travel logs; and official state acta and consular lists and other magistrate lists, which logged the names, dates, and positions of government officials).

Luke most likely did not write “immediately” after Josephus published. Even on coincidental odds alone that’s less likely than his writing some time later. But Acts’ structure and aims also fit the reign of Trajan (98-117 A.D.) better than Domitian (81-96 A.D.): unaware of the looming Bar Kochba revolt, yet too distant from the first Jewish War or the imperial paranoia of the Domitianic era to comment on either, while taking advantage of the new attitudes and magnanimity of the Trajanic regime—as exemplified by Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan regarding the Christians, showing an interest in leaving Christians alone so long as they obey the law, a theme the entirety of Luke-Acts is devoted to. Its language and objectives are also very Josephan, and even closer to the second century forgeries of the Pastoral Epistles than to earlier Christian literature (as documented in Stephen Wilson’s 1979 study Luke and the Pastoral Epistles). Add to this that no references to Luke-Acts exist earlier than the early-mid-second century, and we have a range of likely dates from the early 90s to the 130s. Thus most scholars now think the highest probability is in the middle of that range, hence in the 110s.

There is no evidence otherwise. And when that sadness happens, apologists need to invent evidence. Rule four. This is what Boyd does (albeit relying on previous apologists for his select arguments). For example, he claims Luke never mentions the Jewish War and therefore must have written prior to it. This is simply false. As we just noted, not only does he mention it, he lifts detail from Josephus to do it. Likewise, Boyd claims Acts being early simply has to entail all the other Gospels were even earlier; he omits mention of the evidence that Mark unmistakably responds to the Jewish War (from his apocalypse, OHJ, pp. 427-28, to his fig tree narrative, OHJ, pp. 433-35), and even uses Josephus’s account of it to model his passion narrative (OHJ, pp. 428-31). And Matthew unmistakably rewrites Mark; and also adds material that post-dates the war (like his Sermon on the Mount: OHJ, pp. 465-68).

So there’s a problem here. Because Luke unmistakably rewrites (and attempts to harmonize) Matthew and Mark. So there can be no doubt that Luke-Acts is a post-war text; indeed, he is writing later than several previous post-war Evangelists. Boyd “ignores” all this evidence, and instead tries to circularly bootstrap his case for Acts into a case for earlier dates for the Gospels than is even remotely plausible. Paul’s letters, likewise 1 Clement and Hebrews, show no knowledge of the Gospels, yet were written in the 50s and early 60s. So the Gospels can’t have been written by then. Which leaves no time for Luke to post-date them and still predate the war. Hence real logic turns this the other way around: the fact that Luke post-dates Paul, Hebrews, Clement, Mark, and Matthew leaves no other plausible option than that Luke wrote after the Jewish War, indeed quite some time after. Combine this with all that evidence he used the Antiquities, and most likely wrote in the generation after that was published, and we end up where Boyd does not want to be. There is no getting out.

But Boyd tries. By making stuff up. There is no such thing as “primitive” vocabulary in Luke. That is an invention of Boyd’s imagination. Luke’s vocabulary is entirely in line with his known sources: the Septuagint, Mark, Paul, Josephus, and Matthew; and probably borrows on any other sources he may have used that we cannot reconstruct. Boyd’s assertion that Luke’s “concern for Jewish-Gentile co-existence, mediated by the food requirements of the apostolic decrees, makes much less sense after A.D. 70 than before” is simply false. That debate was indeed pressing precisely in the early second century (see David Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community, 1998), ripe for Luke to try and solve it. Indeed, contrary to Boyd, this debate was ginned up right before the second century by the combat between Mark and Matthew in the decades after the war. And everything else Boyd claims “Colin Hemer notes” as “a number of other incidental considerations of Luke-Acts which generally strengthen a pre-70 dating” is false. Not a single one of those things actually distinguishes a first from a second century date. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to realize his own comparands—Dio Chrysostom and Josephus—were second century personages (their last writings span the end of the first century and the beginning of the second), and indeed they were likely source models for Luke-Acts (Josephus, we know for sure), as would have been any other first century sourcebooks the author used for color.

Boyd fabricates circular arguments as well. “Also note,” he says, “that James’ successor, Symeon, is not mentioned either in Luke or any of the Gospels,” which “according to Robinson, is inexplicable unless these documents pre-date James’ death.” This is a bogus argument. Not only is the plain fact of it false (Acts mentions two prominent men of that name in the Church), but so is the inferred fact: that Luke should have mentioned him succeeding to the office. Because that circularly presumes that the legend of Symeon was even true. There is no evidence of it; and indeed Luke not knowing about it sooner confirms it was a legend that arose later—it first appears in the writings of the unreliable mythmonger Hegesippus in the late second century. Acts actually mentions no one leading the church, and is conspicuously against suggesting any such hierarchy (that would thwart his apologetic agenda to paint Paul and his mission the equal of any).

“Who succeeded to head the church” is thus not anything the author of Acts even wants to write about; which is why he doesn’t. Indeed, it may well be that still by Luke’s time no such concept had yet existed (we should not believe later legends at all: see my discussion of this in respect to Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and series). Before the late second century, the church appears to have imagined itself an anarchist commune with no single leader but only an evolving community of loosely affiliated elders. This is clear in 1 Clement for example, where the concept of “a leader” to appeal to doesn’t exist; there are only committees of elders, church by church, and “the apostles” as an aggregate (and by then passing) group, who all had to persuade fellow churches to hew to any doctrine or policy. Acts seems to know of no other system. As in Acts 15, where only a community exists, not a leader, and other churches have to be persuaded to share doctrine and policy. No mentions of any James in Acts, either—none of whom are the brother of Jesus—assigns them the role of “head of the Church,” rather than just a revered member.

So there is no way to get Boyd’s argument to work here. It requires ignoring all evidence, fabricating evidence, and drawing inferences from your thus-assembled distortion of reality. This same bogus argumentation can be found in Boyd’s argument that “the understanding of Jesus Christ in both Acts and Paul’s epistles lines up well with the portrait of Jesus Christ provided for us in Mark (and, of course, from Luke’s own gospel)” and therefore this indicates an early date. To the contrary, that Luke is building on those authors and their teachings is why he replicates it. This has nothing to do with the date of his composition, only the content of his chosen sources, and his own personal agenda to unify the disparate factions of the Church. There is no evidence of an early date here.

Making stuff up like this reaches a fever pitch when Boyd says, “It is, for example, arguable that 1 Clement 2:1 (A.D. 96) refers to Acts 20:35” (actually, Acts 20:35 could be referring to 1 Clement 2:1; or the same sayings tradition they shared); “that the Epistle of Barnabas 19:8 (A.D. 100?) cites Acts 4:32” (actually, Barnabas could date long after that; or Acts could be referencing Barnabas); “that Ignatius (A.D. 110) cites Acts 1:25” (actually, many scholars now conclude the Ignatian letters are of much later date, possibly the 130s or 140s, and even if they were from 110, Acts could have been written in, say, 105—but there is no passage in them that refers to this verse in Acts anyway); and “that Polycarp (A.D. 120) refers to Acts 2:24 and 10:42 in 1:2 and 2:1, respectively, of his epistle,” which meets with the same problem: scholars actually date Polycarp’s letters more likely to the 130s or 140s—and even at 120, Acts could still have been written in 115, so even if Polycarp knew Acts (and not the other way around), this isn’t evidence of any early date for it. So it is simply false that “unless the proximity with the Acts passages can be accounted for another way, a first century date for this work seems to be required.” No such conclusion is required at all. There is no evidence of an early date here.

All Boyd has left is the usual apologetic line: that “the narrative of Acts breaks off abruptly with the trial of Paul at Rome,” and “Given the centrality of Paul to this work, this is difficult to explain except on the supposition that Paul had not yet been martyred when Luke wrote his narrative.” Actually, it’s the other way around. How could Luke publish his book without awaiting the outcome of Paul’s appeal at Rome? And even if he did rush to publish mid-trial, that would have been just a year or two before its outcome—so how could he not rush to append that outcome in a second edition or volume? This apologetic “explanation” of this omission doesn’t work like they think it does. It makes no sense even of itself.

In actual fact, in Acts Paul is depicted as well aware of his impending death, so it wasn’t written in ignorance of it. There is a much better explanation of why Luke avoids narrating it: the traditional story would reverse all the aims of his entire two volumes. Acts struggles consistently to depict the Romans as uniformly supportive of Christians (and only hardline Jews as persecuting them); he cannot admit this ever changed. His message has to be quite the reverse. But even that assumes the traditional story existed when Luke wrote. And we know it probably didn’t. Even Willem Blom agrees the Tacitean account of the Neronean persecution must be false. Certainly, no Christian had ever heard of it until the 4th century; and before that, beliefs in a Neronian persecution were far different, and wholly unsourced.

More importantly, our only source contemporary with the fate of Paul, the Epistle of 1 Clement, says Paul died in Spain, not Rome. So Boyd is depending on late, implausible, unsourced, and contradicted legends of Paul dying in Rome to get his explanation of the ending of Acts. But once we reject that (as we should), the evidence indicates Luke knew of no such death in Rome even to relate. And there are many reasons why he might not have told what did happen. It may have required too much exposition to fit on the same scroll, necessitating a third. Which, contrary to what Boyd says, is not a conjecture, but a fact: the text of Acts was already overlong, so any detailed account of what then happened to Paul would have needed an entire third book. The author might never have ventured or got around to completing that. Indeed, he may have died before completing even his second volume—thus it ends where he left it, unfinished. It’s also quite plausible that Acts ends where it does is that its author didn’t know what happened to Paul after that. He couldn’t relate anything further, because he knew nothing further to relate. After all, that knowledge appears long since lost by the early second century, when Luke-Acts appears most likely to have been written. The legends of a Neronian persecution arose only later (so far as second century Christians appear to know), indeed possibly by a telephone-gamed misreading of 1 Clement. Before that, Paul was only known to have died in Spain, with no connection to Nero or Rome.

So there is no evidence Acts was written in the first century, and a considerable amount of evidence indicating it was written in the early second century. This renders it unlikely the author was a companion of Paul’s half a century earlier. And Acts never says he was anyway.

Luke’s Biggest Mistake

Boyd responds to two charges of error in Acts: its misdating of the Theudas rebellion (Boyd answers this by trying to claim there was a second Theudas rebellion nowhere recorded: a classic example of “making shit up” to explain-away falsifying evidence) and its misdating of the Nativity, placing it during the 6 A.D. census of Quirinius when Matthew said it was ten years earlier (Boyd answers this by trying to claim the Greek in Acts means “before” Quirinius, which is simply false, another “made up fact,” or that Acts is referring to some other prior command Quirinius held before he became governor of Syria, which is impossible; so again, “made up”). Ironically I don’t see the second as an error. One could easily just say Matthew screwed up the date, and Luke got it right. So I don’t figure that as proof Luke was a bad historian. All the other evidence is what signals that (from Luke’s rampant reliance on fictional storytelling, to Luke’s completely hosing nearly every detail of the Jerusalem Council).

But the Theudas mistake is a doozy. In fact, it’s not only a really huge mistake, it is a mistake that gives away the fact that Luke is cribbing these details from the Antiquities of Josephus, and thus (a) writing near the turn of the second century and (b) filling his book with “color details” from reference books, and not personal knowledge of Christian history. I’ll here just re-use much of my summary of the most conclusive evidence of this from my outline in Luke and Josephus of the findings of Steve Mason and others, some of which evidence Boyd even mentions as “corroborations” of Acts, when in fact it’s the other way around: the congruences he lists are corroborations of Acts using the Antiquities as a color source. This is clearest in his goofing of his lifts from Josephus on famous Jewish rebels.

Luke mentions the same three rebel leaders as Josephus does: Judas the Galilean—even specifically connected with the census (Acts 5:37; JW 2.117-18, JA 18.1-8); Theudas (Acts 5:36; JA 20.97); and “The Egyptian” (Acts 21:38; JW 2.261-63, JA 20.171). It’s quite a remarkable coincidence that Luke should even mention these men at all (no other Christian author does), and that he names only three rebel leaders, and that all three are the very same three named by Josephus—even though Josephus says there were numerous such men (JW 2.259-264; JA 20.160-69, 20.188), and he only singled out these three for particular reasons of his own. In fact, to use only the rather generic nickname “The Egyptian,” instead of, or without, an actual name of any kind (there were millions of Egyptians, and certainly thousands in Judaea at any given time), though explicable as an affectation of one author, seems a little strange when two authors repeat the same idiom.

It also makes sense for Luke to draw these three men from Josephus: since Josephus was writing for a Roman audience, if the Romans knew any Jewish rebels, it would be these three. Just as Josephus named them as examples of what good Jews are not, Luke names them specifically as examples of what the Christians are not—and as Theudas and the Egyptian were specifically painted by Josephus as religious figures, messianic prophets, similar to Jesus, it would have behooved Luke to disassociate Jesus from these men, recently popularized to Romans by Josephus as villains; similarly with Judas, who was a military rebel, very much the opposite of Jesus, the peaceful religious reformer. Notice, for example, how Luke greatly downplays Jesus’ use of violence in clearing the temple, and emphasizes in its place his role as teacher: compare Luke 19:45-48 with Mark 11:15-18, Matthew 21:12-16, and John 2:13-16. Likewise, while Judas the Galilean rebels at the Roman census, Luke goes out of his way to make the family of Jesus dutifully obey that same census (exactly reversing Matthew’s “outlaw” narrative).

Crucially, Luke makes errors in his use of these men, in a way that has an identifiable basis in the text of Josephus. When Luke brings up Theudas and Judas in the same speech, he reverses their actual order, having Theudas appear first, even though that does not fit what Josephus reports—indeed, Josephus places Theudas as much as fifteen years after the dramatic time in which Luke even has him mentioned. Acts thus has Gamaliel mention an event that hadn’t happened yet, nor would for over a decade. That Luke should be forced to use a rebel leader before his time is explained by the fact that he needed someone to mention, and Josephus, his likely source, only details three distinct movements (though he also goes into the rebel relatives of Judas, they are all associated with Judas). And when Josephus mentions Theudas, he immediately follows with a description of the fate of the sons of Judas (JA 20.97-102) and uses that occasion to recap the actions of Judas himself (associating him with the census, just as Acts then does). The fact that Luke should repeat this very same incorrect sequence, which makes sense in Josephus but not in Acts, is a signature of borrowing.

Further evidence is afforded here by similar vocabulary: both Acts and Josephus use the words aphistêmi (“incited”) and laos (“the people”). Luke’s use of the Egyptian as an example is similarly telling: Luke has him leading the sicarii (“assassins”; “daggermen”) into the desert. But this is erroneous. The Egyptian never led anyone into the desert, and was never associated with the Sicarios (see The Egyptian Is Conflated with the Sicarii). The sicarii operated by assassination, under the concealment of urban crowds, not in the wilds. And Josephus does not link the Egyptian with them. But he does mention both in exactly the same place (JA 20.167-69; cf. JW 2.258–261), and in fact also mentions there other figures (unnamed) who led people into the desert, even though the Egyptian led them from the desert to the Mount of Olives (or as Josephus puts it, the Egyptian went around the rural towns gathering followers, then led them to the Mount; no Sicarios, and no one being led “into” the wilderness). Luke evidently just skimmed the Antiquities, and thus erroneously conflated all these things. But that makes no sense unless Luke was indeed skimming the Antiquities—the only place where they would have been mentioned together, an accident of narration peculiar to Josephus. As was also the peculiar choice of name for the Sicarios. What are the odds Luke would know this unusual (and indeed Latin) word Josephus would choose to describe them by? And also connect them with the Egyptian and the unnamed Impostors leading crowds into the wilds? The coincidences are too improbable. Unless this all resulted from a hasty skim of the Antiquities.

Luke’s Use of Incidental Color

Boyd is impressed that Luke gets a lot of incidental detail right. “If Luke is so accurate in matters of Roman imperial and senatorial provinces, we cannot easily dismiss his narrative about (say) the day of Pentecost as a piece of Christian lore” or “that the early Church was” always “united in its proclamation that Jesus was the Son of God who was crucified and rose again from the dead.” But this is a fallacy. It is actually telling of exactly the opposite conclusion that none of the details peculiar to Christianity are corroborated or even plausible, and in fact typically obviously fictional or even contradicted by more reliable sources (like Paul himself). The only details Luke gets right a lot are details with no actual connection to Christianity (like “matters of Roman imperial and senatorial provinces,” from geography to laws and administration). And we know where he got those for Judea: Josephus. He just cribbed another historian for color detail. Likely all his other details come from similar reference works. As historian C.K. Barrett wisely pointed out in response to arguments like Boyd’s, “It is enough to remark that [I have] read a large number of detective stories which were completely correct in their description of legal and police procedures—and pure fiction.”

Thus, Boyd is being quite gullible when he rhetorically asks, “If accuracy on such points as these doesn’t evidence ‘general reliability’, what does?” Um, corroborated accuracy on the actual matters of importance. That’s what. Nothing relating to Christian history itself can be corroborated, and in fact much of it is instead found falsified (as we’ve seen), as that is the one target of Luke’s agenda to distort or fabricate that we know he had. So that he gets incidental details right that have themselves nothing to do with Christian history tells us nothing about his accuracy in the rest. Those could all be gotten from reference books in any public library, which were in every major city under the Empire. Not so, any of the details of Christian history itself. That, it appears, not only did he often have to make up, but often deliberately made up even when he had a reliable source that he could have followed (e.g. Paul). And even his reliance on reference books for incidentals shows his sloppiness, as when he got careless in reading Josephus on Jewish rebel movements—which is not the behavior of someone “who was there.”

Of course, Luke had every incentive to at least try and get all that color right, yet still sometimes failed even at that. He had no reason to intentionally alter it or mess it up—such that even when he did, we can conclude it was by accident. Yet he had every incentive to fabricate and distort the actual apologetic details of his narrative—Christian history itself. And as we can point to countless egregious examples of his doing this, this proves rather his unreliability in the rest, not the other way around. In other words, the one thing we actually need here to reach Boyd’s conclusion—corroborated accuracy in the details specific to the history of Christianity—we have not a single ounce of, but exactly the opposite: numerous cases demonstrating Luke fabricates, alters, and distorts.

By the same point, Boyd is quite wrong when he says, “What also counts decisively in Luke’s favor is that his portrait of the early Church squares well with the evidence of early Christian belief found in Paul’s and Mark’s writings” and “His portrait of the early Church as being essentially unified and as networking together also squares perfectly with the evidence discovered in Paul’s writings.” That’s all bogus. The opposite of confirming Luke’s reliability, it casts that reliability fully into question. He is trying to harmonize his Christian sources to fabricate a fake history of the Church that sells a vision of a harmonious Church he wants to promote, but that we know didn’t exist. The entire letter of 1 Clement and Paul’s account across Galatians 1-5 illustrates the contrary; indeed he attests not only to a fierce and disharmonious division between the Torah-observant and his own sect, but to yet other Jesus sects so abhorrent to Paul he orders his congregations to shun them, as well as internecine factionalism he constantly had to battle. Any congruence we find between Acts and the rest of “our” New Testament is by design, not proximity: the design of the author of Acts; and the design of the editors who chose these books (and not others) to gather together in a single edition we now call “The New Testament.”

That Acts Is Mythology

The defining character of myth is the conjunction of three features: (1) the meaningful emulation of prior myths is frequent and central to the story (Acts is full of emulations of Greek and Jewish mythologies); (2) historical improbabilities are frequent and central to the story (as in, strange things keep happening, including not just miracles, but implausible coincidences and unrealistic behaviors), and again, for both of these criteria: these aren’t incidental to an otherwise mundane and credible narrative, but pervasive, and central to that narrative; and (3) there is little or no external corroboration of central characters or events. There can be corroboration of incidental color detail—historical fiction has always striven for realism in those details, and can achieve it because none of those details have to be changed to sell the desired myth, they can just be dropped into the myth wherever they fit, pulled from reference books. So Acts qualifies beyond doubt as a myth. It hits all three criteria. In spades.

Acts also emulates a history without actually replicating any of its actual critical methods, features, or techniques—like naming and identifying its author and their sources (Acts peculiarly avoids ever doing this); critically evaluating its claims (this never happens even once in Acts), particularly incredible claims (real historians even of that time would remark on things that seemed incredible, not simply relate them as if no reader would raise an eyebrow); giving relevant dates (e.g. notice how the only precise date in Luke-Acts is in Luke 3, and it only attaches to the date John the Baptist begins his ministry, not to when Jesus does, or to any fact of Christian history); and presenting actual documents.

For example, the official writ supposedly supplied by Claudius Lysias conspicuously lacks all the details a real one would contain, such as its date (as we know from surviving examples of this type of correspondence), Paul’s full citizen name (his trinomen being a security of his authentic citizenship), the governor’s own full name and actual title (the coarse brevity Luke uses does not appear on any authentic examplar we have; e.g. Lysias would have addressed Felix as anthypatos, proconsul, not by the generic hêgemôn, “leader”), or any information the governor actually needed, like the actual charges against Paul (Roman law required them to be specifically stated, as the exact wording of charges was a central component of their trial procedure), and the size of the illegal army recruited to pursue him (kind of an important thing to mention, don’t you think?), and the justification for the outrageous number of troops removed from their duties to protect one man. It seems far more certain Luke just made this letter up—and he didn’t know what a real one looked like so as to even produce a plausible fraud.

Likewise, contrary to Boyd’s gullible claim that Acts documents “a zealous missionary explosion that covered the entire Mediterranean world within a century, a fact that is itself difficult to account for on any scheme that fundamentally discredits their testimony,” this is actually evidence Acts is bogus. The numbers and scale of the movement Acts relates are refuted by all external facts. The author is simply fabricating and exaggerating Christianity’s success. I document this in detail in my book Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed (summarized in Bayesian format as a chapter in The End of Christianity), with particular attention to the issue of numbers in Chapter 18 thereof (see also my discussion of how unsuccessful Christianity actually had been, particularly by the time Luke would have been writing, in How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?).

Conclusion

I have only given a few examples and brief summaries. My chapter on Acts in Historicity surveys many more, citing scholarship supporting; and Pervo’s Commentary and Mystery provide a great deal more. Even more examples can be found in the other works I cited here today, and in my last article. The evidence that Acts is a work of fiction, employing the methods of mythography, propaganda, and literary art rather than critical historical reporting, is vast. All of which Boyd ignores. And nothing he provides to argue the contrary carries any weight against this overwhelming evidence. So what he has done is hide all this evidence against him, cherry-pick whatever weak evidence he can muster for him, and spin it his way with emotional rhetoric. Apologetics, not critical scholarship.

In this and other ways, Boyd straw-mans the opposition by never mentioning most of their actual arguments, thus concealing from his readers most of the reasons experts don’t believe Acts is reliable. He never addresses the best evidence indicating Acts is (1) merely emulating a history without actually replicating any of its critical methods, features, or techniques, (2) uses numerous mytho-fictional methods of constructing its stories instead, and (3) rewrites actual history by deliberately erasing and even contradicting Paul’s actual eyewitness accounts; while (4) desperately explaining-away all the evidence against him that Boyd thinks he can’t get away with ignoring.

Boyd also never engaged with the real problems of Acts—such as that its author apparently had no actual accounts of the tomb being found empty (as the authorities are never prompted to investigate it, and Christians never reference it as evidence), or of Jesus having any family (his parents and brothers and sisters completely vanish from its entire public account of the Church), or of the legal authorities having even heard of his being a recent felon executed for treason (they seem only to think he’s some spirit or angel Paul and other Christians claim to see in the sky or hear in their head). But more importantly, the few problems Boyd feels forced to admit to, he can only get to go away with specious, fallacious, factually challenged argumentation. He clearly needs it to go away, but can’t get it to go away by any honest, logical, or well-evidenced excuse.

The rest of what Boyd argues follows the four rules of apologetics: he straw-mans the actual alternative explanations (and so when we steel-man them, his case falls apart); he leaves out key evidence destroying his case (and so when we put that evidence back in, his case falls apart); he argues backwards, from his pre-established conclusion to cherry-picked evidence he can massage to make his case, rather than actually testing his conclusion against all the evidence (and so when we actually perform those proper tests, his case falls apart); and he makes up excuses to explain away any evidence he can’t omit but needs to go away (and so when we actually notice his excuses are not even effective or plausible, much less supported by any evidence, his case falls apart). This is why mainstream scholarship no longer regards the book of Acts as reliable history. That notion is the sole province now of Christian apologists who can’t accept reality, and thus just need it to go away, by any device.