Is Acts Pseudo-History?

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are good. It's a beautiful day outside here in Salt Lake City, in stark contrast to what I just got- How things are going, yeah ... back from. You viewers will remember that a couple weeks ago, there was some very bad weather in the eastern part of North America, and I was in Canada, and I'm lucky to have made it out alive. It was cold. It was bad.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I heard some flights got complicated.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I had to stay an extra day, which is great when it's freezing.

Dan McClellan When there's stuff to do.

Dan Beecher When it is so cold. Yeah, there was nothing to do. It was a little rough. And it was a Monday, so even the museums were closed. That wasn't very good.

Dan McClellan Oh, man. That's rough.

Dan Beecher But yeah, it's beautiful today, and I'm excited about today's episode, today's segment, because for the next two segments, this one and the next one, both of them take the same jumping-off point, which is Acts chapter 7.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Today's, we're going to be looking at Acts 7 as a chapter and verse, but specifically, we're going to get into how the New Testament authors interacted with, and New Testament characters interacted with, the Hebrew Bible, and I think that's going to be a really fascinating discussion.

Dan McClellan Yes, indeed.

Dan Beecher Let's dive in with chapter and verse. All right, so chapter and verse is Acts chapter 7.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher A lot of verses, actually. We should call it chapter and verses.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But where do you want to start with this? Do you want to start with Stephen talking about some stuff?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, let's just lay our scene- Yes, please ...

Dan Beecher in- In fair Verona?

Dan McClellan Yes, exactly. Two houses alike in dignity. The leaders of the synagogue basically call Stephen to task. He's doing great signs and wonders among the people, and they bring him before the council, and they say, "Hey, you've been doing all this stuff the people said you've been doing." And Stephen basically takes the opportunity to just wax historical for 52 verses.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Basically outlining the history of the people of Israel, starting from Abraham, and then going all the way down to verse 53 and saying, "There was the coming of the Righteous One, and you have become his betrayers and murderers, and you have not kept the law." And then they become enraged. They grind their teeth at Stephen. They go, "Eh," and then they cast stones at him.

Dan Beecher Yeah, that's not great.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's not the outcome you're looking for.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's not a good review of his history of Israel, but I think it's interesting because what it represents is the author of the Book of Acts' negotiation with the history of Israel as told in the Hebrew Bible, as they have access to it, and as they have negotiated with it. And I just wanted to jump around to a handful of verses and talk about some of the ways that they are representing the history that might indicate they're going from the Greek and not the Hebrew, that might indicate they're picking and choosing which passages they're basing this on, and some places where they even contradict what's going on in the Hebrew Bible and contradict themselves. And so I think it's just a fascinating study of how one New Testament author, anyway, is engaging with the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. And I want to start in verse 2. This is the very beginning of Stephen's performance. "Brothers and fathers," he says, "listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our ancestor Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, 'Leave your country and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you.' Then he left the country of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After his father died, God had him move from there to this country in which you are now living." And so this is basically the end of Genesis 11 and the beginning of Genesis 12. But the author has Stephen stake a pretty clear claim, that Abraham did not leave Haran until after his father Terah died.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is where we're seeing the author's interpretation of kind of a squirrely part of Genesis. Because if we go to Genesis 11, Haran has some kids. "When Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran." So that's Genesis 11:26. So Terah's 70 years old. Abraham is born when Terah is 70 years old.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Now, we have down toward the end of chapter 11 that Abraham was 75 years old when he- takes up and leaves. Picks up and leaves. Excuse me. I'm trying to find the exact verse where it says this.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan So Abram went, this is Genesis 12:4. "So Abram went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran." So Terah was 70, Abraham 75. Put them together, what do you get? 145 years. Abraham leaves Haran when Terah is 145 years old. It says according to Genesis 11:32, however, that Terah was 205 years old when he died in Haran. So if you go by Genesis 11 and 12, Abram departed from Haran, waved bye-bye to his dad when his dad was 175 years old. He lived for another, or excuse me, 145 years old. He lived for another 60 years in Haran without Abraham.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Abram. Except in Acts, the author says that Abram didn't leave Haran until Terah had died. So we've got a little bit of a problematic thing there, and that's probably just because the author of Acts is not doing the math.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Is not looking closely at this and being like, "Wait a minute, that doesn't add up."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so Terah had to have lived for 60 more years after Abram left.

Dan Beecher You're blaming the author of Acts. You could just as easily blame Stephen. Stephen could've gotten it wrong.

Dan McClellan Well, there are a number of places where I blame the author and not the character precisely because the texts are very clearly written in Greek- Mm. And are very clearly appealing to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which indicates it's probably not this Jewish person talking in a Jewish synagogue when they're being represented as speaking Aramaic or- Okay ... maybe even Hebrew.

Dan Beecher So what you're saying, if I can just sort of repackage it a little bit, is that Stephen himself would have read it in the Hebrew. He would've been a Hebrew-speaking Jewish person, and so if he had encountered the Hebrew Bible, he would've encountered it in Hebrew and not made some of the mistakes that we're about to talk about. Is that what you're saying?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Either Hebrew or in some Aramaic translation, one of the Targumim or something like that, but- Oh, okay ... but what we see is that the author of the Book of Acts is relying on the Septuagint, and we see this even more clearly in Acts 15, and I think we've talked about this before. This is the Jerusalem Council, and there's a part where they talk, excuse me, they talk about how the tabernacle of David will be restored, and for the remnant of humanity who seek after the Lord, and this is the Septuagint's pretty flagrant mistranslation of a part of Amos that in the Hebrew says something entirely different, that has no relevance at all to the context where it's being deployed in the Book of Acts. So it has to have been the Greek that was being- Right ... being used. And so, yeah, it's definitely a literary composition here.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We do not have the verbatim recording or transcription of somebody speaking in Aramaic or Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So yeah, it's problematic. Another interesting one, we can scoot down to verse six. This is where we're talking about the Israelites in Egypt, "And God spoke in these terms, that his descendants would be resident aliens in a country belonging to others, who would enslave them and mistreat them during 400 years." And so this is the time that the Israelites are in Egypt. And if we go to Genesis 15:13, there's this prophecy about Abraham's descendants being, they'll be oppressed 400 years.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But if you go to Exodus 12 verse 40, the time that they were in Egypt was 430 years being oppressed. So you've got two different ways that the Hebrew Bible is representing the length of the sojourn in Egypt. It's either 400 or 430 years. And so here we see that the author of the Book of Acts is siding with Genesis over and against Exodus about the story that is actually in Exodus. So picking and choosing here.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan This is an example of the author deciding to go with one and not the other.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You start in Genesis, you might as well hang out there.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher When you're talking about Abram and whatever- Yeah ... just stick with what you know. Why read a whole other book?

Dan McClellan And here's another instance where we can see that the author is pulling from the Septuagint. This is verse 14. "Then Joseph sent and invited his father Jacob and all his relatives to come to him, 75 in all."

Dan Beecher Great.

Dan McClellan We can go look at Genesis 46 verse 27, as well as Exodus 1:5, and it says there were 70 people who came down to Egypt. But if you go look at the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint of Genesis 46:27, hey, what do you know? It says 75.

Dan Beecher So I- That's interesting. What accounts for that discrepancy?

Dan McClellan Do you know?

Dan Beecher Um- Do you have a sense of why they just changed the number?

Dan McClellan This would be interesting to look into because 70 is a really important number in the ancient world. The table of nations in Genesis 10 has 70 nations.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And Deuteronomy 32:8, we have the El Elyon, the Most High, divides up the nations according to the number of the sons of God in the early Hebrew, but in the Masoretic Text, it's sons of Israel, and that traditional number is 70. So you would think that they would want to stick with 70, but for whatever reason, the Septuagint changed it to 75, and I'm just going to look- I'm going to dive in just really quickly and remind everybody what the Septuagint is- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher because we've been referencing it, and we're going to keep referencing it. So it's the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible- Yes ... that was produced. When was it produced?

Dan McClellan Somewhere in the- Between the third century BCE and the first century BCE. So the books were translated independently and kind of came together over the centuries.

Dan Beecher Okay. So what we're talking about is that anyone who was a Greek reader and probably speaker of Greek around this time who wanted to read the Hebrew Bible would've read it as the Septuagint in this form.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And, technically the Septuagagint really refers to the translation of the first five books of Moses. Those would've been the first books translated, each one by a different translator, and they were not coordinating. It was not a systematic process. But there's kind of the narrow sense of what the Septuagint is and then the broader sense. We're speaking about the broader sense.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And the Septuagint also has 75 in Exodus 1.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan So both of the passages that in the Masoretic Text say 70 are 75 in the Septuagint. So we have another example of the author relying not on the Hebrew, but on the Greek.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then the next two verses I think are really fascinating. I really like verse 15 and 16 because it says, "So Jacob went down to Egypt. He himself died there, as well as our ancestors, and their bodies were brought back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem." So that's pretty clear. Jacob, all the sons of Jacob who came down to stay in Egypt, they all died. Bodies were brought back. They were all buried in Shechem in a tomb that was purchased by Abraham. The problem is that Abraham never bought anything in Shechem, and not from any sons of Hamor. Abraham bought land and a cave, which was used as a tomb, at Machpelah, which is near Hebron- Okay ... from Ephron the Hittite, and you can go to Genesis 23 for the story of this purchase. This is where there's kind of this haggling back and forth.

Dan Beecher It's up haggling. It goes in the wrong direction. Yeah, because the Hittite's like, "Let me just give it to you."

Dan McClellan And Abraham's like, "Good try. I'm going to pay for it." And really the point- He's like, "Come on.

Dan Beecher What's 400 shekels between friends?"

Dan McClellan Yeah, and you get to the end and he's like, "400 shekels." And I think what the story is supposed to illustrate is that this really does legally and fully belong to Abraham and his family, and they did pay for it. Because if they were like, "Just take it," and he just takes it, it's kind of like, that wasn't a real legitimate transfer of property. That was a gift or something like that. It weakens the claim to the property.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But if Abram can say, "No, I'm paying for it," then that's really his property. So Abraham buys that plot, and that is where Jacob is buried, according to Genesis 49 and 50. So nothing to do with Shechem.

Dan Beecher So just to be clear, Shechem and- Hebron ... Machpelah are not- Machpelah ... they're not next door- No ... to each other.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher Where are we talking about? I don't know where.

Dan McClellan Hebron is closer to Jerusalem. Shechem is way up north in the northern kingdom.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So we're talking close to southern kingdom.

Dan Beecher Very different places.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's a long walk between those two places.

Dan Beecher So Stephen wasn't just getting a little confused here.

Dan McClellan He was- No, and we'll talk about what likely Stephen was doing. So where's the sons of Hamor and Shechem coming from? Well, that's coming from Genesis 33, where Jacob, not Abraham, pays the sons of Hamor an amount of silver to purchase some land in Shechem. And then it wasn't Jacob who was buried there. Jacob's buried in Machpelah. It's Joseph who was buried at Shechem, according to Joshua 24:32.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so what we have is Jacob's burial in Machpelah, the place that was purchased by Abraham, and Joseph's burial in Shechem, in the place that was purchased by Jacob, and the author seems to be just Just squishing them together.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And some of the folks who want to argue that this is not actually a contradiction will argue, "Well, it says Jacob died and then all the ancestors. And when it says they were brought to Shechem, it just means the ancestors, Joseph specifically, since he was actually buried in Shechem." And so there are attempts to try to kind of dodge what's actually in the text. But you can't get around the fact that Abraham did not purchase the plot of land in Shechem. That was Jacob who purchased that. So what seems to be the problem is he just, instead of taking the time, because they're already picking up rocks and they're getting a good look at a good round rock, and he's like, "Okay, I got to hurry. I'm going to just squish these accounts together and just be like, 'Eh, they were all buried in Shechem,' and just save some ink." Let's- Save a little bit of papyrus.

Dan Beecher Our current president can't keep Iceland and Greenland straight. It makes sense to me that a guy- Yeah ... would maybe mess up who was buried where.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Especially when he's facing down some very angry- Yeah ... audience members.

Dan McClellan If someone as sharp and as insightful as Trump can talk about the airports being taken during the Revolutionary War, I think we can forgive Stephen this little peccadillo by messing up exactly what's going on with the graves. But yeah, that's another instance of engagement with, and negotiation with, the tradition coming from the Hebrew Bible.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And there are a handful more that I think are interesting. One of them is... Well, actually, I want to go all the way down to the last verse, 53, because I think this is pretty interesting. Acts 7:53, and we've gotten all the way down to Jesus, where verses 42 and 43 have some interesting stuff in it we're going to talk about in another segment.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan But in Acts 7:53, Stephen's conclusion is, "You were the ones who received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it." And then they say, "How dare you?" And then they take their shiny new stones, and they stone him. But the law was not given through angels, or at least that's not really what we find. We find the law being given directly by Adonai, the God of Israel, in Exodus 19 and 20.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, hmm, where are these angels coming from? This is not exactly what we see, even in the Septuagint. And here it's not that we're going directly from the text. Here it is Second Temple interpretive tradition that is standing in between the text and what we see Stephen saying. Because you had a bunch of traditions about angels mediating what's going on as a way to kind of distance God from what's going on here. So rather than God themselves being the one to deliver the law, God's presence is represented or borne by angels. And I think this probably has a little bit to do with this concept of the angel of the presence or the angel of the Lord. The identity of the angel is conflated with the identity of God in a handful of stories, and we've talked about this before on the show. You have Hagar runs into God in the wilderness, and in one verse it says it's the angel of God, but then Hagar says, "I'm naming this place this way because have I seen God and lived?" And you have something similar going on in Exodus 3. In verse 2 it says, "An angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in the flame of fire in the midst of the burning bush." And then a few verses later, that angel says, "I am the God of Israel." And you have Judges 6, Judges 13, Judges 5 probably. You have a handful of places where the identity of God and the angel is kind of conflated. And in my opinion, and the opinion of a number of other scholars, this kind of literary prophylaxis, "Hey, it says God, but remember, it could be the angel," probably became very, very useful in the Second Temple period to distance God from what was going on. And so at any point in the text where it talks about God doing these things, they could say, "No, that was just the angel." Because remember, the angel can identify as God.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so I think this is another witness to the proclivity to reinterpret stories about God themselves as stories about angels. And you even see this in the Septuagint because at some point we-- Have we addressed Exodus 4:24, the bridegroom of blood passage? Do you remember that one?

Dan Beecher I don't remember that one, no. That's where- But I could very easily have forgotten.

Dan McClellan Well, yeah. We both could. That's where God tries to kill Moses. God shows up at the hotel and- Oh, yeah ... and then Zipporah, his wife- His wife- ... circumcises him and throws- Has an astonishing...

Dan Beecher Or circumcises his son and- Circumcises their kid and- Yeah ... flips the foreskin at him. At his feet, yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And says, "You're a bridegroom of blood." Well, what's interesting is in the Septuagint, it's not God. It's angels of God.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, in the translation, they've gone ahead, and they've already inserted the angels. And you have similar things going on in a number of other passages in the Septuagint.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I thought we had talked about the idea that the Septuagint authors were so uncomfortable with the idea of it- Yeah ... being God that they just kept making it angels.

Dan McClellan Yeah. God doesn't personally put out a hit on anybody. God sends angels to go- Yeah.

Dan Beecher Why would...

Dan McClellan Yeah ... carry out his dirty deeds- Yeah ... done dirt cheap. Did you ever see the movie "Dirty Deeds"?

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh. Who was that? Who was in it? Was it called "Dirty Deeds"? That was Norm Macdonald.

Dan Beecher I saw "Mr. Deeds," but that's a different- That was Adam S- Sandler Adam Sandler. That's right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. No, no. "Dirty Deeds" was Norm Macdonald. It was funny in parts.

Dan Beecher Kind of like Norm Macdonald. Eh, he was funny sometimes.

Dan McClellan Was it? Wait, was it "Dirty Deeds"? I'm seeing another movie come up, but- We are way off-track here.

Dan Beecher I'm- I- Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Dirty Work." Excuse me.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "Dirty Work" was Norm Macdonald.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Okay. It's Norm Macdonald. You know what you're getting with Norm Macdonald. So, I think that's what's going on there at the very end. And to kind of tie all this off in a nice little bow, we've got a very creative Second Temple period literary negotiation with the history of Israel here that's certainly not something that someone speaking Aramaic or Hebrew was going to just rip off the cuff- Right ... standing in front of the Sanhedrin. This is obviously something that took some care and some time and some thoughtfulness on the part of the author going through and being like, "Well, should I say 430? Should I say 400?

Dan Beecher Hmm."

Dan McClellan And squishing together the accounts of Abraham and Jacob buying the plots of land and huge tracts of land, as the great poet once said. And so, it is a creative and an ongoing kind of negotiation with the author's own heritage. And it conflicts with that heritage as it has been preserved down to us in the Hebrew Bible. And in another segment, we're going to talk a little bit more about one of the ways that it conflicts and represents later ideologies. But I think taking this text seriously and trying to allow it to operate on its own terms means recognizing that this is a literary creation, that this is something that is the product of thoughtful and, again, creative engagement with the author's heritage that is definitely not something that this Stephen, who I don't know for sure if there was really a martyrdom of a dude named Stephen. I'm willing to allow it, that it's certainly plausible. But if that person did actually rattle off the history of Israel just to try to buy some time and ended up getting stoned for his troubles, it wouldn't have matched what we have here in Acts 7. But it is- Interesting ... but it is a fascinating story.

Dan Beecher Well, I love it. Just a broader, more fun way to look at this than just everything is as it meets the eye or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Well, if you would like to become a part of keeping this show rocking, we sure would love to have you as a patron of the show. Head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and just chuck a little bit of coin our way. We always appreciate it. You can get early ad-free versions of the show. You can get the after party, which is bonus content every week from the two of us. And you can get the happy feeling of knowing that you are participating in getting the word about the Word out there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Thanks to Roger Gowdy for editing the show.

Dan Beecher Thanks so much to all of you for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.