Just as mankind eliminated the intelligent opposition, the anthroposaurs would have eliminated any other animal, dinosaur or mammal, that seemed likely to become a rival.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Acts of Peter 1

The Events of Pentecost
Peter’s Pentecostal Address
Nazarene Success

Abstract

The earliest tradition, as Acts implies several times, was to continue as before, the only difference being that the general resurrection had begun with the raising of Jesus, so that Jews had better repent and be baptized quickly. Peter and the other disciples saw it as their duty to persuade the froward Jews to rejoin the fold—it was urgent! The instructions to repent and be baptized were just as before—in God’s name. Jesus’s followers were mainly unsophisticated people but they were still in Palestine and they would not have baptized converts in Jesus’s name when Jesus and John the Baptist were careful to baptize them in God’s name. To baptize in Jesus’s name would have outraged Jews. The gift of repentance and baptism was not the Holy Ghost but entry into God’s kingdom. Hope for the kingdom had receded and Luke offers a more diluted gift.

The Events of Pentecost

Pentecost was the celebration of the giving of the law but was also the occasion of the Essene Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant which would explain why they were “all with one accord in one place” in Acts 2:1. Luke tells us they experienced a rushing noise like a mighty wind which filled the house and tongues of fire sat upon the faithful, filling them with the Holy Spirit so that they began to speak in tongues.

The allusions to fire and spirit are plainly to John the Baptist—baptism by the holy spirit meant judgement, and judgement was by fire on the terrible day of God’s vengeance. But Luke was writing after the forty years of a Jewish generation, the period of the battles for the kingdom, had long passed and the messiah had not returned as the Christians had thought he would. Luke had to make John the Baptist’s prophecy appear to have been realized. Hence he invents the scene in which the apostles are baptized with the holy spirit in the form of tongues of flame.

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
Acts 2:5-6

The “this” that was noised abroad in Acts 2:6 was the speaking in tongues not the sound of the Holy Ghost as most Christians would assume. Speaking in tongues was readily adopted as a miracle by the early church because it was a metaphor for the spreading of the gospel throughout the world. Christians have ecstatically babbled nonsense ever since, even calling it prophesying, though no one ever seems to bother interpreting these gobbledegook prophecies. It was not a miracle and the more rational Christian commentators warn their flocks not to take these events too seriously.

We imagine that every language of the world babbled forth, and that is the intention of the author’s adding a list of countries, but the list is identifiable as an ancient astrological catalogue and was probably added later. We can deduce this because the Greek word for dwelling in Acts 2:5 means permanently dwelling not merely visiting as the added list must convey. Jews that were present would have been mainly locals who spoke Aramaic, the common language of the Levant at the time, with some Hellenized Jews who, resident as traders and merchants, would have spoken Greek, the common language of the Eastern Empire, or Latin, the common language of the Western Empire. There were only Jews present as 2:5 tells us, though in 2:10 we learn some were proselytes—there were no gentiles. So not many tongues had to be spoken for the crowd which had gathered to understand.

Luke relates that the crowd recognized them as Galilaeans in Acts 2:7, probably to suggest, in this context, they were from Galilee, speaking in the Galilaean accent. If this is genuine tradition, the crowd recognized them as Galilaeans—the Jewish sect founded by Judas of Galilee.

Peter’s Pentecostal address

It seems curious that there were no gentiles present in a crowd in Jerusalem which must have been quite a cosmopolitan city. The reason is that the gathering was an exclusively Essene one, and probably occurred at an Essene centre. Oddly enough, we get immediate confirmation in Acts 2:13, Luke mockingly referring to “new wine”, the holy drink of the Essenes.

The Christian belief is that the crowd mocks the Nazarenes believing them to be drunk, but the mockery is that they could get drunk on new wine—merely water—the vintage did not start for almost two more months. The joke is an Essene joke and confirms that new wine was in fact only water. Luke does not know this or pretends to his gentile readership he does not, composing a speech for Peter which he begins by refuting the apparent accusation of drunkenness. Essenes did not drink alcoholic drinks and it cannot be believed that they would have allowed their converts to drink them either.

Peter makes his Pentacostal speech, beginning by quoting, from Joel 2:28-32, the signs of the end time, the very signs that Jesus had indicated in his mini-apocalyptic speech (Mk 13). The quotation in Acts stops short at Joel 2:32 where it says the day of the Lord will be a terrible day for all but those who call in the name of the Lord to be saved, and the remnant who are called by the Lord. In the original, not anyone who called to be saved were saved but only the remnant called by the Lord.

The “remnant” and the “called” were Essene names for themselves—the righteous ones. Typically, by omitting the second part of the quotation, the first Christians change it to anyone who calls will be saved. That will not have been Peter’s doing but Luke’s, the remnant being some of those in Mount Zion and Jerusalem implying that they were Jews whereas Luke had the diametrically opposed message that the gentiles were saved while the Jews had murdered God, or as he puts it, since Jesus at this early stage had not yet been deified, a man approved by God.

Yet more significant however is the continuation of the passage in Joel missed out by Luke but which was probably the point of Peter’s speech—it describes God’s revenge against the Grecians for enslaving the Jews. It describes a mighty battle in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the valley of the judgement of God, in which God would put in the sickle and judge the nations, the gentile enemies of the Jews. Afterwards Jerusalem would again be holy and no foreigner would pass through the city any more.

Now this is precisely what the Nazarenes had done when they defeated the Jerusalem garrison in the valley of the brook Qidron, also known as the Valley of Jehoshaphat, a battle disguised as the killing of the Gadarene swine.

The passage in Joel goes on to say that after this judgement, a fountain would arise in the temple and flow into the valley of Shittim, the rift valley to the east, where its purifying waters would meet and resurrect the Dead Sea at Qumran, the New Jerusalem of the Essenes. The Essenes believed in the purifying power of water and saw in the springs issuing from the limestone to form living oases by the Dead Sea the beginning of the magical purifying river, described in more detail in Ezekiel.

Having heard all of this from Jesus, Peter’s speech was that this prophesied judgement by Joel had occurred with the Nazarene victory, even though it had been temporary. God had simply wanted proof that He was not rejected by His people. Jesus had proved it and, though he had been then killed, he had been resurrected—proof by God that the victory indeed denoted the day of God’s vengeance and that the general resurrection of Hosea had begun and would be complete in forty years. The battle in the Qidron valley had been prophesied by Joel and it had occurred!

Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know.
Acts 2:22

Note here that Peter or Luke do not consider that Jesus is a god but only a man, albeit approved of God. Jesus is described as “of Nazareth” when in the Greek, as always, it is properly the adjective whose meaning has been lost but is better rendered “the Nazarene” since it evidently describes members of a sect. G W H Lampe in Peake’s commentary (BR-PCOB 887) is honest enough to point out that Nazarene could refer to “neser”, a branch, “nazir”, consecrated, or “nasorayye”, watchers. The truth, which has rarely been considered, is that it probably refers to all of these meanings and more because the Essenes delighted in the way Aramaic and Hebrew lent themselves to punning. They interpreted scripture in terms of puns and there seems little doubt that they would have regarded the convergence of multiple meanings on the root “nsr” as a sign of holiness from God.

In Acts 2:23, while blaming the Jews explicitly, Luke is careful to disguise the fact that the Romans crucified the man approved of God. He uses the euphemism lawless men meaning that they were gentiles—men not subject to the only law sent by God, the law of Moses. As it stands, it sounds as though the men who did it were criminals, most Christians would assume metaphorically so, since the High Priests were not criminals in fact. Luke’s clever use of the expression proves that he is writing for gentiles not Jews, who would understand fully.

In quoting Psalms 16 in Acts 2:25, Peter is depicted as being absolutely Essene and indeed Christian, for the common habit of these two sects is to read into scripture what is not there. Psalms 16 is not a prophecy but a psalm of confidence in God. Not deterred Luke (or Peter) pretends it is a prophecy of the resurrection of Jesus to sit at the right hand of God.

The messiah was regarded by the Jews as a son of David because he was to be a great warrior king like David and therefore of his stock. David had written this in Psalms 132 where God promised to make his righteous children kings forever, and so Jesus must have been a son of David, a descendant of the king. But Jesus himself denied (Mk 12:37) that he was!

Jesus had argued to the crowd in Mark that he did not have to be of the line of king David to be a son of David, but simply a man in the mould of David. The messiah could not be a son of David, for that would lead to the contradiction of David calling his son, Lord, when conventionally a son calls his father, Lord. Jesus thus persuades the crowd that the messiah was not of the blood of David but in the mould of David—a man of the same character and appointed by God into the role—and they readily concurred.

Already, when Luke wrote, the words of Jesus were being ignored in favour of the messianic legend. Here Peter uses the same quotation from Psalms 110 and a similar argument to show that David cannot have been referring to himself when he prophesied that the Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou on my right hand, but to the man who was in his mould, Jesus. Jesus could not have been a resurrected David, since David, the psalmist, referred to my Lord, who therefore could not have been himself. Jesus it was, therefore, who had been resurrected to sit at God’s right hand. Nor could David have been resurrected as the messiah because, after a thousand years, his tomb still existed proving that he was most certainly dead and buried. Jesus therefore was the messiah, not David.

Peter, we can accept, was one of the simple of Ephraim, one of Jesus’s converts. He was therefore not as accomplished in theo-logic as an Essene but had spent at least a year and possibly three years with Jesus (18-21 AD) and, as Christians themselves believe, had learnt at the feet of his master.

The speeches Luke gives to Peter are rarely entirely fictional but often contain tradition. Luke savages them perhaps more than Mark savaged Peter’s account of the Nazarene mission but he leaves clues which allow us to deduce some of the truth. We can see this here, but Luke tries to omit all of the violence and references to battles, even indirect ones. But he does it crudely, simply by curtailing scriptural quotations which on restoration often give the main point of the speech.

What is the explanation of the speaking in tongues? Luke would have preferred just to use the quotation from Psalms but the extract from Joel had entered the oral tradition and could not be ignored. Luke wants to give Peter a reason for introducing it, but one which is quite different from the real one. He notices that in the earlier part of the prophecy of Joel that one of the signs would be that everyone would be able to prophesy. Luke therefore pretends that speaking in tongues is prophecy and that was the reason why Peter had quoted from Joel.

Thereafter, when any clever-dick from Palestine said:

My father told me he heard that speech by Peter and he said he quoted from the prophet Joel to prove that Jesus’s victory was God’s doing,

the bishop could reply:

You are very confused my son. He was talking about prophecy not what Jesus did. Take no notice of him, sisters. Jesus fought no battles but Joel had said they would be able to prophesy and they did.

Luke is so desperate to emphasise this that the pouring forth of the spirit and the word prophesy are repeated in Peter’s recitation though they occur only once in the scripture. Any persistence in the idea of a battle could be deflected as simply a vivid expression of Joel’s signs from the same quotation.

However, Luke cleverly makes use of a real incident which had seemed to the spectators quite unusual. The speaking in tongues could possibly have been simply that!

Luke tells us that there were 120 of them and they were in a public place. Jesus had instructed his disciples when he sent them on their mission to convert All Israel not to think about whatever they might say but simply to speak, leaving the words to the holy ghost. In this incident they take his words literally.

Many of these simple of Ephraim were Hellenised Jews some of whom were worldly people who had spent time abroad. They all stood up together and sermonized according to Jesus’s instructions, saying whatever came into their heads, gasping out their heartfelt rather than logical message in the tongue which they knew or normally used. It must have been like a combination of Speakers’ Corner on a fanatical morning and the Portobello Road market. It would have created a considerable babble to anyone a short distance away but, to anyone approaching the different speakers speaking in different languages, would have been discernable to those who knew that language. When a crowd had been thus attracted, Peter alone addressed the audience.

Those who believe the bible is absolutely true might note that Peter throughout quotes from the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. If he did then the story about Mark being his interpreter is false. Why should he need an interpreter if he already understood Greek? It is hard to believe that a simple Galilaean fisherman spoke and read Greek so well that quotations from the Greek bible habitually fell from his lips. Since the Galilaeans were followers of the doctrine of Judas the Galilaean, they would have avoided speaking Greek.

Even mistakes in the Septuagint are propagated so that Peter speaks of “pains” of death when “bonds” is the word used in the Hebrew version of Psalms. The error had already appeared in the Septuagint and Peter repeats it, but people are held by the “bonds” of death not by its “pains”. The man who spoke Greek and quoted from the Septuagint was Luke, proving that the speeches he wrote were composed. If this mistake had occurred in some Essene recension of the Psalms from which the Septuagint had been translated, then the error might have been genuinely Peter’s but it would also prove him to have been a follower of the Essenes.

Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

This is plainly doctored. This part of Acts 2:38 is written at least 50 years after the event and perhaps much later than that—much of the mythology was in place. Peter’s instructions that the crowd be baptized in the name of Jesus are unlikely to have been original. Jesus’s followers were mainly unsophisticated people but they were still in Palestine and they would not have baptized converts in Jesus’s name when Jesus and John the Baptist were careful to baptize them in God’s name. The gift of repentance and baptism was not the Holy Ghost but entry into God’s kingdom. Hope for the kingdom had receded and Luke offers a more diluted gift.

The earliest tradition, as Acts implies several times, was to continue as before, the only difference being that the general resurrection had begun with the raising of Jesus so that Jews had better repent and be baptized quickly. The instructions to repent and be baptized were just as before—in God’s name. Peter and the other disciples saw it as their duty to persuade the froward Jews to rejoin the fold—it was urgent! He urges them to save themselves from this crooked generation—a reference to the forty years of strife expected before the ultimate arrival of the kingdom.

Nazarene Success

They were astonishingly successful. Luke tells us they immediately baptized 3000 people that same day. They and their converts continued to break bread, as the Essenes did, and to pray—the Essenes preferring prayer to animal sacrifices and temple ritual. Just like the Essenes, they also held all their goods in common, distributing to each according to need. All of the righteous were equal in the kingdom of God and since they believed, following the Essenes, that they were the foundation of heaven on earth, they saw no need for differences in wealth. They were still the poor and the meek.

No mention is made of wine or new wine, although the new wine had been mentioned earlier (Acts 2:13). In fact, the earliest tradition was bread and water, the water standing for the new wine, unfermented grape juice, which was only in season around August. Luke speaks here of no tradition that the bread was the body of Christ. It was the promise of everlasting life for the worthy in the kingdom and the new wine represented the New Covenant. Perhaps initially the bread seemed more significant since bread signified life and the kingdom was considered almost on them. Later, the tradition laid down by Paul was to become important as the foundation of the Eucharist, but evidently the author of Acts had not heard of it.

Luke says they continued in the temple worship, and that is quite possible for we know that village Essenes did, although the the perfectly holy ones of the monastery did not. Here we have confirmation that the converts of the simple of Ephraim were village Essenes, or behaved like them. Nevertheless, the Essenes considered themselves a ”living temple” and it seems that is what Jesus taught. The concept certainly occurs in the New Testament several times.

But, there is no need to assume, despite Acts, that the Nazarenes went to the temple to worship, rather the opposite—it says they praised God from house to house. They possibly went to the temple only to teach in the porticoes of the temple courts. If so, we have a hint of a difference with the village Essenes who had returned to their villages awaiting the efforts of the next Nasi to follow Jesus. They were used to the idea of the signs of the times being read, sometimes failing, and the arrival of new leaders from time to time, but the newest converts were more naïve, continuing to believe in the old Nasi rather than his replacement. In the Western Text, their success extends not merely to ”all the people” but to ”the whole world” proving it to be a much later document.

And fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles.
Acts 2:43

”Fear” seems a strange word to use in 2:43 and Christians like to translate it as ”reverence”. Perhaps so, but perhaps they also had reason to fear. Though the changes, with the recall of Pilate and the subsequent death of Tiberius, in the administration of the empire and the province had tempered the assiduousness of the authorities, the Nazarenes were strictly still outlaws and many of the converted might have felt they were doing a bold thing in being baptized.

Peter cures a lame man in Acts 3:1 to 3:11 to give us an example of the apostles’ signs and wonders, but they are different from those of Mark’s gospel. In Mark, the healing miracles were not physical cures but meant psychological cures—people were won over to the cause of Israel after centuries in which they had submitted to various foreign powers. Luke does not know this, or wants to muddy the water.

In Acts 3:8:

And he leaping up stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.

Christian commentators tell us the reference is to Isaiah 35:6 where the lame man will leap like a hart, part of the proof text of the Essene interpretation of afflictions (Isa 35:3-10) which explains categorically that the cures are spiritual ones presaging the coming of the kingdom. This same passage refers to the high way in the wilderness, the way of holiness over which neither the unclean (the Jewish collaborators—the feeders of swine) nor any ravenous beast (the Romans—the swine themselves) shall walk, but only the redeemed and the ransomed of the land—the repentant and the righteous. This place in the wilderness was, for the Essenes, a plain reference to Qumran, their New Jerusalem.

Luke must have been aware of the relevance of the passage in Isaiah for the first Christians, stemming from their Essene traditions, but tries to suggest that physical illness was meant.

The spectacular cures in Mark are often those that needed strong arm tactics—where a beating was hidden by pretending it was an exorcism or a miracle. Unclean spirits were driven out. The general sense, however, remained the curing of people of their defeatism and apostasy. If Luke understood this, he now wants to suggest otherwise and concentrates on building up the record of physical healings carried out supposedly under the influence of the Holy Ghost. They are all fake.

The Nazarenes, though doubtless still technically outlaws, were no longer revolutionaries—they were not trying to recruit soldiers to battle the Romans as part of the cosmic battle. That part had already been done. Now they had to make Jews realize that when Jesus returned on a cloud, the kingdom would begin. And it would be soon (familiar?), certainly within forty years. So this healing is highly doubtful. However, there are indications that there might be tradition behind it.

One is the specification of the name of the gate of the temple by which the lame man sits begging—the Beautiful Gate. No gate of the temple or of Jerusalem by this name has ever been recorded except here. The only literally beautiful gate of the temple was the one decorated with golden vines and screened with a sumptuous tapestry of cosmic design which was the entrance to the divine places and forbidden to the layman. The story here is set at the entrance to the temple precinct.

The word for beautiful used in the Greek is “horaios”, from the word for “hour”, meaning “timely”, thence “blooming” and “beautiful”. But no gate called the Gate of Hours or such is known either. Plainly, we have here an Aramaic or Hebrew word falsely read as a Greek word and therefore misleadingly translated into English. The original word was “ha roeh” meaning “the seer”. The word is used of seeing or understanding the word of God and is an alternative to “nabi” meaning “prophet”. Interestingly, there is a relevant play on words here with the word meaning “bathing”, “rahas”. The old temple had a Water Gate and it would hardly be surprising if this gate was associated with the Essenes who were concerned with daily lustrations and baptism. So, it is just possible that the Simple of Ephraim who adopted the doctrines of the Nazarenes, continued to describe conversions to their cause as healings. Luke, of course, romanticises them.

Peter’s speech, in 3:12-26, to explain the miracle of the healed cripple is unlike anything that Jesus did in the synoptics. He did not have to make long speeches explaining his miracles because there were none. Peter’s speech is also too advanced in its theology for it to have been really Peter’s though it has traces of Essenism and so might reflect faint echoes of tradition.

Peter declares that Jesus was the prophet promised by Moses—“that prophet”—confirming that it was a title assumed by Jesus—surely at his transfiguration. Deuteronomy says nothing about people being destroyed if they do not heed the prophet, but it does tell us that false prophets speaking false things will be destroyed. This was Jesus’ own fate as a false prophet and the apparent distortion or confusion here looks like a typical bishop’s ploy to obfuscate the truth. Stories that Jesus had been destroyed as a false prophet according to Deuteronomy were arriving from Palestine. The bishops had to counter them and did so by claiming that the story was a garbling of the prophesied fate of those who do not listen to the true prophet who suffered according to the scriptures, not as a false prophet!

The Jew-baiting of 3:13 proves that the speech is false. Like all of these people, Peter was a Jew and could not have spoken as if he were of a different and superior race of people. Luke could, and, of course, puts his words on the tongue of Peter! The taunting continues in Acts 3:14, where the expression habitually used by the Essenes of their Righteous Teacher is used of Jesus—the holy and righteous one—a title which appears in the Enoch literature, highly regarded by the Qumran sectaries.

Meanwhile, Peter exonerates Pilate, the Roman governor, to placate the target audience of Luke’s books, the Romans. The Christian revision of the incident of Barabbas is known to Luke.

In Acts 3:15, Jesus is called the Prince of Life referring back to his pre-messianic title of Nasi, the Prince. C S C Williams (BR-PCOB 890) has been astute enough to note its use of quasi-divine leaders like Joshua with the implication that Jesus (a Greek translation of Joshua) was the title of a Nasi who parallels Joshua in taking the people into a kingdom promised by God.

In 3:19, the reward offered for repentance is just that promised by the Essenes—the cancellation of personal sins and the promise of renewal in God’s presence in the kingdom—but now introduced by the Parousia of Jesus who simply waited in heaven for the restitution of all things, the completion of the cosmic battle against evil. The raising up of Acts 3:26 is another echo of Jesus’s title, Nasi, which literally means “one raised up”—typically Essene punning.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.