Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 26, 1998

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.

The Disciples are Arrested

And as they spake unto the people, the priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees, came upon them, Being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they laid hands on them, and put them in hold unto the next day: for it was now eventide.

Acts 4:1-3

The priests, having noticed Peter addressing a large crowd, send the captain of the temple guard to move on the crowd and arrest the speakers. Luke is at least historically accurate here in making the Sadducees the main enemies of the Nazarenes rather than the Pharisees, the tradition which grew after 70 AD when the Sadducees effectively disappeared with the suspension of temple worship. This suggests that the story is based in genuine tradition.

But, why? The temple porticoes were for teaching—that was their purpose—so it could not have been the act of teaching people that they objected to. Luke pretends it is because Peter was teaching about the resurrection of the dead. Resurrection was not a belief of the Sadducees, but why should they have taken such a hard line in this instant? The Pharisees believed in it and many ordinary Jews. The Sadducees would simply have regarded the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus as absurd.

The simplistic Christian assumption has always been that the priests were evil and malicious and the proto-Christians good and kind, but that explains nothing. The priests might have been alarmed that the crowd was large and wanted it dispersed fearing a riot, but the arrest of the Nazarenes implies that they were either still outlaws or had created a disturbance by refusing to move on.

And it came to pass on the morrow, that their rulers, and elders, and scribes, And Annas the high priest, and Caiaphas, and John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest, were gathered together at Jerusalem.

Acts 4:5-6

The Nazarenes now had about 5000 converts. Verse 4:6 contains one of the curious anachronisms that tell us that the gospel chronology is not correct, a fact which Christians like to ignore. Luke asserts that Annas is the High Priest when, according to Josephus, Annas was sacked as High Priest by Gratus in 15 AD. Luke has an equally strange passage in his gospel where literally he states that Annas and Caiaphas were High Priest (singular) when Jesus came to John the Baptist for baptism. In the time of Pilate’s Prefecture, the High Priest was Joseph Caiaphas who merely gets a mention here as apparently second in command.

Between the sacking of Annas and the appointment of Caiaphas, his son-in-law, there had been three other High Priests, all appointed by Gratus at yearly intervals:

1. Ishmael, son of Phabi
2. Eleazar, son of Annas
3. Simon, son of Camithus.

Before Gratus, Prefects had served for three years, the normal tour of duty decreed by Augustus. Gratus arrived, sacking Annas and appointing Ishmael. Each year thereafter he appointed a new High Priest, a measure intended to limit their power. In his third year, he appointed Caiaphas as High Priest to succeed Simon.

Now according to the extant works of Josephus, Gratus then continued to serve as Prefect with Caiaphas as High Priest for another eight years before he was succeeded by Pilate who served for another ten years with Caiaphas still as High Priest. But the chronology of Josephus has been altered by Christian editors. It is more likely that Gratus served the normal three years appointing Caiaphas in his final year, and that Pilate found Caiaphas as the High Priest of the year when he arrived. Realizing he could work with Caiaphas, Pilate stopped the annual cycling of the priesthood introduced by his predecessor and retained Caiaphas in office.

Caiaphas is described three times in John’s gospel (11:49,51; 18:13) as High Priest of the year, confirming Josephus, and that perhaps he became rather a joke—his year turning into no less than 18. Caiaphas did not get sacked until Pilate had himself been sacked in 36 AD. Vitellius, governor of Syria which included Judaea, apparently recognized that Caiaphas had been on the gravy train with Pilate too long and sacked him when his protector had gone back to Rome.

Vitellius appointed Jonathan, a son of Annas, possibly the John of Acts 4:6 but he did not serve long and Vitellius replaced him with Theophilus, his brother, obviously another son of Annas. Theophilus served for several years until he was deposed by Agrippa I in favour of Simon, son of Boethus. Agrippa then decided that Jonathan was the man for the job after all, but Jonathan refused the honour, urging instead that Agrippa appoint his brother, Matthias.

In all of these changes, Josephus makes no mention of any Alexander that could be identified with the one of Acts 4:6 and never suggests that Annas ever again became High Priest after 15 AD, though with his son-in-law and five sons in the post in subsequent years he was plainly an important man and probably an eminence gris behind the priesthood. Nevertheless, Luke must have been wrong in saying that Annas was actually the High Priest unless he is speaking about a much later Annas.

Peter and his co-defendants appear before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish civic court, and they are questioned.

By what power, or by what name, have ye done this?

Acts 4:7

Why had they had done… this! What? We still do not know, but it apparently has nothing to do with the teaching of resurrection and Luke now pretends that the crime is healing the man with the club foot. The fact that the disciples were asked by whose authority they did this proves that the crime was one of laesae majestatis, just as it had been when Jesus controlled the temple. Authority or power meant a king, or the power of a king. In short, the authority of the state. The clear implication is that there had been a public disturbance in the temple and the temple guard had arrested the instigators.

The likely reason for the disturbance, if Luke is to be believed, is that Peter spent much of his speech running down the Jews, who would have got quite annoyed, but, since this is a later invention of the Christian church, the real reason must have been that the disciples were recognized as Nazarenes, followers of the rebel Jesus who had captured Jerusalem a few years earlier. They had gathered a large crowd and the priests evidently thought they were plotting another revolution.

Curiously, the very fact that temple guards arrest the Nazarenes here in Acts shows that they would have arrested Jesus in the gospels when he, brandishing nothing but a piece of string as a weapon, according to John, cleared out the temple court. Here in Acts, the temple guards disperse a large crowd and arrest 120 troublemakers but in the gospels they could not arrest a frail man with a thong! This is manifest proof that Jesus was not alone when he cleared the temple and, indeed, must have had sufficient might to overpower or intimidate the temple guard.

The specification that the High Priest and his kinfolk met at Jerusalem is curious since they would not have met anywhere else. If anything it implies that the Pentecostal scenes did not occur at Jerusalem, perhaps because they occurred at Qumran or wherever the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant was held.

In the speech he composes for Peter addressing the court, Luke continues to play on the bogus healing of the congenitally lame man, pretending that the proceedings had been brought because they had done a good deed! The defendants stood before the court in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, or properly, Jesus the Nazarene.

Luke tells us this Jesus was the stone set at nought who became the head of the corner, the quotation from Psalms 118:22—but not from a known text suggesting that it might have been from an Essene source—which the Qumran sectaries used of their concept of their own community being the foundation of heaven on earth. Both uses are found in the New Testament applied to Christ or to Christians. Thus, the original Essene usage is preserved in the early epistle, 1 Peter 2:7-10, but applied to the community of Christians.

The change in Peter’s speech from healing at the beginning to saving at the end demonstrates the identity of the two concepts for the Essenes—to enter God’s kingdom, the people were to be healed of their sins, not of their physical defects or illnesses. The metaphorical healings of the Essenes vulgarly become miracles of physical healing for Christians, whether by deliberate re-interpretation of the truth or original invention.

In Acts 4:13-22, the Sanhedrin let the plaintiffs go, although Luke, using the fiction writer’s omniscience, tells us what the elders had discussed in camera! Having been kept overnight in the cooler, they will have been released with a stern warning to keep the peace. Taking away the fictional trappings, that is just what seems to have happened.

The curious logical inconsequence in 4:22:

For the man was above forty years old, on whom this miracle of healing was shewed,

seems to be an obscure reference to the forty years of cosmic battle expected before Jesus was to return on a cloud when all was restored. The point might have been that the man could hardly have expected to be still alive in another forty years time when the Parousia and the kingdom were due. The message is that people were converting who could not reasonably have lived to see the miracle of the return but nonetheless were confident that they would themselves be resurrected into the kingdom. Otherwise, it is just a crude introduction of the word forty by way of an explanation of the tradition of forty years.

It is possible that the elements of genuine tradition in the courtroom scene actually stem from the trials of the other insurgents after the failed rebellion of Jesus. It might, for example, have been constructed from scattered reminiscences of the trials of Peter and John. If they are different court appearances, Luke is maintaining the pretence that the apostles were unknown to the authorities—they could not, therefore, have been known rioters or insurgents. If the tradition stems from accounts of their earlier appearances before the authorities, as insurgents with Jesus, then their faces might indeed have been new to the original judges.

Note also that Peter and John are described as unlearned and ignorant. In Judaea at that time the criterion of scholarship was knowledge of the scriptures and the law. Jesus’s followers were sinners and backsliders—non-practising and non-devout Jews. Jesus insisted that he came for sinners not for the righteous. Plainly then, on the criteria of the time, these men were unlearned and ignorant.

Goods in Common

When Peter and his friends return to the circle of the Nazarenes in Acts 4:23, they return to only a small group of the thousands of converts they have already made—presumably the original 120. The prayer they offer up is essentially Essene being similar to the prayer of Hezekiah (2 Kg 19:15-19; Isa 37:15-20). Remarkably we find Luke quoting from Psalms 2, the coronation psalm, but cuting it short at the mention of the Anointed One (Christ) to argue that this is just what happened to Jesus, and thus omitting the unmistakeably nationalistic and rebellious continuation of the original.

”Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ.” For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.

Uncharacteristically, Peter speaks of a gathering against the Lord and His Christ of Pontius Pilate and the gentiles as well as Herod and the Jews. Since this is contrary to any impression that Luke wanted to give—Pilate and gentiles being habitually whitewashed by Luke—there might be a hint here of original Nazarene tradition. Even Lampe observes, in Peake’s Commentary (BR-PCOB 892a), that the hostility of Pilate and Herod to Jesus (referred to, you will note, as a child) is scarcely in accordance with Luke’s own passion narrative and suggests that this reinterpretation of Psalms 2 was taken over by Luke ”from early tradition without adjustment”.

Lampe is disarmingly frank in admitting that the clergy are quite aware that the gospel writers adjusted the stories which came to them. Here he recognizes that the kindness of Pilate in the gospels is not in keeping with the original tradition which Luke has adjusted! Pilate was greedy and unscrupulous as history records everywhere he appears except in the New Testament.

“Anointed”, in Acts 4:26, is a harmony with the quoted psalm where the word rendered “Christ” here is “anointed” in the original. It is not a statement of fact. Essenes did not anoint their princes but baptized them.

Signs and wonders is repeatedly used by Luke apparently signifying miracles but, if it stems from the original tradition as seems likely, in conjunction with the references in Acts 4:30 to God stretching forth His hand, it is a veiled reference to the victory of Jesus and the Nazarenes over the Jerusalem garrison. The passage in Joel which the Nazarenes considered prophesied the victory was explicitly described by Joel as a wonder and he also listed several signs which the Essenes would have noted as further indications of the end time. The scriptural meaning of stretching out a hand was to slay or punish. In combination, the inference of a victory over the enemies of Israel seems clear.

They had been arrested as disturbers of the peace and then had been released. It is this apparent good fortune that gave them an overwhelming feeling that they had been graced with the Holy Ghost. After recent tribulations, suddenly they had faith that God really was with them. This was probably the original Pentecostal experience that Luke has elaborated and dramatized in these passages. They felt ecstatic, convinced by their own propaganda, good fortune and success.

In Acts 4:34-37 and in the reference in Acts 4:32, Essene practice regarding the common possession of property is described, again showing the commonality of their roots. But the converts who followed Jesus were not fully initiated Essenes and might have been expected to behave more like village Essenes who did not hold everything in common but instead had a levy for the old and the sick.

Jesus however thought the end of the wicked world was imminent and seems to have taught his Nazarenes that there was no point in holding on to any wealth—their treasure would be in heaven. Thus, the first Christians accepted the practice of the monastic Essenes, holding everything in common. Here the message is that the multitude of converts truly believed in the end of the wicked world because they willingly yielded up all they had to the common fund.

The man called Barnabas who sold land for the Nazarene group is not a “son of consolation” or “of exhortation” (as in the Revised Version) or “of encouragement” (as in the Revised Standard Version). He could be a “son of a prophet”—a follower of Jesus, the only relevant prophet of the time—or Barnabas could be a deliberate disguising of the name Barabbas used in Mark’s gospel for the released criminal, but which we have surmised was the nickname of Jesus himself. Barabbas could have been, like Jesus, a man who called God “father” but Luke did not want to associate the name of the criminal with the early Christians.

In connexion with the practice of holding goods in common, Luke relates the episode of Ananias and Sapphira who were murdered. This strange tale is a severe embarrassment to Christians, whether the loving God or Peter was the murderer. The pair were apparently withholding some of the money that they were anyway giving voluntarily to the Nazarenes. Why should this invite such extreme wrath from God—or Peter! The Essenes had to give everything to the Poor (that is turn everything they owned over to a common fund—the Poor were the Essenes) and it seems the Nazarenes had to also, but the punishment for welching was never death.

Plainly the real crime was much more serious and the clue is given by the great fear that overcame the church when they heard of these things. Naturally, murder was a criminal act but that does not seem to be the implication here because Luke blames the murder on to God, so why should he say the Nazarenes were fearful? The truth must have been that the couple were spies, being paid by the priests or the Romans to betray the Nazarenes who were still known as insurrectionists. If so the punishment ties in with Essene practice.

A Second Arrest and a Trial before the Sanhedrin

Acts 5:12-16 are garbled and contradictory. If this passage is genuine tradition then the apostles still were operating secretively. In 5:13 no man dared join them though they were admired by the people, but immediately multitudes are joining them and being healed in more miraculous ways than Jesus ever managed in the first gospel written. Even Christian commentators have to admit that this is a difficult verse. The reason is that it is another veiled reference to the Nazarene victory over the Romans.

Signs and wonders is code for the Nazarene victory which occurred not “in” but “under” Solomon’s porch, the temple porticoes, where the Nazarenes preached being high above the Qidron Valley where the victory was won. “Of the rest” should be “of the rulers”, as many scholars will admit, the people being plainly counterpointed with the rulers. The Sadducees wanted nothing to do with the the Nazarenes. They were too scared of them.

The rest of it copies Mark which Luke might have known was coded but he continues to pretend that the healing miracles were the gift of the Holy Spirit, adding absurd miracles like the effect of Peter’s shadow. Peter is always made to seem like the leader of the sect but we know even from this work that James was really the leader, so the impression given is deliberately false.

The apostles behave like Jesus, healing and casting out unclean spirits. However, circumstances were now different. After the Roman counter attack, Jesus having failed to expel the Romans and induce God’s miracle, it seems unlikely that his followers would have continued in the same way, preparing for another uprising. If they had done, it is hardly surprising that they were persecuted. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that the authorities would have been so lenient towards them.

Jesus had to prove to God that Jews had not deserted their God. That he had done, and no further proof was needed. The duty of Jesus’s followers was to continue to persuade Jews to repent and be baptized, but they did not expect now to have to fight battles against the foreigner—at least not without an angelic host on their side. They had only to recruit repentant Jews to walk through the gates into the kingdom when God permitted them to open. Nazarenes were no longer seditionists but now were missionaries for the new belief that the Son would return and lead the repentant into the kingdom. So though the Sadducees still saw them as troublemakers, they were not. Already they were Christians!

The Jewish rulers of Judaea continued to mistrust the apostles, monitoring their activities and periodically arresting them. Christians make out it was willful hatred of saintly people but the Jewish ruling class had every reason to be wary of the apostles and their converts.

The rulers, the High Priests, again turn against the Nazarenes in Acts 5:17. It is curiously similar to the events following 4:1, possibly a doublet—Luke had the same story from two sources and used them both. In some manuscripts, the High Priest does not rise up but is named as Annas as before (a confusion of Annas and Nasi.) Again they are imprisoned and appear before a court as in 4:7 but here an angel has appeared to release them from prison. Luke or an editor is fond of angels and often is fond of using scriptural phrases and forms of speech, but these parts, like the biblical style of the birth narrative in Luke’s gospel, are perhaps the work of an editor keen to add biblical gravitas to his insertions.

Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.

Acts 5:28

Verse 5:28 confirms that the authorities regarded the evangelical activities of the apostles to be the same as those of Jesus and John the Baptist—they thought they were preparing for another uprising and that is why they were arrested. The High Priest, this time unnamed, reminds the apostles that they had been strictly warned not to foment trouble among the people by relating the exploits of Jesus and the Nazarenes because it would bring this man’s blood on to us, proving that the priests feared Roman reprisals.

Why should wandering healers invite Roman wrath? The Christian pretence throughout the New Testament that Jews are gratuitously wicked is irresponsibly racist and, following the Nazi holocaust, should be uncompromisingly rejected by everyone. The Sadducees, like all ruling castes, arranged things to suit themselves but they and the Pharisees were interested in saving all Jewry from further strife at the hands of their oppressors, the Romans. The apostles were recruiting people for God’s kingdom, a revolutionary idea, and they tried to suppress their activities with some justification.

I have surmised that a large crowd hurling stones from high vantage points helped the Nazarenes win victory over the Roman garrison of Jerusalem. In 5:26 we get support for this contention:

Then went the captain with the officers, and brought them without violence, for they feared the people, lest they should have been stoned.

The temple guards had to behave with circumspection when they arrested the apostles because they feared an angry mob might stone them. Stoning was a religious punishment, as in the case of Stephen later, so plainly the fear was of the mob taking justice into their own hands and stoning the armed guards as they had stoned the Roman legionaries.

We ought to obey God rather than men. 5:30 The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. 5:31 Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.

Acts 5:29

In his reply to the Sanhedrin in Acts 5:29, Peter explains for us that the Nazarene band were members of the sect of Judas the Galilaean by saying they had no human Lord but only God. This was the vow of Jesus at his coronation and the slogan of the Galilaeans of Judas. It expressed a plain anti-Roman sentiment. “Raised up Jesus” is a gospel distortion of the “Prince Jesus”, the word Nasi, a prince or leader, meaning one who is raised up. The gospel writers often use this convention because, by avoiding the word prince, they want to suggest that Jesus had no political role. Luke follows the convention but, apparently not knowing its purpose because he is writing later, though following an early source, he denotes that Jesus was a prince anyway. Jesus was the Nasi, Jesus which directly translates as the prince and the saviour of god.

Furthermore, he was exalted with God’s right hand signifying that God gave him His destructive power, another veiled reference to the Nazarene victory over the Romans. Peter was defending Jesus’s action in attacking the Romans and the collaborators on the Sanhedrin did not like it. Fearing more Roman retribution, the Sadducees demand the lives of the apostles.

Note that the role of the saviour was to give repentance to Israel, not to anyone—not to gentiles.

Next, in Acts 5:34-42, Gamaliel, who is the leading Pharisee, defends the Nazarenes! He argues the Sanhedrin should not be hasty in judging these men. The rulers should bide their time because it would eventually become clear whether they were truly the agents of God. It would be a sorry error if they persecuted men who had really been sent by God.

The citations made by Gamaliel make it clear that, as far as the authorities were concerned, the disciples had continued recruiting for a rebellion, explaining why they had been arrested and brought to trial. Gamaliel leaves no room for doubt comparing them with other rebel gangs—that of Theudas, leader of a band of 400 rebels, and even Judas of Galilee(!) who had led the rebellion against the poll tax in 6 AD.

If this Theudas is the one mentioned in Josephus but there given a different date, he wanted to emulate Joshua (Jesus in Greek) by crossing the Jordan into the promised land with a band of Jews, presumably—like Jesus—to liberate it from the Romans and induce God’s miracle. Judaea was the Canaan of Joshua, and the kingdom of God of Jesus and the Essenes. The identity of their aims with those of the Nazarenes is plain. Gamaliel’s speech goes as far as possible to demonstrate that the Nazarenes were a band of rebels akin to those of Theudas and Judas the Galilaean without actually saying so.

Census years were 6-7 AD, 20-21 AD and 34-35 AD. My contention is that Jesus was crucified in 21 AD consequent upon his rebellion against both Pilate’s excesses and the poll tax, just as the Acts of Pilate from the Roman archives published in 311 AD proved.

Luke has Gamaliel stating that Theudas was active before Judas of Galilee whereas Josephus has him appearing at least ten years after these supposed gospel events, in the time of the Procurator Fadus. However, Josephus in Antiquities introduces the two insurgents not in historical order but in the order in which they appear in Acts. Luke’s error could therefore be explained by a careless use of Josephus or by a carefree editing of Luke’s originally correct citation. Gamaliels’s speech, which Luke composes, truly represents Pharisaic pragmatism, in contrast with the distorted picture of Mark and other gospel writers, and so is surely based on correct tradition.

The upshot is that Gamaliel gets them off with a flogging and a warning, and again they continued preaching.

Philip, the Samaritans, Simon Magus, Peter

The passage, Acts 8:4-8, uses the metaphor of driving out unclean spirits, and healing the sick so cannot be genuine tradition, unless the Hellenized Nazarenes had adopted the same code for conversion as the original Nazarenes. It is quite possible that they did, since it had biblical authority, and more especially as they were being persecuted, and therefore had reason to keep the conversions dark. But Luke might have simply been composing, using Mark as his model.

Luke’s aim was to show a progression of conversion from Jerusalem to Rome. The chief city of Samaria was Sebaste rebuilt by Herod the Great in the Greek style and doubtless with a largely Hellenised population so Philip’s mission is entirely credible. Luke had been given a whiff of tradition but no detail so he made it up on the Marcan model. Furthermore, for Luke, the martyrdom of Stephen proved that the Jews had rejected the messiah—even though the apostles (Jews) were still active elsewhere—but the Samaritans readily accept the gospel. Luke chooses the Samaritans as representing gentiles since both were hated by orthodox Jews but, progressing gradually, he was not yet ready to have gentiles converted.

Christian commentators say that the miracles mentioned are those of Isaiah 35:5-6, the curing of blindness, deafness, dumbness and lameness, which herald the advent of the Christian age—so they say. Yet, the whole of chapters 34 and 35 of Isaiah recount the results of God’s day of vengeance when he punishes the nations and turns Palestine into a garden of Eden. The outcome is the exact opposite of that averred by the clergy—gentiles are destroyed and righteous Jews are saved. That was Jesus’s message and the belief of the original Nazarenes. The stories related here by Luke show how it was transformed by Hellenized Jews and then gentiles.

The appearance of Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-24 has been inserted at a much later date to discredit those gnostic sects he founded. Justin tells us a lot about Simon but, though he was himself a Samaritan by race, never refers to this passage in Acts. The insertion aims to show that Simon was an opportunist and a materialist who thought spiritual gifts could be bought with money. Peter gives him a dressing down and Simon seems suitably chastened and the episode is left, to us, frustratingly incomplete.

No doubt Christians at the time were being invited to recognize that Simon’s prayer had not been answered and this pretentious man had been set up as a God. That the followers of Jesus had done the same for Jesus would not have occurred to them then any more than it does now.

That the passage is late is suggested by verses 14-17, where baptism is insufficient to call down the Holy Ghost. The immediate followers of Jesus would have believed that sincere repentance confirmed by baptism was sufficient. Here the laying on of hands after baptism is also needed. The reason seems to be that gentile Christians sought a difference between the baptism of John the Baptist and Christian baptism to distinguish Christians from the followers of John. Both were baptizing sects and both were originally called Nazarenes.

Christians claimed that John’s baptism only signified repentance and not the receiving of the Holy Ghost and, furthermore, that John had told his followers to believe in him that came after him—for Christians a specific reference to Jesus but in truth a general reference to the coming messiah—the archangel Michael. Only by believing in Jesus would they receive the Holy Ghost at baptism. Those that had received only John’s baptism had to have apostolic hands laid on them to give them the Holy Ghost (Acts 19:1-6).

We have further proof of this in the strange Acts 8:16. The Samaritans had received the word of God (8:14) and been baptized (8:12) but the Holy Spirit had not fallen on them except those baptized in the name of Jesus (8:16). The others must have been baptized by John not by Philip—they were Nazarenes but followers of John not Jesus. Followers of John who accepted Jesus as the messiah could receive the Holy Spirit through the laying on of apostolic hands.

Healing Miracles

The healing miracles done by Peter in Acts 9:31-43 are copies of healing miracles in Mark. Luke sometimes seems to understand the Nazarene code of afflictions and sometimes he seems to believe they are really miraculous physical healings and gives the apostles similar abilities to suggest they have the power of the Holy Ghost. Luke was probably close enough to the actual events and the people who participated to know what the Nazarene code really was. He is, therefore, either pretending not to know or some of the miracles have been added by a later editor who did not know the Nazarene code.

In Acts 9:36-43, Luke blatantly copies the raising of the daughter of Jair, an important event in Mark’s gospel which signified the bringing back to life of the betrothed of God, Israel, after having been ravished by the Romans. In Amos 5:2 we find:

The virgin of Israel is fallen. She shall no more rise. She is forsaken upon her land. There is none to raise her up.

The virgin of Israel is fallen because of her sins and transgressions but as always Amos finishes with the promise that God will visit and restore all. The principal sin of Israel was to permit the rule of the hated Romans—her metaphorical ravishment.

The point of the raising of the daughter of Jair by Jesus was to show to God that the Jews were willing to raise her up. This miracle by Peter has no point except to boost Peter. At Acts 9:40, Peter says, “Tabitha arise”. Luke seems to think that the woman is called Tabitha which means, in Aramaic, a gazelle. But Jesus actually said, “Talitha cumi” the Aramaic for “maiden arise”. Luke could not have made this mistake because he had Mark to work from, as we know because he quotes it extensively in his gospel.

There are two possible explanations—Luke is relating genuine, but badly remembered, tradition, or the story is a later addition. After Matthew and Luke were written, Mark fell into disuse and only later gained acceptance again. Now the Aramaic phrase is omitted from Matthew and Luke, and so when Mark had become unfashionable, the phrase must also have been only imperfectly remembered. It seems then that this whole story could be a late addition to Acts by an editor who only vaguely remembered the Aramaic expression by Jesus given in Mark. At an even later date, another editor keen to explain Aramaic words to his Greek audience translates the mistake into Greek as “dorcas”, the Greek word for gazelle!

If the first is true, then Peter was staging similar miracles to Jesus as a ritual to help bring on the kingdom of God. Since Peter spoke Aramaic, the mistake was made by the observer of the ritual who related it to Luke. Since Luke thinks, or pretends, that the two raisings were genuine but different miracles, he has to include the differences.

Luke again mentions widows (Acts 9:39) as he did in 6:1-6:

All the widows stood by him weeping.

In 9:41, they are accompanied by saints—Essenes. Christians believe that Christianity began as some sort of charitable social welfare programme seeking out destitute widows to clothe, but, as we have noted, the Nazarenes had a lot of widows of their own, because their men folk had been killed in the abortive uprising and the crucifixions which followed. Both references suggest that the story is genuine tradition and, therefore, inclines us to think that Luke had collected a true story of Peter trying to emulate the ceremonial invocations of Jesus even after the crucifixion.

The First Gentile, Cornelius, Is Converted

Cornelius, it seems, was a godfearer, like the Ethiopian eunuch, a gentile believer in the Jewish faith but one who would not be circumcised as a proselyte. His unit, partially identified by Luke as the Italian band is probably a unit of Roman freedmen known to have been based in Syria before the Jewish war and apparently based in Caesarea sometime in the 30s of the first century.

This story is again a Lucan invention to further his aim of showing the gradual spread of Christianity. Hitherto, Christians have all been Jews, though some have been Romanized Jews (Hellenists). Now, a Roman centurion and the whole of his gentile household are converted by Peter. Obviously, there was somewhere a first gentile conversion, whoever it was and whoever effected it. Luke knows it was a crucial event and wants to record it but nobody knew who it was, so Luke makes up a story.

Who would be the hero? It had to have the authority of Peter, the companion of Jesus. No one else would do, but Peter was one of the Hebrew faction not a Hellenist and Luke knows it. He therefore has to find a reason for Peter to enter a gentile home and dine with him, knowing that a traditional Jew could not do this. He, therefore, has Peter persuaded by a vision from God that gentiles, and the unclean meats of the table, were no longer unclean.

Why is this necessary when Jesus in Mark 7:15-20 has already declared all meats clean? Because Jesus had done no such thing! Mark 7:19 is a blatant and dishonest insertion as all scholars will admit. If it were genuine, it must have appeared in the other synoptic gospels because it was so important—it does not. And this passage also proves its falseness because, if Mark 7:19 were true, Peter’s vision here would be unnecessary.

Both the editor who altered Mark, and Luke are trying to justify the common Christian practice of eating unclean meats and recruiting among gentiles. They do it in different ways thereby contradicting each other.

It is easy to see how it happened. Most of Jesus’s converts were publicans and sinners, meaning the impious, and Hellenised Jews, who were the despair of the Pharisees. Normally these people were indifferent to the law and were only persuaded by the urgency of Jesus’s message of the coming kingdom to repent and practice short term piety to be among the saved. Now forty years is a long time for normally impious people to hold on to their piety after their mentor had departed the earth. The Hellenised Jews in particular will have quickly lapsed and the stories in Acts confirm that they sought a basis for so doing.

Similarly, the first gentile converts will have been recruited by Hellenisers who spoke Greek, not by Peter, who spoke only Aramaic, for why else would he need Mark as a translator? Even in Luke’s story, Jews, those who were circumcized, in 10:45 are amazed that gentiles had been admitted to the Nazarene sect. This was true, as Paul admits in his accounts, where it is clear that the Jerusalem church did not accept gentiles without circumcision.

Some writers of Christian commentaries note that it is surprising that it took so long for some of Jesus’s teaching to be accepted by the apostles, especially as Luke tells us (Acts 1:3) Jesus tarried an extra 40 days on earth after his resurrection giving them personal tuition (an allusion to the 40 years of cosmic battle before the Parousia and the advent of the kingdom). It does not occur to them that the clear inference is that Jesus did not teach such things—that they were bogusly attributed to him by the church at a later date to justify its own practices. The clergy’s explanation that the apostles were half-wits is a half-wit’s explanation. Jesus did not teach that any part of the law of Moses had been repealed and here in Acts, many years after the crucifixion, Luke’s story proves it.

Parts of Acts is written in a mock scriptural style and this is true here in Peter’s speech to Cornelius. It probably denotes the work of a later editor writing when Christianity was popular enough to make production of copies of the Septuagint worthwhile, and, therefore, that Christians were getting used to the Old Testament style of writing. In the early days of gentile Christianity, few gentile Christians would have had a Septuagint and a biblical style would have been a disadvantage.

The speech of Acts 10:37:43 is an outline of the original narrative of the suffering and death of the eschatological redeemer. It was a kind of manual and is called the “Parent Document” (PD) by some scholars.

That word, I say, ye know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached; How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree: Him God raised up the third day, and shewed him openly; Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.

In this passage in Acts, Peter gives in seven verses a concise summary of the gospel. The speech is, of course, really written by Luke, so might be just a summary of his own gospel, but, if Acts was written before the gospel, it might be a genuinely early account of the career of Jesus. It tells of his healing those ”oppressed of the devil”, plainly meaning sinners, not those who were physically ill!

In 10:43, Peter explains the new condition for remission of sins—not repentance and baptism but belief in Jesus! In Acts 8:12, Christians are going out to “carry the good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Christ”. The importance of Christ’s name is evident, echoing Enoch:

In his name are they saved.

Thus, the person of Christ was central to the teaching. In 10:39, Peter says that Jesus took his message to ”the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem,” which, though Galilee and Iturea were also Jewish countries, could only mean Judaea whereas the synoptic gospels pretend that, because he was a Galilaean, he was active only in Galilee until the fateful trip to Jerusalem. John’s gospel admits he was active in Judaea too.

He also did some notable but unspecified things while he was there. Since healings have already been mentioned, what were these things that Peter and others witnessed? Christians will say feeding 5000 people and cleansing the temple, but in reality these were substitutes for the really notable event, the military conquest of the Romans, that could not be mentioned explicitly. This sketchy outline omitting or glossing over Jesus’s genuinely remarkable Acts, will have been the first missionary outline given to potential converts. It was early Christian preaching and already it was lying to cover the truth.

Far from reminding gentiles of the hatred of Jews for Romans, the message quickly came to be peace. Acts !0:35 is:

The glad message of peace through Jesus Christ.

Since Peter addressed this to Cornelius, the Roman Centurion, plainly peace between Roman and Jew was meant, further evidence that Paul had used the death of the supposed messiah of the Jews to set up a syncretist religion aimed at qwelling the disquiet of the Jews at Roman rule.

Luke attributes to Cornelius saintly qualities even before he is baptized. Luke is pointing out that there were gentiles who were just as worthy as the best Jews. This centurion sounds just like the one in Luke 7:5. Luke is sending a message in both gospel and Acts to Romans and is keen to show Roman soldiers as lovers of Jesus to counter rumours that they had fought each other. If any Jews had reported favourably on the centurion they could only have been Hellenisers. Orthodox Jews would not have commended a Roman soldier no matter how kind he might have been. They would have felt he could show true kindness by going home.

Luke has decided that the sign of the transmission of the Holy Ghost is the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, an absurdity based on a misunderstanding of what happened, and one which was derided by the apostle to the gentiles himself, Paul. Again we see the early Christian baptismal litany, “Can any man forbid?”.

Peter reports back to the church in Jerusalem, Nazarenes called here “those of the circumcision” not meaning merely that they were Jews, which is obvious, but that gentiles had to be circumcized to become proselytes before baptism. Paul’s epistles are replete with his disagreements with the Jerusalem church which evidently remained true to the Mosaic tradition. Paul uses the expression in just this sense in Galatians 2:12 and Titus 1:10. But here they were not outraged because gentiles had been admitted without circumcision but merely because Peter had sat at table with them over unclean food.

Possibly this was the true tradition, Peter having been converted from a Jewish backslider, and, therefore, not meticulous about his observance of Jewish practices, but Luke extends it to Peter’s accepting a gentile into the movement. Peter might not have been pious but he was certainly of the Hebrew faction not the Hellenistic faction and it seems certain that he would not have been the first to baptize gentiles. Perhaps, eventually he did when the sheer weight of gentile converts convinced him, but a careful reading of this passage shows he was lax not revolutonary.

Luke has spent 66 verses explaining how Peter admitted gentiles into the Nazarene movement. The length of the account signifies its importance for the gentile Christians. But it is false. Verses 11:19-21 tell the true story.

In Acts 11:19, we learn that even the Hellenised Jews, dispersed from Jerusalem in the persecution following the stoning of Stephen, did not preach to gentiles but only to Jews. So much for the theologians who, despite 2000 years of biblical study, still assert that Jesus was preaching a universal religion. Tampering by the gentile church has confused the picture, but the evidence is still conclusive that Jesus’s message was only for Jews, and here we find that even his followers who were non-kosher Jews did not preach to gentiles.

Why should Luke include this sentence if it were not true? Why should Jesus’s Hellenised converts, who must have been delighted to hear the Mosaic law repealed by Jesus, not teach this liberating message? Jesus came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it. He did not say he had come to destroy the law to fulfil it. Not one jot or tittle of the law was to pass away until heaven and earth passed away. That pretty definitely means never, in normal times, and, although Jesus did not think his times were normal, he cannot have believed that God would abrogate the law Himself. The abrogation of the law had to be introduced by the evangelists to justify what had happened despite Jesus’s teachings. Gentiles had become Christians. Christianity had become gentile.

The real Cornelius is hidden in the brevity of Acts 11:20. The Hellenists as a body had continued to teach only Jews, but 11:20 admits that a minority of them who had gone to Antioch preached the Lord Jesus to the Greeks. The word used here is again “Hellenists” apparently reiterating that they were teaching Greek speaking Jews, but Jews nonetheless. But that would make the contrast implied between verses 19 and 20 none existent. Verse 19 cannot mean that refugee Hellenists taught orthodox Jews because we know that orthodox Jews regarded them as apostates and would not have listened. They could only have taught other Hellenised Jews—or gentiles!

The answer to the riddle is that Luke originally wrote that Hellenes were taught in Antioch, meaning gentile Greeks. This is when the first gentiles were converted, not by Peter in Caesarea. An editor, probably the one who added the story of the conversion of Cornelius, realized that these gentiles must have been baptized soon after the death of Stephen and, therefore, before Cornelius, and so he altered Hellenes to Hellenists to make it sound as though they were Jews not gentiles. He failed to notice the logical contrast in verses 19 and 20 which he had now made into nonsense.

A Bogus Escape

How could Peter, a Jew himself, think:

The Lord hath delivered me from all the expectations of the people of the Jews?

It has to be Luke or an editor of the book who thinks thus not Peter. Furthermore, this miracle is a miracle and not Nazarene code! In other words it is invented as propaganda. Mark has unclean spirits but no angels. Luke has angels flying all over the place. It is absurd. Some argue that the details given prove the story, but they really prove it is a story. The Western Text of Acts, which scholars accept is bloated, gives even more detail. The miracle is fiction.

In Acts 12:12, the author has forgotten that the Nazarenes held their goods in common and tells us that they meet in the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark—the author of the gospel of Mark, Christians assume. Furthermore, these Christians have slaves, for a maid called Rhoda answers the door. The Nazarenes had no slaves or property of any kind and these details show the episode is bogus. More still! The congregation think not Peter, but his angel, meaning guardian angel, is at the door. Guardian angels were a Persian concept.

In 12:17, the editor acknowledges that Peter is not the leader of the Nazarenes but James. According to Christian commentators, the twelve apostles had no successors, so James could not have been one, even though Judas was replaced earlier in Acts and, in his epistles, Paul calls James an apostle (Gal 1:19; 2:9). Plainly, the apostles of the Jerusalem church were honoured positions which could be filled, but because they were the prerogative of the Nazarene church in Jerusalem, these offices did not carry over into the gentile church of the wider empire and when the Jerusalem church died, the apostolic positions died too.

The Western gentile church continued an apostolic tradition of its own as the apostolic succession. Thus, when James the son of Zebedee was put to the sword, another would have been elected as an apostle to succeed him. Since it was of no interest to the editor of Acts, it was not recorded.

Peter goes to another place, in 12:17, because he has to escape the attentions of Agrippa whose kingdom, short-lived as it was, was possibly larger than that of Herod the Great, his grandfather. If the death of Agrippa, soon to be related in Acts, means anything, Herod Agrippa even had influence in Tyre and Sidon. So Peter had to escape to further afield and apparently chose Antioch, though here it says Caesarea, perhaps the city from which he sailed to Antioch further north. The puzzle is why Peter, in particular, is hounded.

The return of the story to Barnabas and Paul, in 12:25, suggests that the whole of the intervening tale about Peter could have been inserted. The visit of Barnabas and Paul to Jerusalem is interrupted by this totally irelevant story which serves no purpose except to glorify Peter with the miraculous and perhaps to explain why he had to leave Jerusalem. Nothing is said about Barnabas and Paul in Jerusalem and the tale of the angelic release of Peter could have been added to replace an original account of Paul meeting James which might not have been complimentary enough to Paul and so was omitted by the editor with a penchant for scriptural style and angelic stories. We know the Nazarenes were hounded by the Sadducees after the crucifixion and, in this period, Peter might have been jailed but this passage looks like a late addition aimed at adding to the legend of Peter.

Peter as Bishop of Rome

Was Peter ever the Bishop of Rome? Catholics believe he was whereas many others do not believe he ever went there.

The church in Rome was already well established when Paul wrote Romans around 57-59 AD. No Apostle founded it. If Suetonius is correct that Claudius banished Jews from Rome because of tumults instigated by Chrestus in 49 AD, the church at Rome existed before the Council of Jerusalem (~50 AD) yet Peter was still in Jerusalem at that time. In any case, Paul would have referred to Peter’s role had it been true. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, Peter is not even mentioned. The audience are Pauline converts, gentiles not Jews, for they are not bound by the Jewish Law, and put their trust in faith. The Jews from Rome converted on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:10) must surely have been the founders, but following disagreements over ”Chrestus” (salvation through faith or works) they were expelled.

According to Galatians, Peter spent most of his activity in Jerusalem (1:18;2:1-10) but visited Antioch where he refused to mix with gentile Christians and persuaded Barnabas, Paul’s companion, also not to mix, thus antagonising Paul (2:11-21). Acts concludes with Paul preaching in Rome, but merely says that Peter, after his second release from prison, went to another place. Later, he is still in Jerusalem allegedly arguing for Paul’s gentile converts not to be bound by the Law. When later documents refer to Peter’s martyrdom no place is mentioned. He is claimed to be the first Bishop of Antioch although there is no association of martyrdom with it.

1 Clement, an epistle from the Church of Rome to the Church of Corinth, comparing Peter and Paul, refers to Peter’s glorious past but makes no mention of his being in Rome, though it does say that Paul came to the limit of the West (Rome) and died there. It seems that Clement did not know of Peter’s being in Rome. Ignatius, addressing the Romans, refers to Peter and Paul together as if they had been in Rome. But, although Justin Martyr in about 150 AD talks of Simon Magus being in Rome, he does not mention Peter’s supposed polemic against him.

The Bishop of Corinth, writing to Rome about 170 AD, says that both the Church of Rome and the Church of Corinth were founded by Peter and Paul, yet there had been no earlier mention of Peter being at Corinth, though Paul, of course, was. If the bishop was wrong about the history of his own church, is he likely to be right about the history of the Roman one? The author of Romans (Paul) says he has never met the Christians of Rome and this is confirmed in Acts where the Roman Christians meet Paul only on his arrival. The Bishop of Corinth is taking part in myth building! Soon afterwards Irenaeus says that the Roman church was founded by Peter and Paul.

Later, Peter is said to have been in Rome for 25 years and to have founded the church there by himself. This idea grew to strengthen Rome’s claims to be supreme of the churches. Bishops were supposed to have been established since the earliest days so it was better to claim the first bishop of Rome as either Peter or Paul. Peter was preferred as the companion of the real life Jesus.

The Jerusalem Church sent people after Paul to keep an eye on him and to keep his activities within bounds. Peter might have been instructed to follow Paul to Rome late in their careers to counter Paul’s Hellenizing activities. Anomalies in the records of the first bishops of Rome might be explained if there were two autonomous churches in Rome, a Jewish Christian Church recognizing the seniority of the Jerusalem Church and Paul’s Church of Hellenized Jews and gentiles, denying the authority of Jerusalem.

Later, the existence of two churches was erased. The conflict between the two Apostles is smoothed, they work together, they actively cooperate in founding churches including the Roman church, then Peter stays 25 years in Rome, becomes the sole founder and the first bishop. In such ways is the good news manipulated. In such ways are myths constructed.

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