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Who Lies Sleeping?

The Acts of Peter 2

The Disciples are Arrested
Goods in Common
A Second Arrest and a Trial before the Sanhedrin

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 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:

Ishmael, son of Phabi
Eleazar, son of Annas
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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.