Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs, but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the same functions.

Folklorist, Thomas E Bullard (1989)

The Acts of Peter 3

Philip, the Samaritans, Simon Magus, Peter
Healing Miracles
The First Gentile, Cornelius, is Converted
A Bogus Escape
Peter as Bishop of Rome

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.

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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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.