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When Was Acts Written? Not in the First Century. - WESTAR Institute

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Marcion: Forgotten “Father” and Inventor of the New Testament

Christianity owes a major debt to a man with no direct connection to Jesus of Nazareth or Paul of Tarsus – a man labeled a heretic by the forerunners of orthodox Christianity. Marcion (c. 95-165 CE) was a shipbuilder, possibly ship owner, from Pontus, a small region in what is now northern Turkey. We know little else about him, except that at some point in his career he joined the Christian community in Rome only to find himself embroiled in debate with the leadership there. Ultimately they were unable to resolve their differences, and the Marcionite community broke from other Jesus followers of that era. It is unknown how separate the communities were in practice, but in some parts of the ancient world Marcionites were called “Christians” while groups with closer ties to Judaism were called “Nazoreans.”

Jason BeDuhn

Marcion holds a lasting legacy for Christians as the inventor of the New Testament. Jason BeDuhn, author of The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon, argues that Marcion not only put together the very first Christian canon of scriptures, he gave Christianity very idea of doing so. At the Early Christianity: Heritage or Heresies? Conference in Santa Rosa, California, BeDuhn spoke about the important role Marcion played in shaping Christian identity. This begins with the relationship between Gentiles and Jews in the Roman Empire. “A good contemporary analogy is the interest some modern White Americans have in Native American religion and culture,” he said, “A similar thing was going on with Gentile fans of Judaism in the ancient world. They wanted to take on foreign spirituality and practices.” However, Jews rebelled multiple times against the Roman Empire in the second century, and Gentile Christian groups fled association with them, taking on new forms in the process.

Marcionites were pesco-vegetarians who embraced pacifism. Women held high leadership roles, at least prominently enough that critics of Marcionites complained about the role women were playing in the movement. They did not believe the god of Jesus was the god of the Jews. They believed the god of the Jews was a creator god that ruled based on judgment and violence, which Marcion argued by appealing to violent texts in the Hebrew scriptures. Marcion saw the god of Jesus as an entirely new being, a higher god who provided escape from the judgment of this world. Most importantly, Marcionites had something no other Christians had: a canon of their own scriptures.

Challenging Traditional Views of Marcion

Critics of Marcion like Tertullian and Epiphanius complained that Marcion cut and edited scripture to fit his beliefs. Biblical scholar Adolf von Harnack accepted this claim in his definitive text on Marcion, Marcion: The Gospel of an Alien God (1920). However, Tertullian and Epiphanius lived several generations after Marcion, and they assumed the New Testament they read already existed in Marcion’s era. It didn’t. Marcion’s critics were reading history backward instead of forward: there was no New Testament yet.

We tend to assume the version of Christianity we see today as inevitable, but actually there were many possible ways for Christianity to develop. Christianity may never have become a religion with a set of scriptures at all. Christians may have continued to interpret and reinterpret Hebrew scriptures, rely on oral storytelling, consider themselves Jewish, and so on. The very attitude of Marcionites setting themselves apart from Jews led them to declare a “new” testament, and that has made all the difference.

Marcion’s New Testament

What did Marcion’s version of the New Testament look like? It had two parts: the Evangelion, which was a gospel related to the Gospel of Luke, and the Apostolikon, a collection of Paul’s letters. Marcion is our first witness to six of the ten letters now considered to be authentic by modern biblical scholars. Biblical scholars came to the conclusion that only some letters attributed to Paul are authentic (most exclude 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, for example). The evidence from Marcion supports this finding. The inclusion of Paul’s letters in the New Testament was by no means certain. Rather, Marcion’s choice to include the letters succeeded in pushing other communities to do the same thing when they came up with competing canons of scripture, although it took his competitors two hundred years to establish the canon now found in Bibles today.

This is a very different way of looking at the Marcionite New Testament, and scholars will need to compare the edition reconstructed by Jason BeDuhn to determine how this changes our view of how early Christianity developed. For example, the Evangelion is much shorter than the Gospel of Luke, and it is not clear whether they were both written by the same person for different communities, or if a later editor added new material to the Gospel of Luke. Also, BeDuhn found that the Marcionite version of Romans 9-11 is completely different, yet this text has been used by some scholars as a key to Pauline theology. Regardless of how these findings eventually play out in scholarly discussion and debates, BeDuhn identifies four significant contributions of Marcion to Christian history:

The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon

Available from Polebridge Press

Christians owe the idea of a “new” testament to Marcion.
Christians owe to Marcion the particular form of the New Testament.
Christians owe to Marcion the prominence of the voice of Paul in the New Testament.
Finally, Christians owe to Marcion a Christian identity built on a special scripture all their own.

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What is a Critical Scholar?

Westar Fellows are critical scholars. What does it mean to be a critical scholar? How can one tell a critical scholar from other kinds of scholars?

Critical scholars make themselves accountable to the established body of knowledge and theory. They belong to a guild of scholars, the cumulative work of which reaches back for centuries. Individual scholars may elect to add to the body of knowledge or modify particular theories, but in so doing they cannot ignore the cumulative achievements of their own fields of study. Critical scholarship forms the larger pool of learning and research that has dominated universities since the Renaissance.
Critical scholars adopt the critical methodologies integral to their fields of study.Biblical scholars must know and employ the methodologies of linguists since they deal with written texts, and they must know and utilize social scientific method. And they must know other special fields of study, such as archaeology, history, philosophy, and computer science.
Critical scholars practice their craft by submitting their work to the judgments of peers. Untested work is not highly regarded. The first questions asked of the critical scholar is what has he or she published on the subject? And where and by whom has it been reviewed?
By submitting the work to the judgment of other critical scholars, one is actually offering to have one’s work judged by the standards and criteria common to all scholarship. This is what makes critical work critical: the acceptance and use of established standards and criteria.
It is precisely for this reason that critical scholarship in the biblical field does not permit special pleading on the basis of theological doctrine or other bias. Of course, critical scholars are human and subject to human frailties. The only means they have of protecting themselves against private interests is to insist that every fact, every theory, stand the test of examination by other scholars with different private interests but common standards. Scholars must make their cases on the basis of evidence accepted by all scholars.
It is therefore appropriate that Catholic scholars submit their work to the judgment of Protestants; that Christian scholars pass review by Jewish scholars; that biblical scholars measure up to the requirements of historical and philological learning in related fields. Conservative theologians may be skeptical about certain historical events (and often are). Liberal theologians may make conservative historical judgments (and often do). To cite one example, critical scholars may value secondary material in the gospels more highly than something Jesus said. For these reasons, it is difficult to guess the religious convictions or church affiliation of scholars on the basis of their critical judgments. In fundamentalism, by contrast, theology and fact are collapsed into each other, because religious conviction is the controlling element.
It is of course the case that scholars are alert to special biases that affect scholarly judgment on the current American scene. For example, many scholars are concerned not to perpetuate biblical translations that demean women. They see no reason to continue anti-Semitic readings of biblical texts. They prefer to avoid ethnic slurs, nationalism, and other forms of intellectual and moral provincialism. Ideally, scholars are dedicated solely to the search for truth, wherever and whenever they find it.
Westar Fellows, like critical scholarship generally, represent a wide spectrum of religious belief. Fellows include an ample number of both Catholics and Protestants. A few Jewish scholars have participated in the deliberation. Fellows come from all over the United States and Canada, as well as from Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Fellows are affiliated with leading colleges, universities, and seminaries, or they are pastors of a wide variety of churches.

The scholarship Westar Fellows represent is the kind that has come to prevail in all the great universities of the world. It is also the scholarship that has been adopted by the predominant forms of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism; it is therefore the kind of scholarship honored in the theological seminaries connected with those churches.

Even more conservative churches and their seminaries have slowly but steadily adopted the canons of critical scholarship in order to participate more fully in the research and debate characteristic of all fields of study in the modern university.

Want to know more? Try “Milestones in the Quest for the Historical Jesus” by Westar founder Robert W. Funk

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David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Reviewed by Robert M. Price.

Though this book has been out for a few years now, I am reviewing it here and now because more recent research by the same author, the ingenious David Trobisch, has carried the original thesis a significant step further, making explicit a crucial point left implicit in the original. The thesis of the book was bold enough, and well-defended. In brief, bold, simply stated terms, Trobisch argues that the New Testament canon of 27 writings that we use today originated not in the fourth century as the result of a prolonged and anonymous process of debate and ossifying custom, but rather as the work of a single editor and publisher in the late second century. Though Athanasius restricted official use to these 27 books, the table of contents was nothing new. He was simply lending his imprimatur to an edition of scripture already some two centuries old, making a widely accepted edition into a definitive edition. When we still detect debate among church fathers over this or that book, it is like similar quibbling among the Yavneh-era rabbis: the debate is over the right of this or that book to retain its position in the canon, as when, in our own day, Dewey M. Beegle pronounced the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” as more worthy of canonical status than the Book of Esther.

Much of Trobisch’s case rests on simple consideration of New Testament (and even Christian Greek Old Testament) manuscripts. He has delineated a paradigm that makes good, inductive sense of many hitherto-puzzling bits of evidence. He notes that the New Testament books appear, with very few exceptions, in four groups of codices, and that within each the order of presentation is virtually always the same. There are the four gospels, almost always in the familiar order Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. There is the Acts plus the seven Catholic/General Epistles, again always in the same order. There is the Pauline canon including Hebrews. And then there is the Revelation. (Sometimes the Pauline Corpus precedes Acts/Catholic Epistles.) Such an arrangement is hardly inevitable or obvious. Had various New Testament writings simply circulated independently and then been compiled by different scribes at different times in different regions, we would never see near-uniformity like this. Why would Hebrews be included among the Paulines so often, when Paul’s name never appears in the text? Why would everyone have concluded that what we call Ephesians and Romans were written to those churches when some copies show no destination city? Would every scribe have thought the Corinthian and the Thessalonian Epistles belong in the order in which they always appear? Surely some would have labeled our “First” Thessalonians as Second Thessalonians, they are so much alike.

Did everyone “know” or think that the four gospels were penned by individuals named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Or were these not more probably the guesses of a single editor, the first who had to differentiate the four texts because he was the first to place them side by side in a larger collection--which henceforth carried the day? Was even the form of the titles “Gospel according to” self-evident so that all should have independently come to call them thusly? Or were they not, with their grammatical arbitrariness, the creative nomenclature of a single editor?

If the New Testament books are arranged (at least mainly) by genre, come to think of it, so are the Old Testament books in the Christian canon. Unlike Jewish Bibles (Hebrew or Greek), the Christian edition of the Septuagint groups the books by narratives, poetry, and prophecy. Who decided on this arrangement, so sensible and natural in one sense, but hardly self-evident and certainly a radical departure from the Jewish tradition? And why does the Christian Septuagint, alone among Greek Old Testament versions, replace the letters of the Divine Name (whether in Hebrew or in Greek in Jewish versions) with the word Kurios (Lord)? It’s not that such a substitution wouldn’t make sense in Jewish terms, because it certainly reflects the liturgical usage of the synagogue, reading “Adonai” aloud when one came to the name Yahve in the text, but there is no evidence that actually replacing the one name with the other ever took place in the copying of Jewish Greek Bibles. So it looks like the striking innovation of a particular editor.

And so does the peculiarity in Christian Old and New Testament texts of the Nomina sacra, the abbreviation of words including Theos, Kurios, Iesous, and Christos by the first and last letter of each (generally) with a horizontal line drawn over the top. This pattern does not correspond to any known, more widely used system of abbreviations. It looks idiosyncratic in origin, as if it stemmed from a particular editor of a whole Christian Bible.

The sharp-eyed Trobisch accepts the thinking of John Knox (Marcion and the New Testament, 1942) and Hans von Campenhausen (The Formation of the Christian Bible, 1968) that the New Testament in the form we have it is largely a counterstrike against the Marcionite Sputnik: already a counter-testament to Marcion’s Apostolicon. It was already evident that the inclusion of Matthew, Mark, and John was an attempt to lose the Gospel of Marcion (a shorter predecessor of Luke) in the shuffle, as was the padding out of Luke to make it Catholic (not to mention the “ecclesiastical redaction” of John, originally heavily Gnostic and Marcionite, as Bultmann showed). Acts and the Pastorals were the product of whoever padded Luke and (according to Winsome Munro) added a domesticating Pastoral Stratum to Marcion’s Paulines. Acts, of course, parallels Peter and Paul in order to heal the breach between Catholicism (=Peter) and Marcionite Christianity (= Paul), or rather to co-opt the latter in the interest of the former. The grab bag of the Catholic Epistles was simply ballast, counterweight to the Pauline letter corpus.

Well, Trobisch traces out many more individual clues to the same conclusion. He points out signs of redaction as well as arrangement of traditional materials. For instance, he makes the Catholic Epistles an adjunct to Acts in the same way the Pastorals are to the Marcionite Pauline canon. One reads of Peter, John, and James the Just (and of the brothers of the Lord generally, Acts 1:14) in Acts, then turns directly to letters bearing the names of Peter, John, James, and Jude his brother. But, you object, the “Johannine” letters are strictly anonymous. Yes, and pray tell who is responsible for tagging them as John’s? Since everyone in the early church held the same by no means obvious opinion as to authorship, it must be derived from the editor of the whole collection, the same one, on this hypothesis, who saw to it that John was mentioned, almost cosmetically, in Acts. And, to prepare the way for the Epistle of James, he has written an encyclical for James to send to the same audience, believers among the Diaspora, in Acts 15.

In the same way, we find a gospel named for Mark and a character named Mark who is at various points (1 Peter, Colossians, 2 Timothy) made an associate of both Peter and Paul, a “narrative-man” (Todorov) who does no more than embody a particular function, in this case, bridging the Pauline (Marcionite) tradition and the Petrine (Catholic) one.

The character Luke is made implicitly the author of both the third gospel and Acts, while John is made the author of the fourth gospel. Trobisch uses a clever bit of “reader-response” logic here. Everyone knows how conservative writers of New Testament introductions like to piece together clues in the fourth gospel so as to narrow down the author to John the son of Zebedee. “Hm, let’s see, the Beloved Disciple could not have been Peter, since he appears in the same scene with him, etc., etc., so who’s left? John!” Likewise, “Which one of the companions of Paul mentioned in Acts might have been on hand during the ‘We’ passages, etc.? Must have been Luke!” In this light the famous “We” passages may be seen as a device to guide the reader to narrow down the possible candidates for Paul’s companion and the authority for the book as a whole. Likewise, the point of ending Acts on the eve of Paul’s martyrdom is to make it coincide with, actually, to lead into the fictive scene of writing for 2 Timothy. One can hardly blame Harnack for missing this, but one can thank Trobisch for spotting what Harnack missed.

Is it a coincidence that Levi the publican becomes Matthew the publican only in the gospel that bears the name Matthew? Who would have had the redactional agenda to change the name from the nobody Levi to that of an apostle? Oh, I don’t know—maybe a canonical redactor who wanted thereby to make it, after the fact, an apostolic writing? Suppose a clever redactor planted all these clues, and that the traditional authorships are all the creation of this editor. Tradition did not tag these texts with these names: a single editor did. Everyone else got it from him.

Again, it is this editor we hear in Luke 1:1, referring to “many” previous gospel writers, who must now be seen to be referring to the prior efforts of Mark, whom one has just read, and Marcion’s gospel, which this one supplants. One hears the same voice in John 21:24, where he distinguishes himself from the author of the gospel in order to endorse his work, and where he refers to a superabundance of Jesus’ miracles which would require many more books to hold them all, i.e., at least Matthew, Mark, and Luke! There he is again in 1 Corinthians 1:2, where he adds a Catholicizing interpolation to signal that the letter is now general property. There he is yet again in Revelation 22:18-19, which, placed where it is, even if not an interpolation, must mean to cover the whole canon to which it now forms the conclusion.

Suppose the glaring anachronism of 2 Corinthians 3:6 and 14, mentioning “old testament” and “new testament,” the former as a book of scripture, is meant to correspond to the two sections of scripture in the very edition in which these verses appear? It would be like those many references in the Koran which make Muhammad refer to “this Koran” as if it already existed for him to comment on.

Likewise, when 2 Peter 3:16 refers to “all” of Paul’s letters, it is not referring to somecollection of Pauline Epistles, but to the one contained in the very New Testament one is now reading.

Professor Trobisch answers the intriguing question is a paper called “Who Published the Christian Bible?” delivered at the January 2007 “Scripture and Skepticism” conference (Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion). The answer has been hidden in plain sight, but it has also been, like the light from Nietzsche’s distant star, on its way for a long time. First, C.F.D. Moule, A. Strobel, Stephen G. Wilson, and Jerome D. Quinn all contributed to the theory that Luke-Acts share a single authorship with the Pastoral Epistles. (One may modify this thesis to suggest that the author of Acts and the Pastorals was the redactor of an Ur-Lukas shared with Marcion, not the author who worked up Luke from Mark and Q.). Hans von Campenhausen suggested, quite plausibly, that the author of the Pastorals was Polycarp of Smyrna. Combine these theories and you end up with Polycarp as the author of Acts and the Pastorals (as well as, I would add, of the Pastoral Stratum of interpolations in 1 Peter and the Pauline Corpus, and even as Bultmann’s Ecclesiastical Redactor of John).

Trobisch makes Polycarp the editor and publisher of the Christian Bible. And he has more reasons still. We would need someone with a definite antipathy toward Marcion and a desire to co-opt his churches and his scriptures for Catholicism. Polycarp would fit the role nicely. We also need someone who would have a reason for juxtaposing John and the Synoptics. Again: Polycarp, because placing the very different John side by side with Matthew, Mark, and Luke would serve to reinforce (even to canonize) the lit-and-let-live truce worked out to settle the Quartodeciman Controversy between those who celebrated Easter on Sunday (Western style, implied in the Synoptics) and those who observed the Asian tradition, celebrating Easter coincident with the 14^th of Nissan, no matter on which the day of the week it might fall (implied in John). Polycarp went to Rome in 150 to discuss the matter with Pope Anicetas, and they agreed to disagree, an accord (to skip most of a long story) which Polycarp would go on to enshrine by making both options scriptural.

Polycarp may even have, so to speak, signed his work. Trobisch notes how 2 Timothy 4 lists many names familiar from Acts and earlier Pauline Epistles, except for two. “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Tro'as, also the books, and above all the parchments.” Carpus? And this man has Paul’s “cloak”? The cloak of Pauline authorship? For he also has charge of Paul’s manuscripts. Short for Polycarp? You bet! The other name is Crescens (v. 10); it appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Guess where it does pop up, though? Why, right there in the Epistle of Polycarp 14:1!

All right, then may I suggest that Polycarp has inserted himself into John 15:5, too? “He who abides in me, and I in him, the same shall bring forth much fruit (karpon polun)”? And then, as Alvin Boyd Kuhn and, more recently, Stephen Hermann Huller have suggested, mustn’t the Theophilus to whom Luke and Acts are addressed be Bishop of Theophilus of Antioch, Polycarp’s ally?

I should say that David Trobisch’s The First Edition of the New Testament together with his “Who Published the New Testament?” provide an ideal example of a theoretical, “Kuhnian” paradigm, a theoretical framework which, when laid over the evidence like a transparency, reveals a whole new way of making sense of the hitherto-disparate data. I’m sold.

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Taming Tongues of Fire in the Book of Acts

When we read the book of Acts, we encounter a distinct movement away from the egalitarian vision of Jesus and even Paul, down the path toward Constantine and the religion of an empire. This shift comes into focus when we compare Acts to the pagan Felix Minutious, who criticized Christianity in the third century on a number of counts. In a presentation today at the Early Christianity: Heritage or Heresies?conference by the Westar Institute, Shelly Matthews, author of Acts of the Apostles: Taming Tongues of Fire (Sheffield, forthcoming), used Felix as a key to explore the social criticisms to which the author of Acts responded.

Pagan Criticism of Christians

Felix, though writing around a century later than Acts, captures well the sentiments of Greco-Roman civil society toward Christians. Among other things, Felix describes Christians as the “dregs of society,” made up of gullible women and riff-raff whispering in corners. He found it shocking that they worshiped a criminal, which was what crucifixion represented. He described them as worse even than the Jews – who were themselves viewed as rebellious rabble rousers – because at least the Jews worshiped in public places and respectable temples.

Luke is often portrayed as friendly to women, but Luke’s treatment of women is a good test case in demonstrating how he responds to criticism like that of Felix. Luke generally places intelligent women in his narrative, and even quotes Hebrew scriptures that suggest women are important to the Jesus-following movement. However, they rarely speak and are often relegated off stage. Luke does just enough to show that the women in the Jesus movement are not “gullible” but are in fact respectable women. He stops short of showing them in positions of actual power in the movement.

Shelly Matthews

What about the claim that Christians comes from the “dregs” of society? Luke answers this critique by highlighting how many “friends in high places” Christians possess, especially key Christian leaders like Peter and Paul. In Acts 13 he even goes so far as to say the proconsul, a man who occupied an incredibly high position in Roman civil society, was a friend of Christians! This would have been difficult, if not impossible.

Then there’s the claim of secretiveness. This theme emerges repeatedly in pagan discourse about Christians. Worship in Roman society, properly carried out, was public and took place in temples. Outsiders wondered what Christians were up to, and heard rumors that whatever it was, was improper. By way of response, Luke places Peter and Paul in public spaces (mostly synagogues) where in fact they attempt to speak and are often silenced by people who are concerned for their safety. This portrayal of Paul in particular is contradictory to Paul’s own voice in his letters, where he admits to being a poor orator who struggled to debate with competing missionaries. In Acts, Paul demonstrates great prowess in oration. He is articulate and convincing. Where Paul privileges foolishness as the power of God, Acts is suspiciously drawn to portray Christians as powerful and impressive – ideal Roman citizens who could handle debate in the public square.

Ironically, Paul and Felix Minucious are two sides of the same coin. Their descriptions of Christians are virtually the same, but from positive and negative perspectives respectively. Acts is the departure from these complementary views.

“Christians Aren’t Like Jews”
Luke’s Attempt at Christian Public Relations

Another important task faced by Luke was to distance Jesus followers from Jews, who in the second century were embroiled in rebellion against the Roman Empire. It was neither safe nor prudent to be identified with Jews, yet Jesus followers could not deny a connection with Judaism. Luke solves this problem by distinguishing Jesus followers from “non-believing” Jews, that is, Jews who did not believe Jesus was the Messiah. However, this was a complicated matter because Greco-Roman culture did not simply dismiss Jews or Judaism outright. On the one hand, the Jews were rebels, but on the other, the antiquity of their religion was a source of great cultural capital. Luke seizes on both aspects in an ingenious way, a way that would have long-term consequences for Jewish-Christian relations.

Luke describes non-believing Jews as essentially functioning by mob rule, prone to violence, and rebellious. By contrast, Jesus followers embody the fulfillment of Jewish scriptures. They are the hope and wish of the scriptures. Non-believing Jews bear the weight of negative stereotypes, while Jesus followers appropriate positive stereotypes. In ancient rhetoric, repetition indicated the importance of a point; Luke provides ample repetition of these themes throughout the book of Acts.

Was there any truth to Luke’s claims that Jews acted violently toward Jesus-followers? Perhaps there was violence, and Shelly does not deny that possibility. The troubling point in Luke’s narrative is not so much that the claims of violence are inaccurate; rather, this is the only violence that appears in the book. We know Jesus was killed as a criminal by the ruling Roman government. We know the empire engaged in terribly violent action against Jews and Christians alike. Roman violence is virtually non-existent in the book of Acts, however, leaving the Jews as the primary violent force, surely not an accurate picture of the realities of the times. For Luke, the concept of divine provenance was no longer in play; God would not redeem the Jews unless they repented. Repentance in Judaism meant a return to the Law, but to Luke, it meant conversion.

The Revealing Story of Pentecost

One of the greatest challenges faced by Luke is the claim that Christians possessed the divine spirit. Spirit churches are not orderly. Think of the modern Pentecostal church – one is “slain by the spirit.” This threatens the orderly account Luke sought to provide his patron. Yet Luke did not seem to be able to just ignore this teaching, so what he does instead is try to contain it.

When we look at the Pentecost story, we see that the speech of the Spirit is not gibberish, not glossolalia in the modern sense of a unique language. Rather, when people possessed of the Spirit speak, they can be understood widely. This is the language of reason and debate, and thus respectable in the public sphere – something good Roman citizens would do. Luke also “genders the space” by privileging male voices: Peter and 11 apostles stand together and interpret the event for passersby, after having been forewarned by the risen Christ to expect the coming of the Spirit.

It is interesting that Luke claims everyone receives the Spirit, yet we don’t ever hear them speak. Luke promises an egalitarian vision in Acts 2:17b-18, where he quotes Joel saying the spirit will be poured out on everyone, but he does not fulfill it. For that, we must turn instead to Paul, Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”