(b) There is no mention of the death of the apostle Paul. Paul was executed in Rome about A.D. 64, but at the end of Acts he is still alive in Rome awaiting his trial. The most plausible reason that Acts ends where it does, leaving us hanging, is that it was written before Paul finally came to trial and was executed.
(c) The subject matter of Acts deals with concerns important to Christianity before the destruction of Jerusalem. For example, one of the burning issues in Acts is the relationship between Christians who had been converted from Judaism and Christians who had been converted from paganism. The problem was whether the pagan converts should be required to submit themselves to all the Jewish laws and customs in order to be Christians. That was a great difficulty for early Christianity. After the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, it ceased to be a problem, since Jewish Christianity was all but wiped out in that disastrous event. The subject matter of the book suggests that Acts was written when that issue was still current.
(d) Acts uses expressions that faded from use early in the history of Christianity. For example, Jesus is called “the Son of Man” and “the Servant of God,” titles that soon faded into obscurity. Also Christians are still referred to as “disciples” and the Jewish nation as “the people.” Sunday is called “the first day of the week,” another early expression. The most natural explanation for the occurrence of those expressions is that Acts was written early enough to be in touch with the climate of the early days of the Christian Way.
(e) The attitude of the Romans toward Christianity is positive in Acts. The Romans never appear as enemies in Luke-Acts; they are at best friendly or at worst indifferent. Such a portrayal of the Romans would have been possible before Nero’s persecution in A.D. 64, but afterwards it would have been an obvious and cruel misrepresentation.
(f) There is no real acquaintance with Paul’s letters in the book of Acts. The author of Acts does not refer to or seem to be well acquainted with Paul’s many letters. Thus Acts must have been written before Paul’s letters became widely circulated. That favors a date as early as possible for Acts, since the later it is dated, the harder it becomes to explain why the author does not know of Paul’s letters.
These six lines of evidence combine to present a powerful case that Acts was written before A.D. 64. Since Luke wrote his gospel before he wrote Acts (Acts is a continuation of the gospel), the gospel of Luke must have been written around A.D. 57 or the very early sixties. This is a conclusion of tremendous importance, for it means the gospel of Luke was written just about the same time as Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (A.D. 55). Luke therefore ought to be regarded just as historically reliable as Paul.
“But wait a minute,” someone will say. “Granted that Luke and Paul wrote about the same time, still Paul had earlier sayings and sources to go on.” But so did Luke. He specifically states that his information concerning the events of the gospel was “delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2). Luke therefore also had personal contact with the people who saw and heard what he reports in his gospel. Luke was probably a traveling companion of Paul’s (Acts 16:10-17; 20:5—21:18; 27:1—28:16) and spent time in Jerusalem, where he could gather information firsthand from those who had been with Jesus and had witnessed the resurrection appearances. Therefore, Luke’s information should be regarded as reliable as Paul’s.
But more than that: since one of the sources used by Luke in writing his gospel was probably Mark’s gospel, this means Mark was written even earlier than Luke. Robinson suggests a date of A.D. 45 for Mark. And of course, Mark’s sources then go even further back.
When we remember that Jesus died in A.D. 30, we begin to see how hopeless the legend hypothesis is. According to Professor Sherwin-White, generations are required for legends to prevail over historical facts. But we are talking about less than fifteen to thirty years. Remember, we are not talking about deliberate lies; we are talking about legends. It is unreasonable to charge Luke or his sources with being liars.
The question is, Could legends build up around the appearances of Jesus at such a rate that by the time Luke wrote, the facts had been lost and only unhistorical, legendary fictions were left? As we have seen, the rate for such accumulation would be unbelievable and completely unparalleled in history. The development of legends requires too long for us to be able to dismiss the gospel accounts in that way. Historical experience concerning the process of legend formation thus provides the decisive answer to this question: No.
b) The controlling presence of living eyewitnesses would prevent significant accrual of legend. When the gospel accounts were formed, eyewitnesses to what did and did not happen were still alive. Their presence would act as a check on any legends that might begin to arise. The respected commentator on Mark, Vincent Taylor, has twitted New Testament critics for their neglect of this factor. Taylor remarks that if some critics were right, then the disciples “must all have been translated into heaven immediately after the Resurrection.”16 Those who had seen Jesus after the resurrection would soon become “marked men,” who knew firsthand what had happened. Their testimony would act as a safeguard against unhistorical legends. In the same way, if persons like Mary Magdalene and the women did not see Jesus, as the gospels say they did, then it is very difficult indeed to explain how those stories could arise that they did, since Mary and the others were right there in the Christian fellowship in Jerusalem where the legends supposedly originated.
Legends do not arise significantly until the generation of eyewitnesses dies off. Hence, legends are given no ground for growth as long as witnesses are alive who remember the facts. In the case of the resurrection narratives, the continued presence of the twelve disciples, the women, and the others who saw Jesus alive from the dead would prevent legend from significantly accruing.
c) The authoritative control of the apostles would have kept legendary tendencies in check. The apostles who had been with Jesus were, so to speak, the guardians of the information of His life and teachings. It is simply unbelievable that fictitious stories of Jesus’ appearances to them could arise and flourish so long as they were living and active, much less that wholly false stories could replace the true. Walther Künneth states:
It is extremely difficult to see how the Gospel accounts of the resurrection could arise in opposition to the original apostolic preaching and that of Paul. . . . The authority of the apostolic eye-witnesses was extraordinarily strong. It would be inconceivable how there should have arisen in opposition to the authoritative witness of the original apostles a harmonious tradition telling of an event that has no basis in the message of the eye-witnesses.17
Invention of stories by Christians, says Künneth, would have been “sharply contradicted by the apostles or their pupils.”18 Discrepancies might exist in secondary details, the gospel writers might select or emphasize different aspects of the stories, but the basic stories themselves could not be legendary so long as the authoritative control of the apostles was being exercised. Once again, it is instructive to observe that the legendary apocryphal gospels did not arise until all the apostles had died, and even then they were universally rejected by the early church.