What's Really Going on in Acts of the Apostles?

Long thought to be an early, first-century account of Christian beginnings, scholars increasingly see Acts as a later exercise in revisionist mythmaking.

Jul 06, 2025

A celebrated editor I once worked with liked to say that there are only three basic plots in all of storytelling:

1. Boy meets girl.

2. A stranger comes to town.

3. The guys go on a trip.

Throughout the New Testament, there’s not much of plot No. 1 going on at all. As for plot No. 2, the gospels are prime examples (although the details of how, when and where the stranger (Jesus) arrives vary widely—from “full grown in Galilee” (Mark) to “born of a virgin in an obscure village in Judea” (Matthew and Luke) to a combination: “preexisting before time with God, but also arriving on earth full grown in Judea” (John).

By the time you get to The Acts of the Apostles, both its title and opening scenes suggest that you’re about to read an example of plot No. 3. But the further you read in Acts, the less certain that seems. The guys—in this case the twelve apostles—don’t really go on a trip, at least not in this book. Nine of them, in fact, are never mentioned again after their introduction in the first chapter.

So, we need to look at what kind of book Acts really is—what the real story is that it’s telling, whether it is in fact historical, when it was written, and what the author hoped to accomplish.

There is action aplenty: miracles, mass conversions, mob violence, shipwrecks, and an angelically aided jailbreak, and there is a cast of dozens. As the scholar Joseph B. Tyson outs it: “Acts is thickly populated with characters who appear and disappear as the narrative progresses, but clearly there are two major characters: Peter and Paul. It is not implausible to refer to the Acts of the Apostles as the Acts of Peter and Paul.”

An even better title might be something like, “The Beginnings of the Christian Church.” The Apostle Peter dominates the first half of the book, converting multitudes and spreading the gospel from Jerusalem. Paul dominates the second half, as he spreads the faith further across the regions of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Until modern times, in fact, most religious historians, church officials, and bible readers believed Acts to be a factual history of the beginnings of Christianity, written just a few decades after Jesus’s crucifixion, likely by an eyewitness to many of the events it describes. It established the outline and set the tone for nearly all church history that followed.

How Acts Tells the Story

The Acts of the Apostles begins with a bang. The risen Jesus appears to the apostles in Jerusalem shortly after his crucifixion and remains with them for forty days, “telling them things about the Kingdom of God,” and enjoining them to remain in Jerusalem to await the appearance of the Holy Spirit. He then vanishes into the sky.

The Apostles elect a replacement for the late Judas Iscariot to round out their number to twelve. The Holy Spirit arrives shortly: The Pentecost happens—with a turbulent noise and tongues of fire resting on each apostle as they “speak in tongues” and can be understood by a crowd of Judeans (attracted by the hubbub and spectacle) who come from “every nation under the sky” and speak different languages.

The Apostle Peter takes charge, preaching about the Kingdom of God, and in the ensuing days performs miracles in Jesus’s name, and converts and baptizes thousands of Judeans. The apostles and the newly converted live in harmony. The second chapter of Acts ends with this passage (David Bentley Hart’s translation. See Further Reading.):

And reverence came to every soul; and through the apostles came many wonders and signs. And all those who had faith were at the same place and owned all things communally, and they sold their properties and possessions, and distributed to everyone, according as anyone had need. And from day to day they steadfastly remained in the Temple in concord of spirit and, breaking bread in one house after another, they shared their food in gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And day by day the Lord added those who were saved to their company.

Four Apostles. (John, Peter, Mark and Paul) Albrecht Dürer, 1526, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Modern Critical View

Many scholars today consider this story—of an organized and well-established Christian Church at the dawn of Christianity, sometimes referred to as “the big bang theory of Christian beginnings”—to be romanticized and ahistorical. As the scholar Robyn Faith Walsh writes:

Different early Christian texts have contributed to the myth of the early Christian Big Bang, but it reaches its apex with the origin story and details of the miraculous founding and growth of the Jesus movement as found in Acts.
Yet, previous to Acts, our earliest literature about Jesus is taciturn on the subject of the movement’s historical development. Even our earliest source material, Paul, reveals a smattering of ekklēsiai oftentimes demonstrating little sense of unity, with Paul invoking the language of “group” in an attempt to evoke it. The quintessential example in the gospels is Mark, whose original ending is cast in mystery and silence, leaving a reader wondering how the Jesus movement developed at all. Thus, strong ideas in early Christian writings about certain kinds of social formations—an ideal Israel, communities of disciples, ekklēsiai—are as best we can tell literary constructions and not necessarily reliable historical data.

Scholars have noted many internal contradictions between Acts and other early accounts of Christian beginnings that cast doubt on its historicity. In three of the canonical gospels, for example, Jesus does not tell his followers to remain in Jerusalem after his resurrection as Acts stipulates. In Mark and Matthew, the angel at Jesus’s tomb tells the disciples that Jesus will “go before them to Galilee.”

And, of course, heading for the hills of Galilee would make a lot more sense for Jesus’s followers, on its face, than hanging around Jerusalem. Their leader had just been apprehended and gruesomely executed, and they had every reason to expect that they themselves were in danger.

Another puzzling discrepancy is the characterization of Peter and Paul in Acts. The story in Acts is that Peter and Paul were in perfect theological harmony. But the details of both Paul’s biography and theological views are radically different in Acts than in the letters reliably attributed to Paul—which are known to have been written in the very time that Acts purports to represent. Without getting too deep in the theological weeds, here are a few examples of Paul in Acts vs. Paul in his Letter to the Galatians, from Dennis E, Smith and Joseph B. Tyson:

Whereas Paul in his letters consistently saw himself as uniquely commissioned to be the apostle to the Gentiles (as in Gal 1:16), [Acts] gives that divine charge to Peter (15:7). Paul understood Peter to be commissioned primarily as a missionary to the circumcised (Gal 2:8) and had to oppose Peter for not fully accepting the legitimacy of Gentile Christians (Gal 2:11-14). In contrast, Acts gives to Peter the most eloquent case for the Gentile mission (Acts 15:6-11).
Paul specified that the only requirement made upon him was that he “remember the poor” (Gal 2:10). Acts leaves out that reference and substitutes instead a decree that Gentiles must follow a modified version of the Jewish Dietary laws (15:19-29), a decree for which there is no evidence in the letters of Paul (see, for example, Rom 14:1– 15:13).

Tyson writes:

The characterization of Paul [in Acts] …stresses his fidelity to Jewish beliefs and practices. In episode after episode, he begins his local mission with a visit to the synagogue, where he presents his message to Jews. The heart of his message in the synagogues is that Jesus is the fulfillment of Jewish expectations and prophetic promises.

A Second Century Date

Many modern critical scholars believe that Acts was written much later than the traditional, mid-first century date—in the second century. Some favor a date around 120 CE; others put it as late as 150 CE. The author of Acts, in their view, was representing what scholars refer to as the proto-orthodox (or early Catholic) Christian movement, based in Rome. The aim of the book, these scholars conclude, was to create what anthropologists call a “charter myth”—one designed to promote certain social norms or institutions.

The motive for creating this myth was to counter other Christian movements that were growing in the early second century, and which had very different understandings of Jesus’s teachings and of apostolic authority. Their principal target was Marcion, who was founding Christian churches and attracting large numbers of followers in the early second century. He taught that the God who sent Jesus was not the (inferior) God of the Hebrew Bible (and thus that the Hebrew Bible should not be considered a Christian scripture), and that the only Apostle with authority and a full understanding of Jesus was Paul. Ultimately, Marcion was declared a heretic by the ascendent church in Rome.

The author of Acts, known to us as Luke (but in fact, anonymous) also wrote the Gospel According to Luke that we know from the New Testament. Many modern scholars, however, believe that that gospel was also composed (in the final form we know) in the second century—an amplified and edited version of a gospel story that had already been circulating in a shorter form—notably in the first published version of the New Testament, edited and circulated by Marcion. (See my earlier post about Marcion and Luke here.)

Ancillary targets of the revisionist history in Acts were the many other communities that were developing different conceptions of Christianity in the early second century, such as the Valentinians. These were eventually denounced as heretics of “Gnostics” as well.

The myth described in Acts put the proto-orthodox Christians of the second century in a strong and compelling position to reject these other Christian movements. It gave the rising catholic church a bulletproof pedigree by proposing as historical fact the primacy of Jerusalem and the Apostle Peter as central to the birth of Christianity. as well as the continuity of Christianity with Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. It smoothed the edges of Paul’s own teachings, forced them into rough conformity with proto-orthodox views, and reclaimed his legacy from heretics such as Marcion.

And it succeeded spectacularly, in becoming the standard, accepted story of Christian beginning for more than a millennium and a half.

A second century date for Acts was first proposed in the mid-nineteenth century by German scholars of the Tübingen school, notably Ferdinand Christian Baur. The idea was subjected to a furious counterattack from traditional scholars and was largely ignored or dismissed—although the scholarly consensus did shift to a somewhat later date, around 70-80 CE, in the twentieth century. One scholar who championed the second-century date anew was John Knox, in a 1942 monograph.

In recent decades, modern critical scholars have increasingly favored the second-century date for Acts. And while there’s no widespread consensus—traditional scholars continue to cling to the earlier date—many scholars seem to be accepting the later date and moving on. Paula Fredricksen, for example, in her recent book Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years, introduces Acts as “an early second century text,” without further comment.

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