Selections from Josephus - Sách nói Miễn phí

IV. Note on § (35). Theudas and Judas

This passage has been often quoted as convincing proof that St. Luke had read the Antiquities of Josephus, or at least the twentieth book. On this view the date of the Acts must be brought down to the close of the first century. The Evangelist is at the same time accused of the grossest carelessness.

Gamaliel in his speech in the Sanhedrin adduces two instances of insurrectionary movements which came to nought in the chronological order: (1) Theudas, (2) Judas of Galilee (Acts v. 36 f.).

The date when Gamaliel is represented as speaking must have been some time in the early “thirties.” The revolt of Theudas, according to Josephus, occurred in the procuratorship of Cuspius Fadus (about 44-46 A.D.), at least ten years later. The revolt of Judas in “the days of the enrolment” was in 6 A.D. Thus the events appear to have been transposed in the speech and one of them to have been still in the womb of the future!

The error, if it is one, is commonly explained as due to a cursory reading and inaccurate recollection on the part of the Evangelist of the passage in the Antiquities which alludes to the fate first of Theudas and then of the sons of Judas under the procuratorship of Tiberius Alexander (about 46-48 A.D.), the latter notice leading to a brief mention of their father. This view has been supported by Burkitt (Gospel History and its transmission, pp. 106 ff.), Krenkel (Josephus and Lucas), Schmiedel (art. in Encycl. Bibl.) and many German commentators. It has been rejected, among others, by Schürer, Blass, Harnack (Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels, p. 115), Stanton (Gospels as Historical Documents, pt. II, p. 272), and most recently by Prof. C. C. Torrey (Composition and date of Acts, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1916). Cf. also an art. on “St. Luke and Josephus,” by the Rev. J. W. Hunkin, in the Church Quarterly Review for April 1919, pp. 89-108.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there has been error on the part of some one responsible for putting the speech into the mouth of Gamaliel. The attempts which have been made to remove the apparent anachronism are unconvincing. Either an earlier unknown Theudas is postulated (but one would expect the person named by Gamaliel along with the notorious Judas to have been of sufficient importance to be mentioned by Josephus); or the mistake as to the date of Theudas is shifted to Josephus; or the name Theudas is regarded as a Christian interpolation in the Antiquities (Blass).

But that the passage in Acts is to be explained by a casual perusal of Josephus by St. Luke is highly improbable for the following reasons:—

(1) St. Luke gives the number of the followers of Theudas as “about four hundred”; Josephus writes “most of the common people.” Clearly St. Luke had access to some source other than Josephus.

(2) The carelessness attributed to St. Luke in the supposed use of Josephus is not what we should expect from the professions of the writer of the prologue to the third Gospel and from the handling of his sources in the earlier work.

(3) If there has been error, it is older than St. Luke and goes back to his authority. Torrey in the above-mentioned work seems to have proved conclusively that Acts i-xv is based on an Aramaic source, to which St. Luke was “singularly faithful.” “He disliked to alter, even slightly, the document in his hands, even where he believed its statements to be mistaken, and where he found himself obliged to contradict them” (p. 40). On the alleged use of Josephus in Acts v., after referring to the horror which must have been aroused in Judæa by the crucifixion of the sons of the insurgent Judas, he adds: “Any history dealing with this period would have been pretty certain to mention Theudas and Judas at this point, and in this order, although the revolt under Judas really happened much earlier. From some history of the kind, in which the facts were not clearly stated, the author of Luke’s Aramaic source obtained his wrong impression of the order of events” (p. 71).