Historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles
[26]: 45–48 The Byzantine text-type served as the basis for the 16th century Textus Receptus, produced by Erasmus, the second Greek-language printed edition of the New Testament.
[29] Leading scholar and archaeologist of the time period, William Mitchell Ramsay, considered Acts to be remarkably reliable as a historical document.
[36] Whilst treating its description of the history of the early church skeptically, critical scholars such as Gerd Lüdemann, Alexander Wedderburn, Hans Conzelmann, and Martin Hengel still view Acts as containing valuable historically accurate accounts of the earliest Christians.
[51] Concerning Acts 2, Lüdemann considers the Pentecost gathering as very possible,[52] and the apostolic instruction to be historically credible.
[53] Wedderburn acknowledges the possibility of a ‘mass ecstatic experience’,[54] and notes it is difficult to explain why early Christians later adopted this Jewish festival if there had not been an original Pentecost event as described in Acts.
[66] Acts 4:4 speaks of Peter addressing an audience, resulting in the number of Christian converts rising to 5,000 people.
A Professor of the New Testament Robert M. Grant says "Luke evidently regarded himself as a historian, but many questions can be raised in regard to the reliability of his history [...] His ‘statistics’ are impossible; Peter could not have addressed three thousand hearers [e.g. in Acts 2:41] without a microphone, and since the population of Jerusalem was about 25–30,000, Christians cannot have numbered five thousand [e.g. Acts 4:4].
[72] The 3rd-century writer Origen referred to a Theudas active before the birth of Jesus,[73] although it is possible that this simply draws on the account in Acts.
Acts 10:1 speaks of a Roman Centurion called Cornelius belonging to the "Italian regiment" and stationed in Caesarea about 37 AD.
[74] Wedderburn likewise finds the narrative "historically suspect",[75] and in view of the lack of inscriptional and literary evidence corroborating Acts, historian de Blois suggests that the unit either did not exist or was a later unit which the author of Acts projected to an earlier time.
[88] However, more recent scholarship inclines towards treating the Jerusalem Council and its rulings as a historical event,[89] though this is sometimes expressed with caution.
[90] In Acts 15:16–18, James, the leader of the Christian Jews in Jerusalem, gives a speech where he quotes scriptures from the Greek Septuagint (Amos 9:11–12).
For instance, Richard Pervo notes: "The scriptural citation strongly differs from the MT which has nothing to do with the inclusion of gentiles.
This is the vital element in the citation and rules out the possibility that the historical James (who would not have cited the LXX) utilized the passage.
Richard Pervo believes that this demonstrates that Luke used Josephus as a source and mistakenly thought that the sicarii were followers of The Egyptian.
[95][96] Two early sources that mention the origins of Christianity are the Antiquities of the Jews by the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, and the Church History of Eusebius.
More indirect evidence can be obtained from other New Testament writings, early Christian apocrypha, and non-Christian sources such as the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan (AD 112).
