Sterling’s Historiography and Self-Definition (Influential Book 1)

I originally decided to take up Ken’s challenge and create two posts about books that have been influential to me: the early years and my time at seminary. Yet the concept of writing a single post on the second set of books quickly went out the window. Instead, I’ll write a single post for each book in the second category, so what follows is the first installment. Also, I’d like to mention that both Kevin and Michael have participated in my challenge to them and you can see their posts here and here .

Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography. (NovTSupp 64; Leiden: Brill, 1992). When I came to Candler, I had already been interested in Luke’s historiography in the book of Acts. Though I had originally approached the subject through the Ramsay-Bruce-Hemer lens (if it’s fair to lump them together), I was already coming around to the idea that Luke may have been interested as much in creating theology as he was in recording history. At this time I still hadn’t read a book that dealt with Luke’s historiography to my liking, and so I expressed this interest to one of my professors who suggested I read Sterling’s book. I am grateful for the suggestion because this volume helped change my approach to Luke-Acts entirely.

The book is actually a revised version of his 1989 PhD dissertation submitted to the Graduate Theological Union. Though published in the expensive Supplements to Novum Testamentum series (Brill), I was glad to see that SBL reprinted it in paperback. The majority of the volume is a selected survey of ancient historiographers; Sterling demonstrates how a strand of Greek ethnography eventually developed into apologetic historiography. Before we get too far, here’s the definition of apologetic historiography that he gives us: "Apologetic historiography is the story of a subgroup of people in an extended prose narrative written by a member of the group who follows the group’s own traditions but Hellenizes them in an effort to establish the identity of the group within the setting of the larger world " (17; italics original).

The survey of ethnographers and historiographers is worth the price of the book alone. There is a lengthy section which introduces the Hellenistic-Jewish historians and Josephus, which makes the book also function as a reference volume on those authors who are are so significant to our discipline. He argues that ethnographers started out describing other cultures; some championed the greatness of other cultures, but eventually people from within their own culture argued for their superiority over other Mediterranean peoples.

By the time Sterling addresses the Hellenistic-Jewish historians, he is in the realm of apologetic historiography. These authors were influenced by Hellenistic traditions, but addressed both Jewish and pagan audiences in order to argue for the greatness of the Jewish nation over other peoples in the ancient world. The self-identity that they put forward competed with other nations for claims of antiquity and originality. In these traditions, it was not uncommon to attribute the discovery of astrology to Abraham or to show how the patriarchs helped other civilizations to advance.

Sterling dedicates a large chapter to Josephus and claims that he wrote his Antiquities in the same tradition as the Hellenistic-Jewish historians. One of the important points that Sterling makes in this chapter is that Josephus saw himself as a prophet in the Old Testament tradition, a sort of Jeremiah redivivus , and as such this prophetic office gave him the ability to write the definitive history of the Jews (237-38). Ultimately, like the Hellenistic-Jewish historians, Josephus’s history of the Jews was written for the purpose of presenting the Jews in a positive light, so that as a nation they would be well positioned after the revolt.

After discussing the eleven ethnographers and historians, Sterling turns his attention to the author of Luke-Acts. He addresses the introductory matters of Luke-Acts just as well as anyone and places Luke-Acts in the same tradition of apologetic historiography. By writing a continuation of the Jewish Scriptures, Luke is able to present a picture of Christianity that lays claim to the antiquity of Jewish people in order to improve its socio-political standing in the Roman world.

In his conclusion to the Luke-Acts section he also makes an interesting comparison of Luke’s type of history to that of the Apocalypse, which is something I would like to investigate further down the road. He states:

The willingness to identify with rather than to set oneself over against (as in the Apocalypse) must have been somewhat revolutionary to the first readers. I do not mean the story-line of movement from Jerusalem to Rome, but the intellectual undergirding of the narrative. I think that our author was like Polybios who wrote his history after he grasped the worldwide significance of Rome. The expansion of Christianity was a fait accompli by the end of the first century. The intellectual undergirding of that expansion had not yet, however, been grasped in historical terms. This is what our author saw when he wrote. It was an attempt to move Christianity into the larger world intellectually and socially as well as physically. (388)

The book is really a model dissertation. It argues something both novel and plausible, it tackles a topic that has long vexed NT scholars (the genre of Luke-Acts), and it is well researched and very detailed. His approach radically changed the way I view history in Luke-Acts, but also gave me better tools to engage a plethora of primary sources. Whether or not one buys his overall thesis, the book is still a useful tool as well as a necessary secondary source on the topic of historiography in Luke-Acts.