"Gamaliel's Advice"
Acts 5:25-42
April 15, 2001 (Easter Night)
Text Comment
v.34 Paul, remember, tells us that he studied under Gamaliel (22:3). It has always been a question how Luke obtained an account of what transpired during this executive session of the Sanhedrin. Of course, it could be that some of those men present were later converted and told the story as Christians. But, it is also quite possible that Paul is the source. He was probably too young to be himself a member of the Sanhedrin at this time [he is described as a "young man" in Acts 7:58 and, therefore, almost certainly too young to belong to the council of the elders], but it seems that he was close to his famous teacher, Gamaliel, and entirely possible that Paul got a report from Gamaliel and later, as an apostle, gave his report to his colleague, Luke. This may be, then, Paul's first latent fingerprint on the Book of Acts. [C. Hemer, The Book of Acts in its Hellenistic Setting, 343n]
v.36 We know nothing in particular about this particular Theudas. There was another Theudas some years later than this, but we know that there were any number of insurgent leaders in Palestine after the death of Herod the Great and this must have been one of those.
v.37 We know more about this Judas who led a revolt against Rome and Rome's taxation in AD 6. In some ways, in his views he was like the Scottish covenanters - proclaiming that God alone was Israel's true king - , and the same thing happened to him as happened to them. Rome crushed his movement. But it did give rise to and lived on it the party of the Zealots.
We know a good bit about this Gamaliel, known in Jewish lore as Gamaliel the First, or Gamaliel the Elder (to distinguish him from a grandson who was also a famous rabbi). This elder Gamaliel was the grandson of Hillel, the founder of one of the two rival rabbinical schools, the other being founded by Shammai. These two schools differed widely in their interpretation of the law and in the form in which they communicated the tradition of the elders. According to the Talmudic tradition, Hillel flourished 100 years before the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 which is just right if his grandson, Gamaliel was at the height of his powers here in Acts 5, somewhere soon after A.D. 30. The school that descended from Hillel was known for its mildness and gentleness in the application of the law, as opposed to the stricter followers of Shammai, though, to be sure, both agreed that the law in its rabbinical applications was to be punctiliously obeyed. After the destruction of the temple it was the school of Hillel, Gamaliel's school, that came to dominate Jewish religious thought.
In his own day and afterward Gamaliel the elder was revered in Judaism. It was no small thing for a bright, young Jewish scholar from the hinterlands, from Tarsus in Cilicia, to be sent to Jerusalem to study with the celebrated Gamaliel. As Paul tells us in Acts 23:6, his father was a Pharisee as well, and no doubt had aspirations that he should study with the greatest Pharisee scholar of the day. There is a statement in the Mishnah (mSot 9:15): "From the time that Rabbi Gamaliel the Elder died, respect for the Torah ceased; and purity and abstinence died at the same time." It is a relative contrast presented as an absolute. It means that no one afterward had the same respect for the law as had Gamaliel. Because he taught Paul and because of his role here in Acts 5 in seeing to the release of the apostles, Christian legend made him into a Christian. But there is no reliable evidence of this.
Apparently, Paul was one of, if not the brightest and ablest of Gamaliel's students. He says, in an autobiographical reference in Gal. 1:14, "I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people..." It is not hard to imagine that there existed a close and affectionate relationship between the great teacher and this rising star among his disciples.
Gamaliel's advice was typical Pharisaic theology. A later rabbi of the same school put it this way: "Every assembly which is in the name of heaven will finally be established, but that which is not in the name of heaven will not finally be established." [Pirke Aboth 4:14] And that is what he said. If this movement represented by these men is from God it will succeed no matter what we do. Certainly we do not want to be found fighting against God. If it is not from God it will come to nothing, no matter what we do. Now there is common sense in this advice, though it is hardly a prescription to be followed in all cases. Paul, for example, did not follow it in regard to false teaching movements that troubled his churches. He never said to let them be for if they are teaching against the truth of God their teaching will come to nothing. It will, of course, come to nothing in the end. But it might do a great deal of harm to souls along the way! But, such was Gamaliel's prestige that the advice carried the day. We can't help but wonder if Gamaliel wasn't suffering some personal doubt himself. After all he knew about Jesus and knew about the miracles the disciples were now performing in his name. But we don't know what he thought or what role he may later have had in the work of his student Saul of Tarsus harassing Christians and trying to destroy the movement.
So much for Gamaliel and his advice. If God is in this movement there is nothing we can do to stop it!
Now, I want to compare Gamaliel to Thomas Huxley, the 19th century British man of letters, "Darwin's bulldog" as he was known for his enthusiastic defense and propagation of Darwin's theory of evolution. It was Huxley, if you remember, who invented the word "agnostic." "I took thought and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'," Huxley wrote in 1869. He wanted a word to describe a person who wasn't a Christian but who wasn't irreligious either. It was based on a Greek word and it fell to de Vere to point out that its Latin equivalent was ignoramus!
Anyway, I read this past week an essay of Huxley's originally published in March of 1889 entitled, "The Value of Witness to the Miraculous." It begins with a detailed account of Eginhard, or Einhard, a counselor and friend of Charlemagne, who later wrote a well-regarded and sober history of the life of the great king. At any rate, at one point Eginhard was involved in an effort to bring the bodies of two martyrs from Rome to a purposefully built sanctuary to house these sacred relics in what is now Germany. Upon the arrival of these bodies, according to Eginhard's own account and backed up by his own personal guarantee, wonders began to occur. The man assigned to watch the bodies had a strange dream, the great case that held the two bodies exuded blood, and so on. Later a paralyzed nun was healed by spending a night in proximity to the martyrs' bodies and other miraculous healings followed forthwith.
Now, after the extensive relation of all these miracle stories associated with these relics, Huxley says this.
"It might be fairly said, Here you have a man, whose high character, acute intelligence, and large instruction are certified by eminent contemporaries; a man who stood high in the confidence of one of the greatest rulers of the age, and whose other works prove him to be an accurate and judicious narrator of ordinary events. This man tells you, in language which bears the stamp of sincerity, of things which happened within his own knowledge, or within that of persons in whose veracity he has entire confidence, while he appeals to his sovereign and the court as witnesses of others; what possible ground can there be for disbelieving him? [T. Huxley, Essays upon Some Controverted Questions, London, 1892, 387]
Huxley then precedes, in some detail, to prove - and I think he does prove - that the entire story, much of which I have not told you, demonstrates that the powerful bias toward the supernatural in that culture rendered a man like Eginhard credulous, incapable of an honest reckoning with claims to the miraculous. He goes on to pour contempt on the various accounts of miracles in Eginhard's narrative. And, then, Huxley goes for the jugular.
"The readers of this essay are, I imagine, very largely composed of people who would be shocked to be regarded as anything but enlightened Protestants. It is not unlikely that those of them who have accompanied me so far may be disposed to say, 'Well, this is all very amusing as a story, but what is the practical interest of it? We are not likely to believe in the miracles worked by the [skins] of Saints Marcellinus and Petrus, or by those of any other saints in the Roman calendar.'
"The practical interest is this: if you do not believe in these miracles recounted by a witness whose character and competency are firmly established, whose sincerity cannot be doubted...why do you profess to believe in stories of a like character, which are found in documents of the dates and authorship of which nothing is certainly determined, and no known copies of which come within two or three centuries of the events they record. If it be true that the four Gospels and the Acts were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all that we know of these persons comes to nothing in comparison with our knowledge of Eginhard; and not only is there no proof that the traditional authors of [the Gospels] wrote them, but very strong reasons to the contrary may be alleged. If, therefore, you refuse to believe that 'Wiggo' was cast out of the possessed girl - one of the miracle stories in Eginhard's account - on Eginhard's authority, with what justice can you profess to believe that the legion of devils were cast out of the man among the tombs of the Gadarenes (the account of the Lord's delivering "Legion" in the Gospels)? [400-401]
You see Huxley's point. If you don't believe one sincere man who relates a bunch of miracle stories - a man we know something about and have reason to believe was very sincere - why do you believe the accounts of men many centuries earlier who tell the same kind of stories?
Now some points need to be made in clarification. Huxley was writing in the 1880s and it was easier for him to be more skeptical than it would be today about the NT documents.
1. He supposes that the earliest mss of the NT are two or three centuries removed from the events they purport to record. That is, the earliest NT documents in existence come from several centuries after the time of the NT events themselves. Someone could have made that claim in the 1880s (not accurately but more believably); no one can make it today. There has been a treasure-trove of NT mss discovered in the meantime that carry the text of the NT, at least in parts, back to just a few years after the writing of the NT itself, far closer than exists, for example, for any other ancient writing that we have. A thousand years separate Plato's writing from the oldest ms copy of his Dialogues. A few decades now separate the oldest NT ms from its original.
2. What is more, the date of the gospels is now admitted on all hands to be in the first century and by many scholars, even non-evangelical ones, to be in the middle of the first century. This was the immense achievement of the great British NT scholar J.B. Lightfoot, who settled forever the question of the date of the apostolic fathers, the earliest Christian writings after the era of the apostles themselves. Since the writings of the apostolic fathers mention and quote the NT, including the gospels, the NT writings must be earlier than they. But in the 19th century it was widely claimed that the apostolic fathers dated from the late second or even the third century. Lightfoot established to everyone's satisfaction that they were from the late first century and early second century, placing the NT solidly in the first century and so, not far removed at all from the events it purported to describe.
In those two respects Huxley is wildly wrong and that seriously undermines his case against the credibility of the NT narrative. But there is a much more serious problem with Huxley's argument and Gamaliel helps us to see it.
Huxley wants us to believe that the fact that we don't believe many claims to the miraculous even by sincere people - there are many sincere Christians today who make such claims that we do not believe - should make us equally unwilling to believe the claims of the NT. But the situation of the NT is very, very different. Eginhard, as Huxley rightly points out, lived in a culture dominated by the agreement of all that supernatural events occur and often by means of the mediation of relics. The Apostles in Acts, however, came into an environment openly hostile to their message and their cause. Some of them were eventually killed, many of them imprisoned, here they were flogged for no other reason than that they proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus Christ, an event to which they claimed publicly and triumphantly to have been eyewitnesses. Miracle working claims were common enough in the ancient world - as common perhaps as they were in Medieval Europe, in the day of Eginhard.
But Gamaliel was absolutely right. Movements based on such claims, claims that couldn't be substantiated in action, died out and came to nothing. The later Theudas claimed to be able to part the waters of the Jordan. The Romans dealt summarily with Theudas and put an end to his nonsense and his following.
The situation described in the NT is the same situation described in Josephus and in the Roman historians. The Christians were persecuted by everyone, they had enemies on every hand, skeptics jeered their message and their claims, but they continued to make inroads into Roman life and belief because no one among all those powerful minds and forces ranged against the new faith was able to show their claims false.
The fact is, the triumphant emergence of Christianity in Jerusalem is impossible to account for apart from the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the unending effort to produce some sort of plausible explanation for the rise of Christianity apart from a real resurrection of Jesus Christ has - explanations that range from the ludicrous to the desperate - has proved that point time and time again.
If the authorities could have produced Jesus' corpse that would have been that, but they could not. The idea that the apostles were dupes or frauds who then cheerfully risked life and limb for the rest of their lives to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus Christ is unbelievable and, as a matter of fact, virtually no one does believe it. But what then do they believe. Not much of anything. The question is left unanswered. What happened is that Christianity as we know it began with the resurrection and any and every attempt to account for Christianity's rise, the apostles, the Gospel itself, the New Testament, the Sunday Lord's Day, the Apostle Paul, and so on that leaves out the resurrection is will, as history has shown, satisfy only those who have no interest in being satisfied. [Cf. J.I. Packer in G. Habermas and A. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? 149]
This is precisely how we turn the tables on Thomas Huxley. He says that we are credulous, that we have laid down our critical faculties, if we accept the accounts of the supernatural in the NT. We say, au contraire, that he has laid down his critical faculties so easily to imagine the NT and Christianity without any of the events upon which it actually was founded actually having occurred. Legends and stories can sustain faith in a credulous age, but they will not survive and must come to nothing if the fact that these miracles occurred and that there are living witnesses of them are the basis and the only basis of a message being proclaimed in the teeth, in defiance of a hostile world.
Gamaliel was right to this extent. If all of this about Christ's resurrection was made up, the movement would come to nothing.