Interview with Craig Keener (Part 1 of 6)

Craig Keener is one of the premier New Testament commentators today and is going to be featured for

Craig and his wife Medine

the next six Saturdays in an interview that covers his scholarship, as well as, scholars who have influenced him.

He is a professor at Asbury Seminary and also the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

In his book Gift & Giver: The Holy Spirit for Today, Craig writes, "I have been miraculously healed, experienced supernatural gifts such as prophecy, followed the Spirit's leading in witnessing, and had deep experiences in the Spirit during prayer (including, regularly, prayer in tongues)."

Among the many books he has published is the widely-acclaimed, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary. That's where we begin this interview series.

JR:  Craig, what should a 21st-century reader make of the speeches in the Book of Acts, especially an elongated one like Stephen's?

CK: You have deliberately highlighted a big debate in Acts scholarship. (I wish you would have asked me a good Pentecostal question about tongues in Acts, or healing - smile.)

I spend a few chapters of the introduction establishing that Acts is a work of ancient historiography and showing what ancient historiography was. It was of course similar in many respects to the way we write history today, but different. (There were also different kinds of ancient historiography. The elite historians often spiced things up rhetorically - Josephus does that a lot. But no rhetorical historian would have speeches as short as most of those we find in Acts.)

One difference between ancient and modern historiography is that we want to narrate only clear information, whereas they wanted to really NARRATE their information, to tell a good story. That means that some historians took their genuine information about events and fleshed out scenes. If a historian knew that a speech occurred on an occasion, and something of what the speech was about, the historian would not normally say something like, "Themistocles advised that they build some ships." They would be more likely to flesh out the speech based on both their direct information and their indirect information, that is, what they could infer that he would have said based on what else they knew. Some historians were more careful with speech material more than others (some, in fact, mostly plagiarized earlier historians!) But whereas you can use the genre of Acts to say, "Since this is historiography, Luke reports genuine events," you can't so easily extrapolate from the genre for the speeches.

In fact, Luke does not flesh out the speeches much; most are pretty concise by ancient standards. There are many points where I think we can say Luke knew what was going on in the speeches. In Acts 20, where Luke was likely present in person, I found signs that Luke has condensed what must have been a longer speech (some implicit connections to a particular biblical passage, for example, that Luke never makes explicit). At the same time, no one claims that these speeches are verbatim. Even at the end of Peter's speech in Acts 2, Luke says, "and with many other words" Peter exhorted them. In other words, Luke has selected from the speech; he edits them to make part of his larger work. Everyone expected historians to do that. Also, they didn't have much choice in any case; they had to work with what was remembered of the speeches, or of the kinds of things that the speaker or speakers were known to have said. No one had tape recordings or verbatim transcripts to work from.

So we hear in the speeches both the voice of the speaker and the voice of the inspired writer weaving together common gospel themes in these speeches in the Book of Acts. We can learn from the theology on a couple levels. Since my commentary is on Acts itself, my interest is especially in Luke's theological level, but because of the work's historical genre, I believe that he also invites us to hear the voice of the apostolic church.

I have just summarized about 60 pages of material in a few paragraphs and hopefully not done it too much injustice. But you might want to add the editorial comment regarding my Acts commentary, "and with many other words" he spoke (smile).

----------

In addition to the four-volume Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, published by Baker Academic, Craig has a one-volume commentary on Acts coming out in July (it's still a meaty commentary, though, at 714 pages). It's part of the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series.

If you're a more visual learner, Craig has prepared a 23-lecture series that can be viewed on YouTube. For your convenience, the first lecture can be viewed here: