Yesterday I completed my seminar on Luke-Acts with our students in the Masters of Biblical Studies program. One aspect of our conversation was the relationship of Peter and Paul in Acts. It is abundantly clear that Acts anticipates Paul’s missionary work to the gentiles by speaking of Peter’s proclamation of the gospel to non-Israelites, especially in the conversion of Cornelius in Acts 10. In short, the point seems to be this: if anyone thinks Paul is doing something untoward by preaching to gentiles, note that Peter did it first!
The parallels between the reports of Peter and Paul in Acts are truly too numerous to be coincidence. In his massive four-volume commentary, Craig Keener repeatedly offers side-by-side comparisons, drawing from other scholars. As an illustration, consider the reports of Peter and Paul healing men who are unable to walk.
Chart from Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012–15), 2:21:30.
In a sense, the parallel illustrates via narrative what Paul affirms in Galatians: “for he who worked through Peter to make him an apostle to the circumcised also worked through me for the gentiles” (Gal 2:8).
Of course, the parallels involve not just Peter but also Jesus, who also healed a man who was lame. Consider the parallels between the account of Jesus’s miracle in the Gospel of Luke and the account of Peter’s in Acts:
Indeed, there are numerous parallels between Jesus and Paul in Acts. Here I draw again from Keener. Consider the following:
- Four main characters are in each sequence (Roman Governor, Herodian prince, Jewish accusers, the defendant)
- The hearings are held at the procurator’s instigation (Luke 23:6–7; SActs 25:22ff)The defendant is “led in” (Luke 23:1; Acts 25:6; cf. 25:22)
- The authorities find Jesus/Paul innocent (Luke 23:4, 14–15, 22; Acts 25:18, 25a, 26:31)
- Each governor thinks the defendant innocent, both before and after the trial
- Each governor three times pronounces the defendant innocent
- The defendant is accused by the high-priestly elite (Luke 23:2, 5, 10; Acts 25:2, 7, 11, 15–17; 26:2)
- The accusers demand death (Luke 23:18, 21, 23; Acts 25:24)
- The charge is made that the accused acts against Israel and Caesar (Luke 23:2; Acts 25:8)
- Antipas and Agrippa II happen to be in town and want to see the prisoners (Luke 23:8; Acts 25:22)
- The defendant appears before a Herodian ruler
- Although the defendant is innocent, he cannot be freed (Luke 23:16–25; Acts 26:32; cf. 28:18)
The accounts between Jesus and Paul’s last days in Jerusalem in Luke-Acts are especially striking:
In short, Paul is shown to be the legitimate successor of both Jesus and Peter. What Jesus does, Peter does. What Jesus and Peter does, Paul does.
C. Kavin Rowe puts it well: “Whether Luke knows the Pauline conception of the church as the ‘body of Christ’ is open to debate, but that Acts narrates the life of the Christian mission as the embodied pattern of Jesus’s own life is not. Put succinctly, according to Acts, the missio Dei has a christological norm” (World Upside Down: Reading its in the Graeco-Roman Age [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 173).
I have much more on this in my next book, The Bible Anointing of the Sick: Healing in Christ (Baker Academic).