Our church sermon and Bible-study series on the Book of Acts has reached chapter 12, and the miraculous escape of Peter from Herod’s prison.
Our pastor wisely reminded us that the passage actually begins with the execution of James the brother of John, and hence delivers a lesson about tempering faith in “the God of the impossible” with acceptance of God’s inscrutable will, in prayer. It’s highly unlikely, I think, that the prayer meeting in John Mark’s house was making Bethel-style “Prayer Declarations” of angelic intervention, given the unbroken series of martyrdoms from John the Baptist, through the Lord himself, to Stephen, and finally James. The theological norm on which they were working was more probably “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15).
We can date this event to perhaps around 41-43, since the lethal judgement on Herod, also recorded in Josephus, was in 44. Given that Luke quite probably completed his Acts around 62 (according to the masterly recent study on NT dating by Jonathan Bernier), it was fairly recent history.
Luke’s work overall gives every sign of being careful historiography according to the conventions of Roman literature. There are few places where his public facts can be disputed (and the most notorious of those, the date and management of the census at Jesus’s birth, is based on apparent disagreement with just one later historian, Josephus, whose own reliability isn’t perfect). Luke is not only the go-to historian on Mediterranean navigation in the first century, but he gives the earliest two records in the world of the use of the prophets in synagogue lectionaries at that time.
But as well as his apparently meticulous attention to detail, Luke manages to employ clever literary techniques to present his major themes, and this chapter is a case in point. Scholars note that Luke draws parallels between the events in the early church, and especially the ministry of Peter, and those involving Jesus. His intention is to demonstrate, or perhaps to suggest subliminally to the casual reader, that Peter inherits the mantle of authority and power from Jesus, and so to authenticate the apostolic gospel of the crucified Messiah to his patron Theophilus, and to the rest of us.
The same scholars also note how, in the same way, events in the ministry of the “untimely born” apostle Paul, by echoing Peter’s experiences, validate his apostleship, and therefore the mission to the Gentiles, as a continuation of Jesus’s divine mission.
It’s easy to miss these parallels, because we read casually. But if we study the chapter more carefully – or dare I say as an early Christian would read it – we note the apparently gratuitous detail that the arrest of James and Peter occurs at the feast of unleavened bread, and that Herod is hesitant to try Peter until after the Passover.
This ought to alert us to the fact that Jesus, too, was arrested before that feast, and Matthew and Mark (whose gospels Luke certainly knew and used) even note the (forestalled) desire of his persecutors to wait until after the feast to kill him.
In the events of Acts 12, James, like Jesus, is executed before the feast as a righteous victim. Peter, also like Jesus, cheats death through miraculous intervention. Not only that, but he escapes his “tomb” by his chains falling off, like the Lord’s casting off of his grave-clothes; by the miraculous opening of the locked doors, like the removal of the stone from Jesus’s tomb; and by the unnatural sleep of an armed guard, which in the latter case is executed for allowing the escape, and in the former is only saved from that fate by the priests putting things right with Pilate.
Then we find that the first witness to Peter’s “resurrection” is, just as in the case of Jesus, a woman – who is, like those women rushing from Jesus’s tomb, not believed by the believers! Instead they say she must have seen Peter’s “angel” (whatever they meant theologically by that!) just as the disciples in the upper room think at first that they are seeing a ghost when Jesus appears.
Note that Luke’s way of presenting this not only connects James’s and Peter’s experience with the death and resurrection of Christ, but it also reinforces the metaphor of the gospel as not only the means of liberation from death, but from the imprisonment of sin. This vivid picture of salvation has been employed by writers from Irenaeus to Charles Wesley, as well, of course, as being quoted from Isaiah in Jesus’s sermon in Nazareth, as recorded by Luke as the very first teaching of Jesus’s ministry. Luke knew what he was doing, under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit.
But there is just one more miraculous release from prison recounted in Acts, and that is the liberation of Paul and Silas from the gaol in Philippi. This time the liberating event is an earthquake, perhaps reminiscent of that in Matthew 28:2. Once more the prison doors fly open, and chains fall off. Once more, the Roman practice of killing guards who fail in their task is alluded to in the attempted suicide of the gaoler, presumably fearing a worse death from his masters.
This is another example of Luke’s “Paul < like Peter < like Jesus” strategy. But of course, Luke would never have been able to make these connections if God had not also had a divine strategy of revelation in the events themselves. Indeed, such “narrative analogies” (to use Seth Postell’s term from his wonderful book on that topic) are ubiquitous in Scripture.
It’s almost as if God had a long-term plan for salvation from the start…
