1. Introduction
Speech and silence, often considered mutually exclusive opposites, are, in fact, mutually constitutive. Both play diverse and complex roles in the rhetoric of a narrative. When it comes to the two early Christian narratives written by the author we call Luke, silence can be its own malleable, meaningful and memorable mode of communication.Footnote 1 Even a cursory glance at the Acts of the Apostles reveals, for instance, that silence can suggest fear, as implied when the Lord says to Paul, ‘Do not be afraid – speak and do not be silent’ (Acts 18.9); silence can protect, as when the chiliarch commands Paul's nephew not to ‘blab’ about the plot against Paul's life (Acts 23.22); silence can mark the futility of changing someone else's mind, as when the narrator explains, ‘Because he [Paul] could not be persuaded, we became silent’ (Acts 21.14); or silence can denote respectful listening – what King-Kok Cheung dubs ‘attentive silence’ – as in Peter's instructions to ‘give ear to [his] words’ in Acts 2.14, or when the Jerusalem elders ‘keep quiet and listen’ to Paul and Barnabas in Acts 15.12.Footnote 2
Approaches to ancient texts that focus exclusively on speech are inherently imbalanced. Far from simply an innocuous absence of language, silence can carry thundering significances. Yet, these meanings are not always obvious, and they can be especially difficult to interpret in texts, without attendant non-verbal cues such as facial expressions or gestures.Footnote 3 How can New Testament interpreters best discern and describe the interwoven words, whispers, silences and subtexts of ancient narratives such as Luke and Acts?
In this article, I seek to build on my earlier narratological study of speech and silence, Silent Statements: Narrative Representations of Speech and Silence in the Gospel of Luke,Footnote 4 where I demonstrate how focusing on silences as well as speech enriches our understanding of the narratological dimensions of Luke's Gospel, including Lukan plot, characterisation, theme(s) and readerly experience(s).Footnote 5 The obvious next step is to extend this work to the Lukan sequel. How do speech and silence contribute to the narrative rhetoric of the Acts of the Apostles? I begin by briefly outlining several key presuppositions established in Silent Statements, and then turn to the topic of Luke's rhetorical uses of speech and silence in Acts.
Because I shall at times observe parallels and contrasts between Luke and Acts, let me first offer a caveat regarding the much-debated relationship between the two narratives.Footnote 6 I hold the view that the same author wrote both the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, several decades apart in the latter half of the first century ce, and that they can profitably be read together as ‘Luke-Acts’. At the same time, I recognise that previous narratological studies often overemphasised the unity between the two, and consequently bordered on ‘parallelomania’.Footnote 7 I agree with F. Scott Spencer that ‘Acts has a literary and historical life of its own which must be respected’, and that the Gospel of Luke ‘should not be treated as a procrustean framework into which every element of Acts must fit’.Footnote 8 My contentions do not depend on either the dating or the intended relationship between the two narratives.
2. Key Presuppositions Regarding Speech, Silence and Narrative
2.1 ‘Doing Things with Silence’
Silent Statements begins by setting out the following three basic observations, shared across diverse theoretical approaches, which can assist in the task of interpreting narrative silences.
First, silence is multivalent. It can signify many different, even contradictory, things. For example, ancient sources from Homeric narratives to Athenian oratories depict silence as a shield, paradoxically pointing towards the mysterious, often magical, power of the spoken word. Other ancient writers consider silence to be a personal or human limitation to overcome. Philo, for one, insists that despite God's ineffability, we must ‘dare to speak beyond our capacity’.Footnote 9 Ancient auspices such as the pseudo-Homeric hymn to Demeter esteem silence as a revelatory ritual practice that enables human–divine connection, while in Nag Hammadi texts such as the Apocryphon of John (2.1–2; 6.35–7.4), mysteries are not revealed but concealed in silence.Footnote 10
At the same time, as post-colonial and feminist thinkers rightly emphasise, powerful people often problematically privilege their own speech and ignore or censor others’ voices as a means of maintaining their power.Footnote 11 In several places, Luke depicts traditionally marginalised characters such as female slaves speaking the truth, and then subsequently being silenced by male characters.Footnote 12 F. Scott Spencer, for instance, observes:
On three occasions – one in the Lukan passion narrative (22:56), the other two in the middle chapter of Acts (12:14–15; 16:17) – a paidiskē makes an announcement: her voice is heard. And what each slave-girl says is absolutely reliable: she speaks the truth … Like the women witnesses to the empty tomb, each slave-girl proclaimer runs into resistance to her message: her word is squelched or challenged in some way.Footnote 13
The point here is that speech and silence can both instantiate and disrupt normative power dynamics. The interplay between them stands at the heart of what Turid Karlsen Seim memorably dubbed Luke's ‘double message’ when it comes to women.Footnote 14
In the Lukan narrative, silence and speech are neutral in and of themselves. Both can be used in positive or negative ways; thus, both require qualification. This is a helpful corrective to the common contemporary tendency to privilege speech over silence. One might guess that in Luke's narrative, speech is always positive and silence is always negative; one might assume that positive or powerful characters always use speech and negative or weak characters always are silenced. This perception might even seem to be bolstered by Lukan scholars; after all, commentaries on Acts routinely note that the apostles are conspicuously marked by their boldness of speech – their παρρησία (e.g. 9.27–8; 13.46; 14.3; 19.8; 26.26),Footnote 15 and Christy Cobb is surely correct that the female slaves in Acts are portrayed ‘as truth-tellers, actively resisting the confines the text and society places upon them as women and as slaves’.Footnote 16 As we shall see, however, the Lukan uses of speech and silence are more nuanced than an unconditional privileging of speech over silence would allow; for example, silence is not negative, passive or externally imposed in Acts 15.12–13, when the apostles listen attentively and James waits patiently for his turn to speak at the Jerusalem Council.Footnote 17
Second, silence is contextually determined; conceptions and practices of silence acquire specificity within particular contexts. It is well known, for example, that certain practices, such as reading and prayer, are considered silent activities in certain time periods, but are not conceptualised as silent in other historical contexts.Footnote 18 Moreover, as rhetoricians Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe write, ‘Westerners have long forgotten (if we ever knew in the first place) the ancient Egyptian and Pythagorean beliefs in the value of silence and listening’.Footnote 19 The importance of contextual factors for interpreting silences is illustrated in an entry to the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, titled ‘Rhetoric of Silence’, in which Barry Brummett defines rhetorical silence as ‘passivity and relinquishment of initiative in politics’.Footnote 20 Brummett sets this silence in opposition to ‘talk’, which he defines as a ‘form of action in politics’.Footnote 21 However, we must be careful not to impose modern sensibilities upon ancient texts. Brummett's contemporary American conceptions of ‘talk’ and ‘silence’ do not always apply elsewhere, not least in the various cultures of antiquity. For example, the silence of the Athenian demos did not signal passivity at all, but rather the silent demos’ active power over the elite speakers who had to win their approval.Footnote 22
Moreover, in ancient Greek, words such as σιγάω and σιωπάω have a wider semantic range than the English word ‘silence’ does today; they actually denote varying modulations of audibility. Sometimes, references to ‘silence’ in Greek can indicate a total lack of sound, while at other times they indicate soft or quiet sounds. Within the ancient Greek soundscape, references to speech and silence should be viewed as variously located along a communication continuum, rather than sitting fixed on the opposite ends of a pole.Footnote 23 In short, linguistic, temporal, historical and social contexts dynamically shape the meaning(s) of silence.
Third, silence can be rhetorically powerful. Humans do things with silence, just as they do things with words. Speech-act theorists usefully distinguish between the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts contained in a single utterance.Footnote 24 For instance, the locution (the act of saying something) often differs from the illocution (the act performed in saying that thing), which itself often differs from the perlocution (the effects engendered in the hearer as a result of the saying). Silence can be seen as a kind of speech act with different illocutionary force depending on its temporal, geographical and cultural contexts.
For too long, silence has been simplistically equated with passivity, weakness and/or submission. Today, scholars of rhetoric are exploring silence as an active expression of power in and of itself. Glenn reminds us that interpersonal communication always entails power negotiations:
Like speech, the meaning of silence depends on a power differential that exists in every rhetorical situation: who can speak, who must remain silent, who listens, and what those listeners can do.Footnote 25
This is why Glenn calls for ‘serious investigation’ into silence as an ‘as yet underexamined rhetorical art’.Footnote 26
Though this scholarly focus on silence as rhetorically powerful is relatively recent, interest in the rhetorical efficacy of silence is in fact quite ancient. Numerous rhetorical handbooks from antiquity explicitly state that silence can be strategic. The second-century ce work On Style, ostensibly written by the Athenian orator Demetrius, cites Theophrastus’ teaching that what remains unsaid can shape one's hearer into one's witness:
[N]ot all points should be punctiliously and tediously elaborated, but some should be left to the comprehension and inference of the hearer, who when he perceives what you have left unsaid becomes not only your hearer but your witness, and a very friendly witness too.Footnote 27
Quintilian, too, recommends hinting at certain points, rather than stating them explicitly, since then the hearer will ‘be led to seek out the secret which he would not believe if he heard it openly stated, and to believe in that which he has found out for himself’ (Inst. 9.2.71). Kathy Maxwell helpfully draws on references such as these from the rhetorical handbooks in her treatment of Luke's Gospel, specifically identifying six forms of authorial silence: (1) access to privileged information; (2) specific omissions; (3) open-ended comparisons; (4) hidden meanings; (5) question and answer; and (6) allusion.Footnote 28 In addition to the rhetorical handbooks, ancient narratives themselves employ such strategies; the Roman historian Livy, for example, utilises silence (silentium) to heighten emotion and create a foil to action.Footnote 29
To summarise these basic but critical observations about silence: (1) Silence is neither uniformly positive, nor uniformly negative. Rather, silence itself is ambiguous. (2) Individual instances of silence receive specification and meaning from multiple contextual factors. (3) Silence can signal oppression, as when minoritised voices are silenced, but silence can also be a powerful rhetorical tool. If scholars overemphasize speech in ancient texts such as Acts and ignore the silences, we easily – albeit perhaps inadvertently – end up reinscribing modern views and obscuring key aspects of the narrative's persuasive power.
2.2 A Rhetorically Focused Narratological Approach
The rhetorical power of what remains unsaid is especially relevant when considering narrative because, when it comes to this genre, different kinds of silence shape readers’ experiences and interpretive decisions. At times, narrators report through indirect discourse that speech has occurred, without citing it directly. Acts 20.7, for example, simply says that Paul ‘continued speaking until midnight’, without stating the content of his speech. This is a silence on the discourse level (a silence of the narrator). At other times, narrators explicitly state that a character remains silent. In Acts 9.7, we read that Paul's compatriots on the Damascus road stand ‘speechless’ while Paul sees a vision. This is silence on the story level (the silence of characters).Footnote 30 Silences of narrators and silences of characters alike prompt readers to interpret what they do not ‘hear’. As Robert Alter puts it, a ‘hiatus in explanation … opens the gates to multiple interpretations’.Footnote 31
Taking a rhetorical approach to narrative means recognising that speech and silence are not only key matters of concern within the Lukan story, but also crucial tools used in its telling.Footnote 32 A rhetorical approach to narrative recognises, in the words of narratologist James Phelan, that ‘narrative is a rhetorical action in which somebody tries to accomplish some purpose(s) by telling somebody else that something happened’.Footnote 33 Several principles follow from this perspective. First, there is a ‘recursive relationship’ between the points of the ‘rhetorical triangle’ (speaker, text and audience), and different ‘audiences’ (i.e. implied reader, narratee etc.) will respond differently to textual cues. I therefore do not imagine a uniform, singular reader of Luke or Acts. Certainly, not all readers/hearers respond(ed) to the Lukan narrative in the same way; my suggestions about narrative rhetoric and audience response are always meant to indicate potential rhetorical effects. Additionally, a rhetorical approach to narrative recognises that narratives progress sequentially, and that such progression is ‘governed by both a textual and a readerly dynamics’ that operate on both ‘story’ and ‘discourse’ levels. In other words, the order in which a story is told matters, directly influencing the ways in which audiences understand its message(s).
In sum, the two main reasons we ought to attend to speech and silence in the narrative of Acts are these: (1) diverse ancient perspectives on speech and silence form part of the rhetorical backdrop of the Lukan narrative and, thus, constitute part of the extratextual repertoires by which the earliest readers made sense of the story; and (2) silence is an integral aspect of the narrative design that effects readerly engagement and thereby impacts the narrative's rhetorical persuasiveness.
3. Narrative Uses of Speech and Silence in the Acts of the Apostles
3.1 Speech Acts in Acts
Commentators have long recognised that speech plays a significant role in the book of Acts. Jesus’ parting instructions to his disciples are that they should be his witnesses to the end of the earth (1.8), the church is inaugurated with tongues of fire (2.3), and the narrative is punctuated throughout by the apostles’ public speeches. Beyond the clear examples of Peter's sermon in 2.14–36, Stephen's speech in 7.2–53 and Paul's speech in 17.22–31, scholars disagree about the exact number of public speeches in Acts, although kerygmatic declarations clearly constitute a major percentage of the story. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the speeches have garnered so much attention in New Testament studies; since Martin Dibelius’ groundbreaking work on the topic, this has been especially true of German scholars. The ocean of secondary literature on the public speeches attests to a sustained scholarly preoccupation in this regard.Footnote 34
To be clear, this interest in the public speeches is entirely warranted. There is no question that they play a vital role in the narrative.Footnote 35 To cite François Bovon, ‘Speeches are both an effective place to insert the creed that the author seeks to defend and a strategic opportunity to give meaning to the present situation.’Footnote 36 Luke certainly could have told the story differently. As Carl Holladay puts it:
Other aspects of Luke's social world such as athletic contests, theatrical performances or even military battles could easily have been used to construct his narrative but they were not. Instead Luke tells a story that privileges public speaking.Footnote 37
Understanding the apostles’ public speeches is crucial for grasping the narrative's overall rhetorical message.
Despite the high degree of scholarly attention afforded the public speeches to date, I believe that it is worth revisiting the topic of speech in Acts for several reasons. For one, scholars have paid insufficient attention to the public speeches’ narrative frame. Typically, the apostles’ public speeches are analysed in terms of classical formal rhetorical conventions: Stephen uses insinuatio in his speech before the Jewish authorities (Acts 6.8–8.3), for example, while James uses conciliar rhetoric before the Christian leaders in Jerusalem (Acts 15.13–21). Stanley Porter has categorised Paul's speeches in Acts as: (1) missionary speeches, using deliberative rhetoric to persuade his audiences to believe the gospel (at Pisidian Antioch, Acts 13.16–41; at Lystra, Acts 14.15–17; on the Areopagus in Athens, Acts 17.22–31); (2) apologetic speeches, employing forensic rhetoric to defend his own actions (before the Jerusalem Jews, Acts 22.1–21; the procurator Felix, Acts 24.10–21; Herod Agrippa and others, Acts 26.2–23; Roman Jewish leaders, Acts 28.17–20); and (3) a farewell speech, using epideictic rhetoric to encourage the Miletan elders (Paul's only speech before a Christian audience, Acts 20.18–35).Footnote 38 This work is often insightful, but it also tends to isolate the speeches, extracting them from the narrative in which they are embedded.Footnote 39 But genre always impacts a text's rhetorical effects, which is why, given the rhetorical emphasis of such studies, it is ironic that they would obscure the speeches’ narrative context.
Second, though it might sound banal to say so, public orations are not the only speech acts in the story. It is necessary to revisit the question of how speech functions in Acts because the common emphasis on public speeches can obscure the fact that character speech impacts readers, whether those characters speak ‘publicly’ or not. When Peter ‘comes to himself and speaks’ alone in Acts 12.11, for example, readers ‘hear’ his private speech just as they ‘hear’ his formal public orations. Both kinds of speech influence potential readerly experiences of the story.
3.2 ‘Doing Things with Silence’ in Acts
In addition to these neglected aspects of speech in Acts, the role(s) of silence in this Lukan narrative has been largely ignored (Acts explicitly mentions silence in 4.14–18; 5.40; 9.7; 12.17; 15.12–13; 18.9; 19.35–6; 21.14, 40; 22.2; 23.22). There are a few notable exceptions: Daniel Marguerat wrote an excellent chapter on ‘the rhetoric of silence’ governing the suspended ending of Acts, Henning Hupe explored ‘Luke's silences’ in the famous ‘we-passages’ through a Derridean lens; Maxwell (mentioned above) considered authorial silences and audience participation in Luke-Acts; and Daniel L. Smith argued that silencing through interruption is a common Lukan characterisation technique.Footnote 40 Aside from these works, however, critics have remained mainly mute regarding the silences in Acts. We turn now to considering the roles of speech and silence in the plot, characterisation and themes of Acts.
3.3 Speech, Silence and Plot in Acts
Narratologists often describe plot as following a progression known as Freytag's pyramid:Footnote 41 the stage is set (exposition), there is a rising action (conflict/complication), events reach a climax, and there is a falling action (denouement/resolution). In addition to this basic structural definition, most theorists agree that plot requires causal connections, temporal succession and a teleological purpose. Brian Richardson draws these nuances together in the following general definition of plot:
[Plot is] a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that is, the events are bound together in a trajectory that typically leads to some form of resolution or convergence.Footnote 42
In Acts, speech and silence contribute to these constitutive elements of plot.
Dibelius famously argued that the public speeches in Acts reflect Luke's literary sophistication, since, like other ancient historians, he uses them to drive the narrative forward.Footnote 43 More recently, Robert Tannehill described Peter's formal speeches as actions in an unfolding narrative plot.Footnote 44 Throughout Acts, the apostles’ public speeches give rise to crucial plot developments, including provoking conflicts that move characters where they need to go. Indeed, certain speech-related threads are not neatly tied up at the end of the Gospel, but drawn through the plot of Acts. Jesus’ directions to his disciples in Luke 12.11–12 to speak boldly in situations of persecution are not realised until Acts, where their refusals to be silenced heighten the dramatic tension and propel subsequent advancements in the narrative.
Stephen's speech in Acts 7.2–53 provides a clear example of these narrative dynamics at work. After Stephen's lengthy recounting of Israel's history, the narrator draws a direct causal connection between his speech and his death with the explanatory clause: ‘When they heard these things, they became enraged’ (7.54). The confrontation escalates, and the Jewish council finally silences Stephen, first by ‘covering their ears’, and then by stoning him to death (7.57–60). This event then has additional narrative consequences, since, according to the Lukan narrative, Stephen's death inaugurates a ‘severe persecution’ against the Jerusalem church; that persecution, in turn, fuels the spread of the gospel as Christians scatter throughout Judea and Samaria (8.1). Stephen's martyrdom thus initiates the fulfilment of Jesus’ commission to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth (Acts 1.8). Stephen's silencing through death also provides the occasion for Luke to introduce a major new character: the best-known witness of Stephen's killing, Saul of Tarsus, later called Paul (7.58). As Acts repeatedly attests, Saul had sought zealously to exterminate the early Jesus movement (7.58; 8.1; 9.1–2, 5, 13–14, 21; 22.4–5, 7, 19; 26.9–11, 14). And yet, he steps into the gap created by Stephen's death, taking a central role as leader in the Christian community, and a central role as protagonist in the story of Acts. Thus, Stephen's speech and subsequent silencing represent a major turning point in the plot of the Acts of the Apostles.
In addition to establishing causality and creating unity across discrete episodes, speech and silence also figure prominently in the plot's teleological end. Peter Brooks is right: ‘Plots are not simply organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal-oriented and forward-moving.’Footnote 45 Not only that, but as Frank Kermode argues in his landmark theoretical work, The Sense of an Ending, a story's conclusion unifies and organises the entire narrative and thus retrospectively gives rise to the story's sense, or meaning.Footnote 46 As in Luke's Gospel, speech and silence contribute to the resolution of certain strands of the plot in Acts. In the end of the Gospel, we witness the disciples praising God ‘continually’ in the temple (24.52–3); this verbal testimony reverberates forward into and all through the narrative of Acts, which itself ends with Paul ‘proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance’ (Acts 28.31).Footnote 47
And yet, not all narrative trajectories find closure. Several scholars have recognised that loose ends in the Gospel serve as proleptic links to Acts, where many of the instabilities and unanswered questions left at the end of Luke are finally resolved.Footnote 48 Following his resurrection in the Gospel, Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will be given to them (24.49); then in Acts, the Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples (2.1–4). Jesus predicts that the disciples will be brought before the synagogues and interrogated (Luke 12.11–12), arrested and persecuted (Luke 21.12), betrayed by their families and friends (Luke 21.16); not until Acts is Stephen dragged before the synagogue to defend himself (Acts 6.9–12) and Paul arrested and persecuted (21.30–6). The narrator's open endings at the close of the Gospel create connective tissue between the Gospel and Acts and thereby elicit the audience's continuing curiosities.
Open endings are not only found at the close of the Gospel, however. Acts, too, leaves certain issues unresolved.Footnote 49 Paul's visitors in Rome have mixed reactions to the gospel (28.24–5), Jesus does not reappear as promised (1.11), and Jesus’ predictions of Jerusalem's destruction are never fulfilled in the narrative (Luke 21.20–4; 23.28–31). John Miller observes that ‘Israel's eschatological redemption and salvation from its enemies … do not come to fruition in the course of Luke's story’.Footnote 50 Neither is Paul's trial in Rome ever recounted; in fact, the reader hears nothing of Paul's fate after his two years in captivity (Acts 28.30). Neither does Luke relate the ending of other main characters’ stories, like Barnabas or Peter. And although the book begins with a personal address (Acts 1.1), there is no concluding second-person farewell, as in the epistles (cf. Rom 16.21–7; 1 Cor 16.19–24; Phil 4.20–3; Col 4.7–18; Eph 6.23–4).
I agree with Marguerat, who argues that the Lukan narrator strategically delays Paul's arrival in Rome until the end of Acts in order to build suspense. The later chapters of Acts intensify the earlier focus on Paul's capabilities as a persuasive speaker, raising audience anticipation for Paul's spoken testimony before the emperor (e.g. 23.11; 25.11–12; 26.32). But this anticipation is never fulfilled because Luke never narrates the trial. Leaving the trial (and the historical Paul's subsequent death) ‘disnarrated’ serves rhetorically to engage the audience in constructing the ending themselves.Footnote 51 As Marguerat puts it, ‘This rhetoric of silence leads the reader to bring the narrative to its completion.’Footnote 52 Narratologist Laurence Perrine contends, similarly, that when an ending is conclusive, a reader ‘ceases to think about the story searchingly’, whereas indeterminacies ‘may cause him to … go over the story in his mind, and thus by searching out its implications get more from it’.Footnote 53 In these ways, speech and silence mutually contribute to the Lukan narrative's closure and, paradoxically, to the sense that the story has not yet ended.
3.4 Speech, Silence and Characterisation in Acts
Foregrounding the various uses of speech and silence as effective strategies of narrative characterisation can also shed light on the ways in which the various Lukan characters are constructed. Most scholars recognise the importance of characters’ spoken words vis-à-vis their respective narrative identities. So character speech functions as an implicit form of argumentation, working – just as Socrates described the purpose of speech – to ‘lead souls by persuasion’.Footnote 54 Moreover, as Richard Thompson writes, character speech typically plays a dual role:
[S]peech and conversations … reflect the thoughts of the presented speaker, and they often function as vehicles through which the narrator may indirectly guide the audience's developing judgments and understanding.Footnote 55
In other words, a character's speech reveals aspects of her or his identity and concomitantly cues the reader to judge that character in particular ways.
Silences ought to be conceptualised similarly: a character's patterns of speech and silence are key aspects of the narrator's rhetorical strategies – not incidental instances of language, but integral tools in the narrator's persuasive arsenal.Footnote 56 Storytellers influence their audiences by depicting characters using speech and silence in particular ways and providing an evaluative framework by which to judge and/or relate to those characters. The audience thereby learns what is and is not admirable from the narrator's point of view. I argue that the Lukan narrative makes good rhetorical use of Roman assumptions about proper practices of speech and silence; these assumptions factor into constructions of various characters as protagonists or antagonists, insiders or outsiders, in Acts.
I have already noted that commentators routinely refer to the apostles’ bold speech in Acts. After Jesus’ ascension, his followers take on his role of witnessing to the gospel; they are his verbal replacements, and they routinely refuse to be silenced (e.g. 4.17–20; 5.17–32, 42; 13.45–6; 21.27–22.21; 24.1–21; 25.7–11). This is rhetorically significant: Luke specifically states that Jewish leaders recognise that the apostles had been ‘with Jesus’ based on their παρρησία (4.13). The apostles’ speech practices align them with Jesus in other ways, as well, some of which are implicit. The Jesus of Luke's Gospel consistently uses speech ‘with authority’ (Luke 4.32–6) to heal, prophesy, exorcise demons and even, in 7.14, to raise a man from the dead. In Acts, Jesus’ followers also use speech to heal, prophesy, exorcise demons and raise a man from the dead (Acts 20.9–10). Like their leader, ‘[t]he apostles’ demonstration of superior authority and power is primarily revealed in speech acts.’Footnote 57
Few critics have considered how the apostles’ silences also contribute to their characterisation as the positive protagonists of the story. Elsewhere, I have argued that Acts depicts the apostles appealing to and embodying Roman standards of collective comportment, including verbal self-restraint and silent, respectful listening.Footnote 58 Roman writers celebrate silent listening in public assemblies. For example, Cicero's praise for the assembly is this: ‘You are attentive and you listen in silence, as you should’ (For Cluentius 156). Because Cicero believes that an audience's silence indicates the quality of what is spoken, he makes this appeal: ‘I beg you, listen to what I still have to say with the same attention that you have granted me so far; you can be certain that I am not going to say anything that may seem unworthy of this gathering and this silence …’ (For Cluentius 66). Tacitus similarly extols the virtues of ‘assisting somebody in the midst of a silent audience’ (Dialogus 6.4). Pliny the Younger negatively contrasts the senate's turbulent political debates of his day with the assemblies of previous generations, who received candidates in great silence (Letters 3.20.5).
In light of Roman commendations such as these, the Jerusalem Council account in Acts 15 reads as a perfect picture of positive characters employing perceptive, purposeful listening. Acts 15.12 recounts how ‘the whole assembly was silent, listening’ while Paul and Barnabas spoke; James, waiting patiently, only replied, ‘after they become silent’ (15.13). James begins his speech with a request that others do the same: ‘Brothers, listen to me.’ Twice in the space of two verses (15.12–13), Luke weds the verbs σιγάω (‘to be silent’) and ἀκούω (‘to listen’). And this has been a recurrent theme from the start of Acts, when Peter twice instructs the witnesses at Pentecost: ‘Give ear to my words’ (2.14) and ‘listen to these words’ (2.22); ἀκούω is used eighty-five times in Acts.Footnote 59
Such references to silence effectively establish an (apostolic) ideal to which readers can compare other characters and judge them accordingly. The apostles stand in stark contrast, for example, to the vocal mayhem of unruly mobs elsewhere in Acts. In Acts 19, the silversmith Demetrius incites a riot in Ephesus. The crowd is clearly cast in a negative light, in part due to their speech practices: three times in Acts 19, Luke repeats that the Ephesian crowd is shouting (κράζω, 19.28, 32, 34), and 19.32 tells us that ‘some were shouting one thing, some another’. Their clamouring causes confusion; in fact, Luke twice mentions the riotous crowd's ‘confusion’ (19.29, 32) using the same word (σύγχυσις) the Septuagint has for ‘Babel’ in Gen 11.9 and for the Philistines’ ‘panic’ as they kill one other on the battlefield in 1 Sam 14.20. Later, when Paul is in Jerusalem, Acts 21.34 has a similar phrase to 19.32: ‘Some in the crowd were calling out one thing; others something else’; in chapter 21, they create so much noise that the officer cannot ‘discern the truth’. These scenes of chaotic speech characterise the rowdy crowds as antagonistic group characters, and prompt readers to judge them negatively.
This is a regular Lukan pattern. Daniel L. Smith's treatment of ‘the rhetoric of interruption’ in Luke-Acts demonstrates convincingly that most violations of conversational turn-taking are ‘interruptions of the pious by the impious’.Footnote 60 Repeatedly in Acts, outsiders – often, but not always, Jews – exemplify the opposite of the well-ordered verbal decorum expected in Roman public assemblies.Footnote 61 This is why the Ephesian town clerk in 19.40 can calm the crowd by stating that a ‘disorderly commotion’ could endanger the city's status in the Empire. A similar dynamic occurs two chapters later, when Paul appears before the Jewish council and a ‘great clamour’ arises between the Sadducees and Pharisees. In Acts 23.9–10, when a group of scribes from the latter group declare that they find ‘nothing wrong’ with Paul, violence erupts and the tribune orders the soldiers to put Paul in jail for his own safety. In this scene, the dissension immediately follows a different kind of silence – namely, the scribes pose a rhetorical question (‘But if a spirit did speak to him, or an angel – ?’). This could be read as an instance of the rhetorical device of aposiopesis, or cutting oneself off deliberately as a way of planting a suspicion in the hearer's mind, rather than stating it directly; whether this is an intentional use of aposiopesis or not, the end result of their unanswered rhetorical question is a noisy violence that again underscores the precarity of the various minority groups who are antagonising one another within the Roman imperial system.Footnote 62 As Lawrence Wills observes, ‘seen from the ruling Roman perspective’, the ‘split between Luke's fellow Christians and Judaism’ is ‘graphically and tendentiously realized in the Jewish mob scenes’.Footnote 63 My point here is to draw attention to the complex roles that silence and speech play in that graphic and tendentious realisation.
3.5 Speech, Silence and Theological Themes in Acts
Silence and speech advance and simultaneously complicate prominent theological themes in Acts. As we have seen, most commentators aver that the public speeches in Acts, like their ancient historiographical counterparts, interpret significant events of the story and establish theological themes for readers. Philip Satterthwaite articulates the common view: ‘[I]t is in the speeches that the important theological themes of Acts are stated at greatest length.’Footnote 64 My contention is that silence, too, illuminates theological themes in the Lukan narrative. Here, by way of illustration, we shall briefly consider two well-known Lukan themes: the divine plan and human response, and discipleship as hearing and doing.
3.5.1 The Divine Plan and Human Response
Bovon describes the theological conundrum of how to relate divine will and human response in the Lukan narrative in the following way:
Does Luke give too much to humanity by limiting God to heaven? … If this is so, we should underscore the word history in ‘salvation history.’ Or does Luke give too much place to God by making humans into puppets? The helping strokes of God in history would be intolerably imperialistic …Footnote 65
Bovon's second question alludes to Ernst Haenchen's famous description of the human responses in Luke's narrative as ‘very nearly the twitching of human puppets’.Footnote 66
Henry Cadbury was one of the first to recognise ‘the evidence of divine guidance and control that pervades [Luke's work] …There is a necessity about the course which Luke's story takes, a “must,” to use Luke's own favorite auxiliary, rather than a mere predicative “shall.”’Footnote 67 It is true that God's plan governs events in the Lukan narrative; the phrase ‘will of God’ (βουλὴ τοῦ θεοῦ) itself recurs often (Luke 7.30; Acts 2.23; 4.28; 5.38–9; 13.36; 20.27). The ubiquity of this motif has led many to conclude, like Haenchen, that Luke's humans lack freedom of choice.Footnote 68 However, when speech and silence are factored into the equation, this conclusion falls apart. In Luke and Acts, speech and silence are used to depict a dialectical, mutually constitutive relationship between divine will and human response.
Throughout the Lukan narrative, speech and silence help to illuminate how divine providence and human response are, in fact, ‘cooperative motifs’.Footnote 69 More specifically, Luke portrays God not eclipsing human freedom, but incorporating human response into the divine plan in order to bring it to completion. This is evident from the very first chapter of the Gospel with the miraculous silencing of Zechariah (1.5–23, 57–65). The angel Gabriel makes Zechariah mute with the explanation, ‘Because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will be silent, unable to speak, until the day these things take place’ (1.20). Zechariah's silencing is part punishment, part fulfilment of his request for a sign; the silence corroborates that Gabriel's long-term prophecy (the miraculous birth of John) is, in fact, reliable, since his short-term prophecy (that Zechariah will be mute) immediately comes true.Footnote 70
Speech and silence together create a complex picture of the dynamic interplay between divine causation and human response not only throughout the Gospel, but on into Acts. Squires is right: ‘An explicit philosophical discussion relating divine necessity to human free-will is avoided by Luke.’Footnote 71 Still, the Lukan narrator does stake a claim, indicating by the shape of the narrative that human response to God's plan is crucially important; in part, this is communicated through characters’ struggles over speech regulation. For example, Acts 3 begins with a divinely caused miracle: Peter heals a man lame from birth (notably, using only his speech: ‘in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk’, 3.6). The human responses to this event are varied: the healed man himself ‘praises God’ (3.8), and the people in the temple are ‘filled with wonder and amazement’ (3.10) and ‘utterly astonished’ (3.11). The priests, captain of the temple and Sadducees, however, are ‘greatly annoyed’ by Peter and John's persuasive speech (4.2). When the Jewish leaders confront the apostles, Peter's bold testimony in the Spirit (4.8, 13) and the healed man himself, as incontrovertible evidence of the miracle, serve to silence them: ‘They had nothing to say against this’ (4.14).
This silencing of the Jewish leaders is only temporary. The leaders respond by attempting to silence the apostles, ordering them ‘not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus’ (4.18). Peter replies that silence is not an option (4.20). Not long after, when the Jewish leaders try again to thwart the spread of the gospel, the apostles again refuse, invoking a well-known Greek proverb and common Jewish admonition about obeying God's will, not humans’ (5.29).Footnote 72 Peter's point is precisely that only God can silence them; their speech, that is, enacts the will of God. Only the Pharisee Gamaliel's intervention pacifies the enraged elders; the pertinent detail to observe is that Gamaliel's argument concerns both God's will and the apostles’ spoken teachings:
Leave them alone because if this plan or this matter is of men, it will be overthrown, but if it is from God, you will not be able to overthrow them – you might also be found opposing God. (5.38–9)
Gamaliel's statement immediately proves prophetic, as the released apostles continue preaching (5.42). This is just one of many Lukan examples of what William Kurz calls a ‘principal irony’ in Acts – namely, that ‘attempts to repress evangelization result instead in the spread of the word’.Footnote 73
The narratorial silence of Acts’ inconclusive ending discussed above also contributes to the paradoxical Lukan depiction of God's will and human response. Tannehill remarks:
Since the purpose of God is ultimately a purpose of universal salvation, according to Luke-Acts, the tension within the plot is not resolved at the end of Acts, which, in fact, dramatizes the recurrent rejection of salvation by the Jews.Footnote 74
Such rejection, Tannehill explains, ‘makes the story richer and more complex’, since ‘the story emerges as a dialogue between God and a recalcitrant humanity, rather than God's monologue’.Footnote 75 In Luke-Acts, the variability of human responses to divine action – often expressed through characters’ uses of speech and silence – attests to human freedom. Concomitantly, the narrative rhetoric suggests that God's word and God's will cannot be stopped.
3.5.1 Discipleship as Hearing, Doing and Speaking
Attention to speech and silence further nuances discussions of the related Lukan themes of discipleship and hearing and doing the word of God. It is commonly observed that Luke depicts discipleship as a journey that involves both the hearing and doing of God's word. Lukan coupling of the word of God and the ‘bearing of fruit’ – i.e. doing good deeds – is well known.Footnote 76 Luke's Jesus cautions against being one who ‘hears but does not do’ his words (6.49), boldly redefines his family as those ‘who hear the word of God and do it’ (8.21), and corrects a woman who calls his mother blessed by saying, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and do it’ (11.28). The Lukan focus on ‘hearing and doing’ and the Lukan emphasis on verbal witness are familiar to Lukan scholars. Yet, oddly, few scholars connect these themes to one another to ask how hearing, doing and speaking fit together as constitutive aspects of discipleship.
Proper speech practices ought to be incorporated into scholarly discussions of ‘hearing and doing’ the word because they are woven together in the narrative itself. For one thing, trustworthy speech is a salient feature of Jesus’ ethical teachings in the Gospel. It is significant that after his teaching about ‘bearing fruit’ (i.e. doing good deeds), his paradigmatic example is speech: ‘Out of the abundance of the heart (kardia), [one's] mouth speaks’ (6.45). Jesus also warns, conversely, that speech can conceal one's true character and thus typify hypocrisy (6.46). Paul then echoes the latter warning against deceitful rhetoric in his address to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20.30).
Repeatedly, the narrative of Luke-Acts instantiates – and thus corroborates – Jesus’ speech-related lessons about discipleship. The contrast between characters in this case is key. In Acts, as we have seen, the apostles consistently speak truth, while the Jewish leaders intentionally set up false witnesses (6.13–14). In Acts, followers of the Way know when to stop speaking (15.12–13; 21.14), while outsiders continue to shout when they should be silently listening (19.28–43; 22.22). In Luke and in Acts, a true disciple hears the word of God rightly and acts accordingly; one of the main examples of doing the word of God is using speech and silence appropriately.
4. Concluding Summary
In this article, I have argued that attention to the uses of speech and silence in the Acts of the Apostles – and in its telling – can illuminate the complex dynamics between Lukan narrator, narrative and narratee. Specifically, the words and silences employed by the characters and by the Lukan narrator have significant rhetorical effects; recognising this helps to nuance and deepen our understanding of Lukan plot, characterisation and theme. Of course, the article offers only an initial reading of the intersections of speech and silence in the story of Acts; work remains to be done. It seems fitting, then, to conclude by echoing the sentiments of François Bovon, who wrote in one of his many essays on the Lukan narrative, ‘My intention is not to offer a definitive survey, but to open some doors of thought as a way of inviting scholars to further research and inquiry.’Footnote 77 I hope this article will stand as just such an invitation to other Lukan scholars: the multivalent narrative functions of speech and silence in the Acts of the Apostles deserve more time and attention than we have heretofore given them.
