Someone recently suggested to me the relevance of Apollos, as depicted in the story in Acts 18:18-28, to the subject of oral tradition and the spread of information in early Christianity. Here we have an individual who had apparently, on the one hand, been “instructed well” about Jesus and Christianity, and who was able to develop his own understanding and arguments from the Jewish Scriptures, and yet “knew only John’s baptism”.
Regardless of what the story’s historical accuracy might be, we have here a depiction of the spread of early Christianity as it was envisaged (and sometimes idealized) by one particular educated author sometime around the turn of the first-to-second centuries.
Just as manuscripts were copied and recopied to the point where we had multiple similar and yet different copies circulating, so too we ought to expect significantly more variation not only in the stories and sayings passed on and circulated orally, but perhaps also in the forms that Christianity itself took.
Luke often attempts to give the impression that differences were reconciled – whether Paul and the Jerusalem leadership, or Apollos and those who baptize “in the name of Jesus”. Unfortunately, he doesn’t give us a lot of indication as to the precise viewpoints of various individuals. Certainly it is to be expected that some who heard partial information did in fact later hear more and change their views accordingly, as in the story Luke tells. But given what we know about the capacity of religious beliefs to resist revision even in light of new evidence, we must also envisage that there were people who heard some things, but not everything, and remained persuaded that their view was correct. We ought also to imagine that those who represented those who “knew the whole story” had themselves been selective (all storytellers and historians must be), and perhaps also had added to the story in such a way as to counter other possible interpretations. And we ought to remind ourselves that we do not know whether the information we have in our New Testament sources comes from those “fully in the know”, or those who, like Apollos in Acts, formulated their vision of Christianity on the basis of what limited information they had.
Perhaps if we knew more about the historical Apollos, it would help those of us who research the historical Jesus.
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