Echoes of Plato’s Apology of Socrates in Luke-Acts

Abstract

As a literate and well-educated person, the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (“Luke”) would have been familiar with Plato’s Apology of Socrates, one of the most widely-known ancient Greek texts in the Mediterranean world in the 1st century CE. Indeed, it appears that “Luke” may have used his, and his readers’, familiarity with stories about the life, trial, and death of Socrates, and with the account in Plato’s Apology of Socrates specifically, as an interpretive tool in three “trial” scenes narrated in Luke-Acts: those of Jesus, Peter, and, most obviously, Paul.