Who Was Bar Jesus (Acts 13,6-12)? 67 foreign, and therefore invalid, source of authority. The term is used in 13,6 is to characterise Bar Jesus as a serious opponent of Paul. 2. A Jew Bar Jesus is also said to be a Jew (∆Ioudai'o"). Scholars tend to understand this negatively — even as an example of a Lukan anti- Jewish polemic. So J.T. Sanders claims Luke thinks of Bar Jesus as an “evil Jew” who opposes the mission to the gentiles (8). Barrett includes the term in “everything that Luke did not like” (9). Bruce calls him “a renegade Jew” (10) because he is a magos; and Garrett says he is someone “who by practicing magic commits what Luke regarded as the worst sort of idolatry” (11). In other words, the man is consistently portrayed as being completely outside the pale. That, as will be shown, is questionable, but for now it is sufficient to say that an individual being ‘a Jew’ is not always, if ever, viewed negatively by Luke. It is true that Luke uses the plural ‘Jews’ to refer to those who are not Christian, and he uses it precisely in that way in 13,5 where Paul is said to be proclaiming the word of God ‘in the synagogues of the Jews’. However, the fact is that on the great majority of occasions in Acts when Luke identifies an individual as ‘a Jew’, he does so of a Christian. Such is the case with Peter (10,28), Timothy’s mother (16,1), Aquila (18,2), Apollos (18,24), of course with Paul himself (21,39; 22,3), and possibly also with Alexander (19,34). The only exceptions are Scaeva (19,14; but even his sons operate with the name of Jesus) and Drusilla, the wife of Felix, who is quite keen to hear Paul ‘speak about the faith in Jesus Christ’ (24,24). So I doubt that identifying Bar Jesus as a Jew is meant at all to be an anti-Jewish depiction. Nor is it meant to cast him in the outsider category; to the contrary, since Luke commonly uses the category ‘a Jew’ of a Christian individual, one could theoretically understand that Bar Jesus was a Christian. It is possible to think of him as an ‘incomplete’ Christian, as indeed was Apollos, a Jew who needed to be instructed more accurately in the way of God (18,26), and were the disciples of Acts 19,1-7. In any case, Bar Jesus was a serious threat, partly because he was so very close to the Jesus movement, and possibly even had an impact on it. (8) J.T. SANDERS, The Jews in Luke-Acts (London 1987) 259. (9) C.K BARRETT, The Acts of the Apostles (Edinburgh 1994) I, 613. (10) F.F. BRUCE, The Book of the Acts (Grand Rapids, MI 1988) 249. (11) GARRETT, Demise, 81.