Acts of the Apostles
The Acts of the Apostles is the fifth book of the New Testament. It recounts the founding of the Christian Church and the spread of its message across the Roman Empire.
Acts and the Gospel of Luke form a two-volume work known as Luke–Acts by the same author. Tradition identifies the writer as Luke the Evangelist, a doctor who travelled with Paul the Apostle, though the text is anonymous, not naming its author. Critical opinion remains divided about whether Luke the physician wrote it. Many scholars still regard the author of Luke–Acts as a companion of Paul, although they note tensions with the Pauline epistles. Most scholars treat Acts as historiography, though focus is more on the author's aims than on settling questions of strict historicity. Scholars usually date the book to 80–90 AD.
The Gospel of Luke depicts the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Acts continues the story of Christianity in the 1st century, beginning with the ascension of Jesus and the mission from Jerusalem into the wider Mediterranean world. The early chapters describe Pentecost, the shared life of the first believers, and the establishment of the church at Antioch. The later chapters follow Paul as he carries the message throughout the empire and conclude with his imprisonment in Rome as he awaits trial.
Luke–Acts addresses how the Jewish Messiah came to have an overwhelmingly non-Jewish church by arguing that the message reached the Gentiles after the Jewish rejection. The work also reads as a defense of the Jesus movement for Jewish audiences, since most speeches respond to Jewish concerns while Roman officials arbitrate disputes about Jewish customs and law. Luke presents the followers of Jesus as a Jewish sect entitled to legal protection, but remains ambivalent about the future of Jews and Christians, affirming Jesus' Jewish identity while emphasizing the Jews' rejection of the Messiah.
Composition and setting
Title, unity of Luke–Acts, authorship and date
The name "Acts of the Apostles" was first used by Irenaeus in the late 2nd century. It is not known whether this was an existing name for the book or one invented by Irenaeus; it does seem clear that it was not given by the author, as the word práxeis only appears once in the text and there it refers not to the apostles but to deeds confessed by their followers.The Gospel of Luke and Acts make up a two-volume work which scholars call Luke–Acts. Together they account for 27.5% of the New Testament, the largest contribution attributed to a single author, providing the framework for both the Church's liturgical calendar and the historical outline into which later generations have fitted their idea of the story of Jesus and the early church. The author was not named in either volume, as was common for ancient biographies and histories, including Tacitus’s Germania and Diogenes Laertius. According to Church tradition dating from the 2nd century, the author was Luke, named as a companion of the apostle Paul in three letters attributed to Paul, but twentieth century scholarship cast this into doubt, with Theissen stating “a critical consensus emphasizes the countless contradictions between the account in Acts and the authentic Pauline letters”, such as between accounts of Paul’s conversion and Acts’ representation of Pauline theology. Many modern scholars have therefore expressed doubt that the author of Luke–Acts was the physician Luke, and critical opinion on the subject was assessed to be roughly evenly divided near the end of the 20th century. More recent developments in interpretation find that Paul and the author of Luke–Acts are not as different theologically as previously thought. Most scholars maintain that the author of Luke–Acts, whether named Luke or not, met Paul. He was educated, a man of means, probably urban, and someone who respected manual work, although not a worker himself; this is significant, because more high-brow writers of the time looked down on the artisans and small business people who made up the early church of Paul and were presumably Luke's audience.
The interpretation of the "we" passages as indicative that the writer was a historical eyewitness, remains the most influential in current biblical studies. Objections to this viewpoint include the above claim that Luke–Acts contains differences in theology and historical narrative which are irreconcilable with the authentic letters of Paul the Apostle.
The earliest possible date for Luke–Acts is around 62 AD, the time of Paul's imprisonment in Rome, but most scholars date the work to 80–90 AD on the grounds that it uses Mark as a source, looks back on the destruction of Jerusalem, and does not show any awareness of the letters of Paul. If it does show awareness of the Pauline epistles, and also of the work of the Jewish historian Josephus, as some believe, then a date in the early 2nd century is possible. However, many arguments mediate against this dating, such as the Gospel of John's awareness of the gospel, its independence from the Gospel of Matthew in the two-source hypothesis, and 1 Clement.
Manuscripts
There are two major textual variants of Acts, the Western text-type and the Alexandrian. The oldest complete Alexandrian manuscripts date from the 4th century and the oldest Western ones from the 6th, with fragments and citations going back to the 3rd. Western texts of Acts are 6.2–8.4% longer than Alexandrian texts, the additions tending to enhance the Jewish rejection of the Messiah and the role of the Holy Spirit, in ways that are stylistically different from the rest of Acts. The majority of scholars prefer the Alexandrian text-type over the Western as the more authentic, but this same argument would favour the Western over the Alexandrian for the Gospel of Luke, as in that case the Western version is the shorter.Genre, sources and historicity of Acts
The title "Acts of the Apostles" would seem to identify it with the genre telling of the deeds and achievements of great men, but it was not the title given by the author, who instead aligned Luke–Acts to the 'narratives' which others had written, and described his own work as an "orderly account". It lacks exact analogies in Hellenistic or Jewish literature. Balch compares Luke-Acts to the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote a well-known history of Rome, and the Jewish historian Josephus, author of a history of the Jews. Like them, he anchors his history by dating the birth of the founder and like them he tells how the founder is born from God, taught authoritatively, and appeared to witnesses after death before ascending to heaven. No sources have been identified for Acts, but the author would have had access to the Septuagint and the Gospel of Mark. Advocates of the Two-source hypothesis argue that Luke knew the Q source, while a growing number of scholars defend either the Farrer hypothesis where Luke used Matthew without Q or the Matthean Posteriority Hypothesis where neither were used. He transposed a few incidents from Mark's gospel to the time of the Apostles—for example, the material about "clean" and "unclean" foods in Mark 7 is used in Acts 10, and Mark's account of the accusation that Jesus has attacked the Temple is used in a story about Stephen. There are also points of contact with 1 Peter, the Letter to the Hebrews, and 1 Clement. Other sources can only be inferred from internal evidence—the traditional explanation of the three "we" passages, for example, is that they represent eyewitness accounts. The search for such inferred sources was popular in the 19th century, but by the mid-20th it had largely been abandoned.File:ApostleFedorZubov.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|Ministry of the Apostles: Russian icon by Fyodor Zubov, 1660Acts was read as a reliable history of the early church well into the post-Reformation era. Attitudes towards the historicity of Acts have ranged widely across scholarship in different countries. The debate on the historicity of Acts became most vehement between 1895 and 1915. The influential scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur suggested that the author had rewritten history to present a united Peter and Paul and advance a single orthodoxy against the Marcionites. Today there is less interest in determining the historical accuracy of Acts than in understanding the author's theological program, though a middle range of scholars see Acts as relatively reliable by standards used to evaluate Hellenistic historiography.Most New Testament scholars view Luke-Acts as representing a form of historiography with a number of sub-genres under discussion, with other proposed genres including novel, epic, and ancient biography.
Audience and authorial intent
Luke was written to be read aloud to a group of Jesus-followers gathered in a house to share the Lord's supper. The author assumes an educated Greek-speaking audience, but directs his attention to specifically Christian concerns rather than to the Greco-Roman world at large. He begins his gospel with a preface addressed to Theophilus, informing him of his intention to provide an "ordered account" of events which will lead his reader to "certainty". He did not write in order to provide Theophilus with historical justification—"did it happen?"—but to encourage faith—"what happened, and what does it all mean?"Acts is intended as a work of "edification", meaning "the empirical demonstration that virtue is superior to vice." The work also engages with the question of a Christian's proper relationship with the Roman Empire, the civil power of the day: could a Christian obey God and also Caesar? The answer is ambiguous. The Romans never move against Jesus or his followers unless provoked by the Jews; in the trial scenes the Christian missionaries are always cleared of charges of violating Roman laws; and Acts ends with Paul in Rome proclaiming the Christian message under Roman protection. On the other hand, Luke makes clear that the Romans, like all earthly rulers, receive their authority from Satan, while Christ is ruler of the kingdom of God.