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Acts of the Apostles

Book of the New Testament

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Acts and the Gospel of Luke share the same author. Tradition identifies the writer as Luke the Evangelist, a doctor who travelled with Paul the Apostle. The author is unnamed in the text but appears as a participant in the first-person we verses of Acts 16-27. Critical opinion remains evenly divided about whether Luke the physician wrote it. Most scholars still regard the author of Luke–Acts as a companion of Paul, although others 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 historicity. The book is usually dated to 80–90 AD.

The Gospel of Luke depicts the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Acts continues the story of Christianity, 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 defends 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 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 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 (deeds, acts) only appears once in the text (Acts 19:18) and there it refers not to the apostles but to deeds confessed by their followers.

The shared author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles 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. 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. Critical opinion on the traditional attribution to Luke was assessed to be roughly evenly divided near the end of the 20th century. The author was not named in either volume, as was common for ancient biographies and histories, including Tacitus's Germania and Diogenes Laertius. Most scholars maintain that the author of Luke–Acts, whether named Luke or not, met Paul. The interpretation of the "we" passages as indicative that the writer was a historical eyewitness (whether Luke the evangelist or not), remains the most influential in current biblical studies. Objections to this viewpoint include the twentieth century consensus emphasized the differences in theology and historical narrative with the authentic letters of Paul the Apostle. Influential figures such as Philip Vielhauer cast doubt on the tradition, while B. H. Streeter argued that Luke could have known Paul without adopting his theology. More recent developments in interpretation find that Paul and the author of Luke–Acts are not as different theologically as previously thought. Support for the ecclesiastical tradition based on medical language in the Lucan corpus has been uncommon since Henry Cadbury's work.

The earliest possible date for Luke–Acts is around 62 AD, the time of Paul's imprisonment in Rome, 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. Some contend that if it does show awareness of the Pauline epistles (argued to begin circulation in the late first century) or the work of Josephus, 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.

The historical Paul never mentions any "Luke the doctor", according to Bart Ehrman (since Colossians is not authentic). Scholars use the word "Luke" wantonly.

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 (shorter) 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" (Praxeis Apostolon) would seem to identify it with the genre telling of the deeds and achievements of great men (praxeis), but it was not the title given by the author, who instead aligned Luke–Acts to the 'narratives' (διήγησις diēgēsis) which others had written, and described his own work as an "orderly account" (ἀκριβῶς καθεξῆς). 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 (Romulus for Dionysius, Moses for Josephus, Jesus for Luke) 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 (a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures) 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 (Mark 14:58) is used in a story about Stephen (Acts 6:14). There are also points of contact (meaning suggestive parallels but something less than clear evidence) 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.

Acts 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 (although this has never died out) 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.

German scholarship as well as the Westar Institute was critical of the historicity of Acts as devotional literature with ideological goals, while English-speaking scholarship primarily viewed Acts as credible historiography. Richard Pervo described Acts as part of a fictionally novelistic genre, but most commentators continue to classify Acts within ancient historiography. However, 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. Although the composition of the audience remains disputed, most scholars agree Luke wrote for a mixed audience of both Jews and gentiles in the late first century. He begins his gospel with a preface addressed to Theophilus (Luke 1:3; cf. Acts 1:1), 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 (or Luke–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.

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