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The Acts of the Apostles (Greek Praxeis Apostolon) is a book of the Bible, which now stands fifth in the New Testament. Abbreviated in Bible citation: Act.
The author names it "treatise" (1:1). It was early called "The Acts", "The Gospel of the Holy Ghost", and "The Gospel of the Resurrection". It contains properly no account of any of the apostles except Peter and Paul. John the Apostle is mentioned only three times (3:1-4, 11; 4:1f, 13); and all that is recorded of his brother James is his execution by Herod (properly known as Agrippa I).
Internal evidence shows that it was the companion and sequel of the Gospel of Luke; its separation from that gospel occurred prior to any surviving manuscript. Historically it is of unique interest and value: there is no other book like it within the New Testament or outside it. The so-called Apocryphal Acts of certain apostles, while witnessing to the impression produced by our Acts as a type of edifying literature, only emphasize this fact. It is the one really primitive Church history, primitive in spirit as in substance; apart from it a connected picture of the Apostolic Age would be impossible. With it, the Pauline Epistles are of priceless historical value; without it, they would remain bafflingly fragmentary and incomplete, often even misleading.
All agree that the Acts of the Apostles is the work of an author of no mean skill, and that he has exercised careful selection in the use of his materials, in keeping with a definite purpose and plan. It is of moment, then, to discover from his emphasis, whether by iteration or by fullness of scale, what objects he had in mind in writing. Here it is not needful to go farther back than FC Baur and the Tübingen school, with its theory of sharp antitheses between Judaic and Gentile Christianity, of which they took the original apostles and Paul respectively as typical. Gradually their statement of this position underwent serious modifications, as it became realized that neither Jewish nor Gentile Christianity was a uniform genus, but included several species, and that the apostolic leaders from the first stood for mutual understanding and unity.
Hence the Tübingen school did its chief work in putting the needful question, not in returning the correct answer. Their answer could not be correct, because, as Ritschl showed (in his Altkath. Kirche, 2nd ed., 1857 ), their premises were inadequate. Still the attitude created by the Tübingen theory largely persists as a biassing element in much that is written about Acts. On the whole, however, there is a disposition to look at the book more objectively and to follow up the hints as to its aim given by the author in his opening verses.
This explains the large space devoted to the tribulations of the witnesses, and their constancy amid them, after the type of their Lord Himself. It forms one side of the virtual apologia for the absence of that earthly prosperity in which the pagan mind was apt to see the token of Divine approval.
Another side is the recurring exhibition of the fact that these witnesses were persecuted only by those whose action should create no bias against the persecuted. Their foes were chiefly Jews, whose opposition was due partly to a stiff-necked disinclination to bow to the wider reading of their own religion --to which the Holy Spirit had from of old been pointing (cf. the prominence given to this idea in StephenSaint Stephen the first Christian martyr, was one of the first seven deacons chosen by the early church, according to the Acts of the Apostles (vi. He is regarded as the first Christian martyr, or "protomartyr". His very name in Greek simply means the 'cr's long speech)--and partly to jealousy of those who, by preaching the wider Evangelical Mission, were winning over the Gentiles, and particularly proselytes, in such great numbers.
Such, then, seem to be the author's main motifs. They make up an account fairly adequate to the manifoldness of the book; yet they may be summed up in three ideas, together constituting the moral which this history of the expansion of Christianity aims at bringing home to its readers. These are the universality of the Gospel, the jealousy of national Judaism, and the Divine initiative manifest in the gradual stages by which men of Jewish birth were led to recognize the Divine will in the setting aside of national restrictions, alien to the universal destiny of the Church. The practical moral is the Divine character of the Christian religion, as evinced by the manner of its extension in the empire, no less than by its original embodiment in the Founder's life and death. Thus both parts of the author's work alike tend to produce assured conviction of Christianity as of Divine origin (Luke 1:1, 4; Acts 1:1f.).
This view has the merit of giving the book a practical religious aim--a sine qua non to any theory of an early Christian writing. Though meant for men of pagan birth in the first instance, it is to them as inquirers or even converts, such as "Theophilus," that the argument is addressed. In spite of all difficulties, this religion is worthy of personal belief, even though it mean opposition and suffering. Among the features of the occasion which suggested the need of such an appeal was doubtless the existence of persecution by the Roman authorites, perhaps largely at the instigation of local Judaism. To meet this special perplexity, the author holds up the picture of early days, when the great protagonist of the Gospel constantly enjoyed protection at the hands of Roman justice. It is implied that the present distress is but a passing phase, resting on some misunderstanding; meantime, the example of apostolic constancy should yield strong reassurance. The Acts of the Apostles is in fact an Apology for the Church as distinct from Judaism, the breach with which is accordingly traced with great fulness and care.
From this standpoint Acts no longer seems to end abruptly. Whether as exhibiting the Divine leading and aid, or as recording the impartial and even kindly attitude of the Roman State towards the Christians, the writer has reached a climax. "He wished," as Harnack well remarks, "to point out the might of the Holy Spirit in the apostles, Christ's witnesses; and to show how this might carried the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome and gained for it entrance into the pagan world, whilst the Jews in growing degree incurred rejection. In keeping with this, verses 26-28 of chapter 28 are the solemn closing verses of the work. But verses 30, 31 are an appended observation."
Yet the writer is, in fact, ending up most fitly on one of his keynotes, in that he leaves Paul preaching in Rome itself, "unmolested." Paulus Romae, apex Evangelii.
The full force of this is missed by those who, while rejecting the idea that the author had in reserve enough Pauline history to furnish another work, yet hold that Paul was freed from the imprisonment amid which Acts leaves him. But for those, on the other hand, who see in the writer's own words in 20:38, uncontradicted by anything in the sequel, a broad hint that Paul never saw his EphesianEphesus was one one of the great cities of the Ionian Greeks in Asia Minor, located in Lydia where the Cayster river flows into the Aegean Sea (in modern day Turkey). It was founded by colonists principally from Athens. The ruins of Ephesus are a major to friends again, the natural view is open that the sequel to the two years' preaching was too well known to call for explicit record. Nor would such silence touching Paul's speedy martyrdom be disingenuous, any more than on the theory that martyrdom overtook him several years later. The writer views Paul's death (like the horrors of Nero's Vatican Gardens in 64Alternate uses, see Number 64 Centuries: 1st century BC 1st century 2nd century Decades: 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 100s 110s Years: 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 Events In Rome, persecution of early Christians begins under Roman Emperor Nero.) as a mere exception to the rule of Roman policy heretofore illustrated. Not even by the Roman authorities were some of Nero's acts regarded as precedents.
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