Acts of the Apostles

Acts of the Apostles, fifth book of the New Testament. The second part of a historical work, of which the Gospel According to Luke is the first volume, the Acts is the story of the development of the Christian Church under the impulse of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is such a prominent figure in the Acts that the book is sometimes called the Gospel of the Spirit.

Scholars agree that the Acts of the Apostles was written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke. Because the book itself originally carried neither a title nor the name of the author, however, the identity of this person is far from clear. As early as the 2nd century, the work was ascribed to St Luke, the companion of St Paul.

Recent research, however, has led to the opinion that the author merely had at his disposal a travel diary kept by someone who was an actual companion of St Paul. Thus, the author may have been one of numerous early Christians known later solely from the anonymous pieces of literature they penned. For convenience of reference, scholars continue to refer to the author as Luke.

Some of the text (Acts 16:10-17, 20:5-21:18, 27:1-28:16) refers to the author as one of the “we” who travelled with Paul, but Paul's execution is not mentioned and no reference to his letters is made. Some scholars have reasoned therefore that the book was written before Paul's death (c. 61) and before the collection of his letters early in the 2nd century. Because the Acts is designed to serve as a second volume, however, the book must be at least slightly later than the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel is almost certainly later than that of Mark. The result is to put Luke's two volumes sometime in the last two decades of the 1st century.

With a beginning that overlaps the ending of Luke's Gospel, the Acts tells the story of the birth of the Church in Jerusalem (chap. 1-5); the martyrdom of Stephen and the conversion of Paul (chap. 6-9); the opening of Peter's eyes to God's intention of including Gentiles in the Church (chap. 10-12); Paul's missionary travels (chap. 13-19); Paul's final journey to Jerusalem (chap. 20-21); his arrest, imprisonment, and hearings in Jerusalem and Caesarea (chap. 21-26); and finally his voyage to Italy and his confinement in a Roman prison in which he awaits trial before Caesar (chap. 27-28). Thus, the events described in the book are framed by the expansion of the Church from its birth in Jerusalem, through the empire, all the way to Rome.

Covering a period of roughly 30 years, the story gives valuable insights into the Jewish Christian Church in Palestine, led by Peter and James; but it finds its major focus in the remarkable growth of the mission to the Gentiles, pursued by Paul, who is thus the primary “hero” on the human level. Particularly notable are the numerous speeches made by the dominant characters. The one given by Paul on the Areopagus in Athens (chap. 17) may have been intended by Luke as a model for the preaching of the gospel to the Gentile world.