Theopedia

Acts of the Apostles

“But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

— Acts 1:8

Overview

Acts of the Apostles is Luke’s second volume, picking up where his Gospel ends and narrating the church’s growth from the ascension of Jesus in Jerusalem to Paul’s arrival in Rome. Luke’s own opening line ties the two books together, addressing Theophilus again and referring back to “the first book” as an account of what Jesus “began to do and teach” (Acts 1:1), implying that Acts continues that same work through the apostles. Kruger and the scholars he draws on read Luke-Acts as a self-conscious “sequel” to the Old Testament’s own historical narrative.1 Kruger adds that Acts also functions as “an introduction of sorts to the rest of the New Testament authors,” since most of the men who wrote the epistles appear first within its narrative.2

Timeline

  • Jesus’ ascension and the promise of the Spirit: Jesus tells the apostles to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth, then goes to heaven. The apostles return to Jerusalem to pray (Acts 1).
  • Pentecost and the Spirit’s outpouring: The Holy Spirit comes on the believers at Pentecost with tongues of fire and other languages. Peter preaches, and about three thousand people join the church (Acts 2).
  • Peter and John heal a lame man: Peter heals a man who has never walked and preaches at the temple gate. He and John are then arrested and threatened by the council (Acts 3-4).
  • Ananias and Sapphira; continued boldness: A couple who lie about their gift fall dead at Peter’s word. The apostles keep preaching and healing despite arrest and being whipped (Acts 5).
  • Stephen’s ministry and martyrdom: Stephen, full of the Spirit, is falsely accused before the council and gives a long defense. He becomes the church’s first martyr, stoned while Saul watches and approves (Acts 6-7).
  • Philip’s ministry in Samaria and beyond: Scattered by persecution, Philip preaches with great success in Samaria. He then explains the gospel to an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah on a desert road (Acts 8).
  • Saul’s conversion: On his way to persecute Christians in Damascus, Saul is stopped by a blinding light from the risen Christ. He turns from persecutor to believer (Acts 9).
  • Peter and Cornelius: God gives Peter a vision that changes his mind about unclean food and people. The Spirit falls on the Gentile Cornelius’s household as they hear the gospel (Acts 10).
  • Antioch and Paul’s first missionary journey: A growing Gentile church at Antioch sends out Barnabas and Saul. They carry the gospel through Cyprus and Asia Minor, planting churches among Jews and Gentiles (Acts 11-14).
  • The Jerusalem council: A dispute arises over whether Gentile believers must be circumcised. The apostles and elders meet in Jerusalem and rule that Gentiles are saved by grace alone (Acts 15).
  • Paul’s later missionary journeys: Paul travels through Asia Minor and into Europe. He preaches in Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, and Ephesus despite constant opposition and time in prison (Acts 16-20).
  • Paul’s arrest and journey to Rome: Paul is arrested in Jerusalem and appeals to Caesar after trials before Roman and Jewish leaders. He survives a shipwreck and reaches Rome, still preaching under guard (Acts 21-28).

Author and Date

Acts does not name its author, but its own prologue (Acts 1:1) points back to the Gospel of Luke, and the traditional attribution to Luke rests on that link together with the “we” passages later in the narrative, where the account shifts into the first person as though the writer were present (for example Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-21:18; 27:1-28:16). Paul names a “Luke” among his companions in three of his own letters (Col. 4:14; 2 Tim. 4:11; Philem. 1:24), and Kruger notes that this Luke has “direct connections to the apostolic circle,” visible already in the Gospel’s own prologue (Luke 1:2), where the author claims to be passing on what was “delivered” to him by apostolic “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” rather than writing as an outsider several generations removed from the events.3

Acts closes with Paul still under house arrest awaiting trial in Rome, his fate left unresolved (Acts 28:30-31); the traditional dating follows the narrative’s own endpoint and places Luke’s writing shortly after that final scene, though the book itself supplies no explicit date.

Historical and Literary Context

Both of Luke’s volumes are addressed to Theophilus (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1), and the Gospel of Luke and Acts together read as a connected historical account. Acts covers roughly three decades, from the ascension to Paul’s confinement in Rome (Acts 1:9; 28:30-31), and its narrative repeatedly turns on the transition Kruger traces at the level of the whole New Testament’s shape: the story, having arrived at Jerusalem, “does not stay in Jerusalem” but “begins to fan out into Samaria, Judea, and Asia Minor, and ultimately ends with a focus on all creation, Jews and Gentiles together” (Acts 1:8; 8:4-5; Col. 1:23).2 Bavinck traces the same movement inside the narrative itself: the apostles, as Christ’s witnesses, “must indeed begin their work in Jerusalem but then continue to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), so that Peter brings the gospel to the Jews first (Acts 2:14; 3:19; 5:31) before learning in a vision that “no one is unclean” and that God accepts “anyone who fears God, no matter in what nation he has been born” (Acts 10:35, 43).4 Paul follows the same pattern on each of his missionary journeys, beginning in the synagogue and turning to the Gentiles only when the Jews of a given city reject his preaching (Acts 13:46; 18:6; 28:25-28), “first to the Jew but then also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 1:21-24).5

Structure

Acts is commonly outlined along the geographic and ethnic expansion Jesus himself lays out for the apostles at the book’s opening: they will be his “witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

  • The church in Jerusalem: Pentecost, the apostles’ preaching, and the first persecution (1:1-8:3)
  • The gospel in Judea and Samaria: Philip, Saul’s conversion, and Peter’s mission to Cornelius (8:4-12:25)
  • Paul’s missionary journeys and the Jerusalem council (13:1-21:16)
  • Paul’s arrest, trials, and journey to Rome (21:17-28:31)

Major Themes

The Spirit’s outpouring at Pentecost

Luke gives Pentecost (Acts 2) a place Bavinck calls “the third great work of God after the creation and the incarnation”: the Spirit, promised by the Old Testament prophets, comes to dwell in the church as his temple, an indwelling that “confers on the church of Christ an independent existence beyond the narrow bounds of ethnic Israel.” Bavinck distinguishes the Pentecost sign itself, apostles heard speaking intelligibly “in their own native languages” rather than in an unintelligible tongue, from the “weaker and diminished” instances of glossolalia recorded later in Acts (10:46-47; 11:17; 15:8; 19:6).6

The gospel’s advance despite opposition

Persecution follows the church’s growth from its earliest chapters, beginning with the Sanhedrin’s arrest of Peter and John (Acts 4:1-3) and Stephen’s martyrdom (Acts 7:54-60), through Herod’s execution of James and imprisonment of Peter (Acts 12:1-5), to the riots and trials that meet Paul in city after city on his journeys. Bavinck reads this as the settled pattern Scripture expects wherever the gospel spreads: “to the extent to which the gospel of the cross is spread abroad, to that extent the hostility of the world will be manifested as well.”4 Acts nonetheless narrates the church’s steady growth through that same opposition, each summary of persecution in the book followed by a report that “the word of God grew and multiplied” (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20).

The inclusion of the Gentiles

Acts also traces how the apostolic office, established by Christ around the Twelve, comes to include Paul’s distinct commission as “apostle to the gentiles” (Acts 9:15; 13:47; 22:21). Bavinck reads Paul’s ministry, narrated across the second half of Acts, as what “helped the church divest itself of Jewish exclusivism and graft the gentiles as wild branches into the cultivated olive tree of Israel,” so that Jew and Gentile together form “a new people of God, with Christ as the cornerstone and the apostles as the foundation.”7 Peter’s vision and his visit to Cornelius’s household (Acts 10) are the narrative’s turning point for that inclusion, and the church later ratifies it at the Jerusalem council, “a larger assembly” in which “the churches of Antioch and Jerusalem, along with others, gathered to address the circumcision of gentiles” (Acts 15).7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 4, “The Authors of Canon.” ↩

  2. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩ ↩2

  3. Kruger, The Question of Canon, chap. 5, “The Date of Canon.” ↩

  4. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 24, “The Return of Christ”: “‘First to the Jew but then also to the Greek’ is the rule he observes on his missionary journeys (Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 1:21-24).” ↩

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩

  7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩2