- Chapters
- 28
- Verses
- 0
- Where it sits
- The Acts of the Apostles
What it is
The second half of Luke’s work, beginning where the Gospel ends. It has Pentecost, the stoning of Stephen, the conversion of Saul told three separate times, the council at Jerusalem, and Paul’s journeys, the shipwreck, and Rome.
It ends without an ending. Paul is under house arrest, preaching without hindrance, and the book simply stops. It never tells you what happened to him.
The strangest feature is the four passages where the narration slips into we — always around sea travel with Paul — and then slips back.
Where it came from
Anonymous in itself, but addressed to the same Theophilus as Luke’s Gospel and always read as the same author’s work. The authorship question is therefore Luke’s question. Dates proposed run from the early 60s — argued from that abrupt ending, before Paul’s fate was known — to the 90s.
When the Church reads it
Acts is read from Pascha to Pentecost, alongside John. For fifty days it is, in effect, the epistle of the season: the empty tomb, and then immediately the community the empty tomb produced.
Before you start
- It is not a complete history of the early Church. It follows Peter, then Paul, and lets the others disappear. That is a real limit on what it can tell you, not an oversight.
- The speeches are summaries. Ancient historians composed speeches appropriate to the speaker and the occasion, and how far Luke’s are verbatim is a question historians ask of every ancient writer, not a problem peculiar to Acts.
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