Acts Bible Study

Eighth Tuesday after Pentecost

"In the first book, O Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up into heaven."

                                                                          --Acts 1:1

 

First, let me note that the winner in the quiz was Caroline Martens for correctly identifying Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book, Love in a Time of Cholera, as the allusion I was making in my blog title, "Prayer in a Time of Coronavirus." She gets one point in the quiz.

Today we begin our Bible study of the book of Acts, more formally known as The Acts of the Apostles. It will take us a day to deal with the introductory questions:

1. Authorship

2. Date

3. Original language

4. Provenance

5. Overall themes

Your first assignment is to read Luke 1:1-4. There you find the author writing to the same Theophilus. It's a quick clincher that it's the same author for both works. "The first book," which the author refers to  in Acts 1:1 is the Gospel of Luke. The two books are written by the same author. The name of the author is not given within either one of the books, only in the titles of the Gospel in the manuscripts. Luke as the author is not mentioned by any early Christian writer before the middle of the second century. This has led some scholars, such as my old friend, Bart Ehrman, from UNC, to conclude that the two books, Luke and Acts, were originally anonymous. 

I don't find this view at all convincing. First, all the manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke that have the beginning of the gospel (some mss. are fragmented and lack parts such as the beginning), have Luke as the author in their titles of the book. No manuscript has anyone else. No church father refers to anyone else as the author. No church father refers to the book as anonymous. There is one anonymous book in the NT, the Book of Hebrews. Of the Church fathers (first through ninth centuries), none argue about who wrote Acts. 

Second, if you were going to make up an author for an anonymous early Christian two volume work, why would you pick Luke. He was not an apostle.  He, or at least someone named Luke, is mentioned only once in the NT. If you were going to make up an author you would likely choose someone better known, like one of the apostles. 

So if I'm correct that the person who wrote Luke and Acts was someone named Luke, is that Luke the same Luke mentioned in Colossians 4;14 an referred to as "the beloved physician." Many scholars have tried to find ancient medical terminology in Luke and Acts, as an effort to prove that it was this Luke who wrote the them. Such efforts have failed, though their failure means little in determining the authorship. Unless you want to date Luke-Acts very, very late, say 135 AD (as did Helmut Koester of Harvard), there us no solid reason to reject Luke, "the beloved physician" as the author. 

The overwhelming majority of scholars date Luke and Acts to the period 80-100 AD. Luke is definitely later than Mark, whom Luke uses as a source. Most scholars think Mark was written 65-73 AD. 

The original language of Acts, like the original language of all the other books of the NT, was Greek. Luke writes in a very good style of Hellenistic period Greek. He is capable of long, periodic style, sentences with subordinate clauses, participial clauses, genitive absolutes, all within the same sentence. Luke 1:1-4 is an example--all one sentence in Greek. It's broken down into several sentences in English translation. When Luke in his gospel is using Mark as a source, he cleans up Mark's bad grammar and turns many of Mark's simple, blunt sentences into flowing, beautifully constructed sentences.

We don't know where Luke was from or where he wrote from. He appears to be from outside Palestine but not very far from it. Antioch in Syria is a good guess.

There are several themes that run through Acts. The major overall theme is the spread of Christianity,

1. From Jerusalem (the central city of Judaism) eventually to Rome (the central city of the Religions of the Roman Empire).

2. From the Jews to the gentiles

3. From strict Torah observance to freedom

A second theme is that Christians make good subjects of the Roman Empire. There is no reason to fear them.

A third theme is that the Holy Spirit takes Jesus' place in the lives of the Apostles'

A fourth theme is that the Apostles can do everything that Jesus did. 

We'll see how these themes play out over the course of Acts. It's a fascinating book. You'll see. But before we get farther in the text, there are a couple of problems with Acts that we must deal with.

Faithfully,

Christian