The first edition of this work contained a foreword from the General Editor of the series, the late Ned Bernard Stonehouse, in which he introduced the commentator to the readers, doing so in characteristically generous terms. After Dr. Stonehouse’s untimely death in 1962, the commentator himself was invited to become General Editor, a responsibility which he still holds. For this revised edition it seems appropriate to replace the original Editor’s Foreword and Author’s Preface with a single preface.
When Dr. Stonehouse invited me to contribute the volume on Acts to this series, I was engaged on a commentary on the Greek text of that book, which was published in 1951. (That commentary has now received a comprehensive revision simultaneously with the present volume.) I accepted Dr. Stonehouse’s invitation the more readily because the preparation of the work on the Greek text had suggested various trains of thought which could not be brought within its scope, and it seemed to me that an exposition of the English text would give an opportunity to develop them.
During the past thirty years and more some notable contributions have been made to the study of Luke’s history as a whole, and of Acts in particular. In 1951 Martin Dibelius’s collected Studies in the Acts of the Apostles appeared in German (the English translation followed five years later). A number of the papers reissued in that volume had been difficult of access when they were first published, owing to a breach in communication between Germany and the English-speaking countries. But it soon became clear that Dibelius’s studies marked a new era in the interpretation of Acts; their influence is unmistakable in much of the work on Acts produced in the following years. Another influential writer was Hans Conzelmann, whose monograph Die Mitte der Zeit (published in 1954) was translated into English under the less precise title The Theology of St. Luke. Here it was argued that Luke was moved by the deferment of the once imminently expected parousia to replace the primitive Christian perspective with a new one in which the ministry of Jesus, crowned by his death and resurrection, was recognized no longer as the eschaton but as the middle age of history, preceded by the age of the law and the prophets (cf. Luke 16:16) and followed by the age of the church. Professor Conzelmann has also contributed the latest commentary on Acts (now available in English) to Lietzmann’s Handbuch zum Neuen Testament.
Ernst Käsemann, in several papers, has maintained that Luke is the first spokesman of “primitive catholicism” (Frühkatholizismus), with a perspective in which not the ministry of Jesus but the age of the church is the center of time and the original and Pauline theologia crucis has been superseded by a theologia gloriae. Some criticisms of this assessment have been made by C. K. Barrett in a number of articles which whet the reader’s appetite for the volume on Acts which he is preparing for the new International Critical Commentary series.
The noblest work on Acts produced thus far within the school which draws its inspiration from Martin Dibelius is Ernst Haenchen’s commentary, first published in the Meyer series in 1966 and available since 1971 in a fine English translation, The Acts of the Apostles. While his affinities are recognizably with Dibelius, Conzelmann, and Käsemann, Professor Haenchen does not follow them uncritically; his concern is to expound Luke’s composition—a composition marked by a creative freedom which makes the historical narrative the vehicle of Luke’s theology. This theology is not a declension from true Paulinism; it is one of the variant forms of Gentile Christian theology which grew up alongside and after the theology of Paul, and in virtual independence of him.
But these writers have not monopolized recent literature on the subject: Luke-Acts remains, as W. C. van Unnik once put it, “a storm center in contemporary scholarship.” These words form the title of his introductory essay in the symposium Studies in Luke-Acts, presented to Paul Schubert in 1966. The aptness of his words is demonstrated by the variety of perspectives which find expression in the eighteen other essays in this volume. From outside the Schubert symposium this variety could be illustrated further by the work of Johannes Munck, notably by his volume Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (as it is entitled in its English translation). Munck waged a courageous battle against prevalent trends and insisted that justice could be done to the history and literature of the apostolic age only when the last vestige of the influence of Ferdinand Christian Baur and his associates had been removed. During those years, too (from 1950 to the present day), our understanding of Acts has been enriched by a succession of positive and valuable studies by Dom Jacques Dupont. More recently the record of Acts, together with other areas of early Christianity, has been illuminated by the learning and acumen of Martin Hengel.
A new and fresh approach to Acts is evidenced in a number of fine commentaries on the book which have appeared in 1980 and the following years—by I. Howard Marshall in English and by Jürgen Roloff, Gottfried Schille, Gerhard Schneider, and Arnold Weiser in German. In this field there is today an embarras de richesse—a contrast to the situation when the first edition of the present commentary was taking shape.
As in all the original volumes of the New International Commentary on the New Testament, the American Standard Version of 1901 served as the basis for the exposition in the first edition of this. It has now been replaced by an ad hoc translation of my own.
In the preface to the second edition of his Römerbrief, Karl Barth complains of the tendency of many biblical commentators to confine themselves to a form of textual interpretation which in his eyes was “no commentary at all, but merely the first step towards a commentary.” As an example of a real commentary he cited Calvin on Romans: “how energetically Calvin, having first established what stands in the text, sets himself to rethink the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! Paul speaks, and the child of the sixteenth century hears.”
No doubt, by Barth’s criterion, my volume on the Greek text was but “the first step towards a commentary,” devoted as it was to the linguistic, textual, and historical aspects of Acts. Be it so: those who do not take the first step will never take the second. It cannot be claimed, indeed, that even the present work has made the wall between the first and twentieth centuries transparent. In particular, I realize now as I did not in the 1950’s that I have done much less than justice to Luke’s distinctive theology. Instead of trying to remedy this deficiency at this time of day, I advise my readers to make it good by digesting I. Howard Marshall’s Luke: Historian and Theologian. But I may be permitted still to indulge the hope, first expressed in 1954, that whatever I have heard in the course of this study, not only of the voice of Luke but of the word of God, may be caught by some of my readers in the late twentieth century.
F. F. BRUCE