ACTS AS A HISTORY OF THE EARLY CHURCH

Demetrius K. Williams

If the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written by the same person—the view taken here, though it is a controversial matter to which we will return below—the author has the distinction of being the only writer of a Gospel to provide a sequel. Acts offered to the early church an account of Christian origins and an edifying narration of the spread of the gospel, chronicling the notable deeds and challenges of the first generation of Jesus-followers and addressing several issues confronting the early church in its infancy, the most pressing of which were the social and theological challenges resulting from expansion (i.e., the inclusion of gentiles); the early church’s relationship with Judaism; and its spread into and navigation of the cultural and political environment of Rome (C. Matthews, 183). The commentary that follows will trace these themes through the work; this essay will discuss Acts as the single historical writing in the New Testament.

The designation “Luke-Acts” considers the Gospel and Acts together as a single two-volume literary project, though these were separated early on in the ecclesial tradition: there are no extant manuscripts or canon lists in which they appear joined together. The patristic writers treated Luke and Acts separately, although they acknowledged their common authorship. Their separation was likely a result of the different literary types and functions of the two documents within the canon (which is organized by genre, Gospels, History, Letters, Apocalypse). The Gospel of Luke is similar to the other Gospels, but Acts more closely resembles other well-known literary genres in the ancient world, historical writings in general, but also the ancient romance genre that included travel, shipwreck, and danger. On the one hand, Luke provides both a kind of ancient “biography” of the founder (Jesus) and as an introduction to the deeds of the first generation of Jesus’ followers as depicted in Acts. The latter writing, on the other hand, serves as an introduction to the letters of Paul, even though it was likely written decades later than they. (Note, too, that the letters ordinarily begin with Paul’s Letter to the Romans and that Acts ends with Paul in Rome, openly preaching the gospel without hindrance.) Their separation within the canon allows the two writings to perform these different literary and ecclesial functions (Johnson, 187–88).

While Luke-Acts is generally believed to be the work of a single author, the traditional attribution of these writings to Luke—“the beloved physician” and companion of Paul (see Col. 4:14; Philem. 24; 2 Tim. 4:11)—has been challenged. Neither the Gospel nor the Acts includes a name in the superscription of the earliest manuscripts. (Superscriptions were added to the Gospels in the early second century, during heated ecclesial debates concerning to whom “the Scriptures” belonged—the emerging proto-orthodox movement, or the “heretics,” or even to Judaism, for that matter, as we see being argued in the Epistle of Barnabas.) As in the commentary, I refer here to the author as “Luke” as a matter of convenience (Williams 2007, 213).