Book of Acts

The Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, is the second volume of the work its author addressed to Theophilus: the story of how the risen Lord's promise of the Holy Spirit was kept, and how the witness to His resurrection travelled from an upstairs room in Jerusalem to a rented house in Rome; the Church has ascribed it, since at least the second century, to St. Luke, the physician and companion of St. Paul who wrote the Gospel that precedes it.[^mur][^iren-i23]

For Inquirers

The Acts of the Apostles begins in an upstairs room in Jerusalem. A small company of Jesus's followers has gathered there, women and men together, with His mother among them, and they are praying and waiting, because the last thing He told them before He was taken up into the sky was that they must not leave the city until the gift His Father had promised arrived.[^acts1] They have been told only that they will be "baptized in the Holy Spirit," and nobody in the room can say what that will look like. When it comes it sounds like a great wind and looks like small flames resting on each head, and the people who had been waiting walk out into the street to find that visitors from many countries, in town for a festival, can each hear them speaking in their own language.[^acts2]

After that the book follows one piece of news across the map. Peter, once a fisherman (Matthew 4.18-19), preaches in the Temple courts and is arrested for it. A man named Stephen is killed for what he says, and as the stones hit him he prays for the men throwing them. One of the bystanders, Saul, who has been hunting the new believers from house to house, is stopped on a road by a light and a voice and becomes the traveling preacher Paul. The news crosses one border after another, from Jews to Samaritans, to an African official reading Isaiah in his chariot, to a Roman army officer's household, and then to the cities of Asia and Greece, where the preachers are beaten and jailed and, in one prison, an earthquake opens the doors. Along the way the believers have to work out how to share their money, whom to put in charge of feeding the widows, and whether people who were not born Jewish must first become Jewish, and they settle that last question in a meeting in Jerusalem. The book closes on Paul, now a prisoner, living in a rented house in Rome and welcoming anyone who knocks, "with all boldness, without hindrance."[^acts28] It is a strange place to stop. The writer sets down his pen while the journey is still under way.

From very early on Christians have said that the writer was Luke, the doctor who traveled with Paul and who wrote the Gospel of Luke as the first half of the same work; at several points the narrator slips into the word "we," as if he had stepped aboard the ship himself.[^acts-we] Believers and scholars press different questions on the book, such as when it was written, how closely its Paul resembles the Paul of his own letters, how its many speeches were gathered, and how smoothly the first Christians really got along, and the Orthodox Church has her own way of holding them. The book itself claims that the Church grew out of a gift of the Spirit on a particular morning and was sent from that room into the whole world, and the Orthodox historian John McGuckin notes that it has been "customary among Christians from ancient times to say that the church, in a fuller sense, began at Pentecost."[^mcguckin-13] The Orthodox Church reads Acts aloud day after day in the weeks between Easter and Pentecost, the feast of that morning, so that each year the story of what the risen Lord's promise did to ordinary people passes again through the ears of the Church.[^lit-acts]

Overview

Acts is the fifth book of the New Testament and the second volume of a two-part work. It opens by recalling "the first book I wrote, Theophilus," which told "all that Jesus began both to do and to teach," and it carries the story from the Ascension to Paul's two years in Rome (Acts 1.1-2; Acts 28.30-31).[^acts1][^acts28] The Orthodox Church in America says that Luke's Gospel and Acts together form "the most complete 'history' of Christ and the early Christian Church that we have."[^oca-gospels]
The book never names its author. The Church's tradition ascribes it to St. Luke, "the beloved physician" and fellow worker of Paul (Colossians 4.14), and the narrator's first-person plural "we" appears at Acts 16.10 and runs through the final voyage to Rome (Acts 28.16).[^acts-we][^osb-intro] The evidence for Luke's authorship of the Gospel and its sequel is set out in Book of Luke and is summarized, not repeated, below.
Acts stands directly after the four Gospels and before the Catholic Epistles in every canon list cited here (Eusebius, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Athanasius, the list attributed to the Synod of Laodicea, and the Council of Carthage), although OrthodoxWiki reports that Codex Sinaiticus sets it after the letters of Paul. In the Church's liturgical book of apostolic readings it is the first part.[^lists-acts][^sinaiticus][^ow-acts]
The book announces its own plan in the Lord's last words, "you will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth" (Acts 1.8). The Jewish Annotated New Testament divides the action at chapter 13, with Peter at the center of chapters 1–12 and Paul of chapters 13–28; the Orthodox Study Bible's outline calls the first part "The Birth of the Church (1:4–12:24)" and the second "The Growth of the Church from Antioch: The Labor of Paul (12:25–28:31)."[^acts-1-8][^jant-intro][^osb-intro]
Its themes, as the Orthodox Study Bible gives them, are the spread of the gospel "from Jerusalem to the whole world" by the apostles, the work of the Holy Spirit who empowered them, and the presence of the incarnate Son in the Church by the Spirit ("Immanuel, God with us"); St. John Chrysostom adds that the book is "a Demonstration of the Resurrection," and the Jewish Annotated New Testament adds the admission of Gentiles into the people of God.[^osb-intro][^chrys-1][^jant-intro]
Where the Gospels narrate Christ and the letters address particular churches, Acts narrates The Church. Chrysostom marks the difference: "The Gospels, then, are a history of what Christ did and said; but the Acts, of what that other Comforter said and did." It is also a book of speeches, from Peter's sermon at Pentecost to Paul's farewell at Miletus, and, as the Jewish Annotated New Testament observes, every one of its quotations from the Old Testament follows the Greek Septuagint.[^chrys-1][^jant-intro]
Orthodox worship is shaped by it. At the Liturgy of Pascha the epistle is the opening of Acts, the epistle readings of the Liturgy from Pascha to Pentecost are taken from the book, and the Church also reads it over the tomb of Christ on Holy Friday and over the body of a deceased priest.[^lit-acts]

Summary

Acts opens by looking back at the Gospel: after His suffering the risen Lord shows Himself alive to the apostles "over a period of forty days," speaks to them about the Kingdom of God, and commands them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for "the promise of the Father," so that when they ask whether He is now restoring the kingdom to Israel He answers that they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them and will be His witnesses "in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth," and then, as they watch, He is taken up in a cloud while two men in white tell them that He will come back in the same way. In the upper room they wait in prayer with the women and Mary His mother, and Peter leads the choice of Matthias by lot to fill the place of Judas. When the day of Pentecost comes, a sound like a mighty wind fills the house, tongues like fire rest on each of them, and the pilgrims in Jerusalem hear the apostles speaking in their own languages; Peter answers the charge of drunkenness with the prophet Joel and with the resurrection of the Jesus whom they crucified, and about three thousand are baptized and give themselves to "the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and prayer," holding "all things in common." Peter and John heal a lame man at the Temple gate and, arrested, tell the council that "there is salvation in no one else"; Ananias and Sapphira fall dead for lying to the Holy Spirit about the price of a field; the apostles are jailed and freed by an angel, and Gamaliel counsels the council to leave them alone. When the Greek-speaking widows are neglected in the daily distribution, the Twelve have the community choose seven men full of the Spirit, among them Stephen, and lay hands on them; Stephen is dragged before the council, retells Israel's story from Abraham to Solomon's Temple, sees "the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God," and is stoned, praying "Lord, don't hold this sin against them," while the witnesses lay their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. The persecution that follows scatters the believers and carries the word to Samaria with Philip, who also baptizes an Ethiopian official on the road to Gaza, while Saul, breathing threats against the disciples, is struck down near Damascus by the voice of Jesus, "Why do you persecute me?", and is baptized by Ananias. Peter raises Tabitha at Joppa and, after a vision of a sheet let down from heaven, goes to the centurion Cornelius in Caesarea, where the Holy Spirit falls on Gentiles even as he speaks, and then defends what he has done before the believers in Jerusalem. At Antioch, where the disciples are first called Christians, Barnabas and Saul are set apart by the Holy Spirit and sent out, while in Jerusalem Herod kills James and imprisons Peter, who is delivered from his chains by an angel. The first journey takes Barnabas and Paul to Cyprus, to Antioch of Pisidia, where Paul preaches in the synagogue and turns to the Gentiles, and to Lystra, where a crowd that has just watched a cripple walk takes them for gods and then stones Paul. When men from Judea teach that Gentile believers cannot be saved unless they are circumcised, Paul and Barnabas go up to Jerusalem, where Peter and James speak and the apostles and elders write to the Gentile churches that "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us" to lay on them nothing beyond a few necessary things; Paul and Barnabas then part over John Mark, and Paul sets out with Silas, circumcises Timothy at Lystra, and answers a vision of a man of Macedonia at Troas, where the narrative first says "we." At Philippi he baptizes Lydia and, after an earthquake, a jailer and his household; he is driven from Thessalonica and Beroea, speaks before the Areopagus at Athens of the God who "doesn't dwell in temples made with hands," and stays at Corinth a year and a half, where the proconsul Gallio dismisses the complaint against him. At Ephesus he baptizes twelve disciples of John, teaches daily in the school of Tyrannus for two years, and survives a riot of the silversmiths of Artemis; at Troas he raises the young man Eutychus who fell from a window, and at Miletus he tells the elders of Ephesus to "take heed" to the flock the Holy Spirit has given them and to remember the Lord's saying, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Warned by the disciples at Tyre and by the prophet Agabus, he goes up to Jerusalem anyway, is advised by James and the elders to share the expenses of four men under a vow, and is seized in the Temple by a mob who say he has brought Greeks in; the Roman commander rescues him, he addresses the crowd in Hebrew, claims his Roman citizenship, defends himself before the council by declaring himself a Pharisee on trial for "the hope and resurrection of the dead," and, after a plot against his life, is sent under guard to the governor Felix at Caesarea. Two years pass before Festus and King Agrippa hear him, and when Paul appeals to Caesar the voyage to Rome begins, with its storm, its fourteen nights on the sea, and its shipwreck on Malta, where a viper fastens on his hand and he is not harmed. In Rome he calls the leaders of the Jews together, explains to them that he is bound "because of the hope of Israel," quotes Isaiah against those who will not hear, announces that "the salvation of God is sent to the nations, and they will listen," and "stayed two whole years in his own rented house and received all who were coming to him, preaching God's Kingdom and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, without hindrance."[^acts-summary]

Author, Source, and Intention

Luke opens his Gospel by telling the reader how he works, and in Acts the telling changes shape: the preface gives way to a narrator who now and then steps inside his own story.

Who wrote it

Acts begins by reaching back: "The first book I wrote, Theophilus, concerned all that Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day in which he was received up" (Acts 1.1-2).[^acts1] A writer who calls the Gospel his "first book" is the writer of the Gospel, and the Church has attached the two works to a single name since the second century.[^jant-intro] The case for that name (Paul's greetings in Colossians, Philemon, and Second Timothy; the Muratorian Fragment; Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome) is laid out in Book of Luke and needs no second telling here. What belongs to Acts is the evidence from inside the second volume, where the writer's own presence enters the narrative.

Until the sixteenth chapter the narrator speaks of "they." At Troas, in the vision of the man of Macedonia, the pronoun changes: "When he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go out to Macedonia" (Acts 16.10). The "we" accompanies the party to Philippi and falls silent when Paul leaves that city; it returns there several chapters later ("We sailed away from Philippi after the days of Unleavened Bread," Acts 20.6), travels with him to Jerusalem, and comes back for the last voyage ("When it was determined that we should sail for Italy," Acts 27.1) until it brings the narrator into the capital ("When we entered into Rome," Acts 28.16).[^acts-we] F. F. Bruce lists the passages as 16:10–17, 20:5–21:18, and 27:1–28:16.[^bruce-we]

One of the early witnesses is the Muratorian Fragment, a Roman list of the books received in the Church that its modern editors date to about the year 170 (A. C. Sundberg has argued for a fourth-century date, and Bruce notes that E. Ferguson has answered him).[^bruce-sundberg] It says of the book:

Moreover, the acts of all the apostles were written in one book. For "most excellent Theophilus" Luke compiled the individual events that took place in his presence — as he plainly shows by omitting the martyrdom of Peter as well as the departure of Paul from the city [of Rome] when he journeyed to Spain.[^mur]

Bruce regards the phrase "the acts of all the apostles" as an overstatement of what the book contains, which is some acts of some apostles and chiefly those of Peter and Paul, and he thinks the compiler's explanation of the omissions a weak one: if Luke recorded only what happened in his presence, the book would be confined to the "we" sections, and most of it is not.[^bruce-mur] The Fragment still shows what a Roman reader of the second century believed, that the book was Luke's, that it was addressed to Theophilus, and that Luke wrote of what he had himself witnessed.

Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Church History, puts the point more broadly about the same pair of books. Luke, he says, "was especially intimate with Paul and well acquainted with the rest of the apostles," and he left in the Gospel what eyewitnesses delivered to him and in Acts a history "which he composed not from the accounts of others, but from what he had seen himself."[^eus-3-4] St. Jerome says the same thing in a sentence of his own: Luke "wrote the gospel as he had heard it, but composed the Acts of the Apostles as he himself had seen."[^jerome-dvi7] Taken strictly, as Bruce reads the Muratorian compiler, that formula covers only the narrator's own part in the story; taken generously, it describes a writer who was so near the apostles that he could narrate the whole as someone who had seen and heard.

St. John Chrysostom opens his fifty-five homilies on the book by asking the question that any reader of chapter 28 eventually asks. Luke "was with Paul to the end," so why does he not tell more? Chrysostom's answer treats the book as an act of selection:

We may answer, that what is here written, was sufficient for those who would attend, and that the sacred writers ever addressed themselves to the matter of immediate importance, whatever it might be at the time: it was no object with them to be writers of books: in fact, there are many things which they have delivered by unwritten tradition.[^chrys-1]

The same homily has no doubt that the book is Luke's and rests the attribution on Paul's own words about his companion in the epistles.[^chrys-1] The Orthodox Study Bible, introducing the book, gives the tradition in one sentence: "Traditionally, Acts is ascribed to Luke—'the beloved physician,' as Paul calls him (Col 4:14); the 'disciple of Paul,' as St. John Chrysostom describes him."[^osb-intro]

In the same century St. Irenaeus, tracing the family tree of the heresies back to Simon Magus, "from whom all sorts of heresies derive their origin," takes his account of Simon from the book and names Luke as its writer:

Simon the Samaritan was that magician of whom Luke, the disciple and follower of the apostles, says, But there was a certain man, Simon by name, who beforetime used magical arts in that city, and led astray the people of Samaria, declaring that he himself was some great one.[^iren-i23]

The Jewish Annotated New Testament lists further second-century witnesses to the Lukan authorship of Acts (further passages of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria), and OrthodoxWiki reports that the title Praxeis Apostolon, "Acts of the Apostles," was first used by Irenaeus in the late second century, although Bishop Alexander (Mileant) says that references to the book itself can be found in the writings of Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr.[^jant-intro][^ow-acts][^mileant] St. Clement of Alexandria shows how the book was used in Alexandria. When he discusses what a Christian may eat, he sets Paul's general liberty beside the exception laid down in "the Catholic epistle of all the apostles, with the consent of the Holy Ghost, which is written in the Acts of the Apostles, and conveyed to the faithful by the hands of Paul himself," that is, the letter that closed the Council of Jerusalem.[^clem-strom4]

Bruce reports that from about AD 160 a series of writings began to appear in various parts of the Christian world claiming to record the acts of Peter, Paul, John, Andrew, and Thomas, and that the Muratorian compiler, for one, evidently knew the Acts of Peter.[^bruce-apocr] Eusebius sorts them in his survey of the books the Church had received. The "so-called Acts of Peter" he says have not been universally accepted "because no ecclesiastical writer, ancient or modern, has made use of testimonies drawn from them"; the Acts of Paul he lists among the rejected writings; and of the Acts of Andrew and John and the other apostles he says that no one belonging to the succession of ecclesiastical writers has deemed them worthy of mention.[^eus-3-25] Jerome argues from the Lukan authorship of the canonical book against one of its rivals. He rejects the Acts of Paul and Thecla because "the inseparable companion of the apostle in his other affairs" could not have been the one person ignorant of the story, and he repeats from Tertullian that a presbyter in Asia who composed the story out of love for Paul was convicted by John and resigned his office.[^jerome-dvi7]

Date and place of writing

The sources cited here give no single date. Jerome says that Acts covers events "to the second year of Paul's sojourn at Rome, that is to the fourth year of Nero," and concludes from this that the book was composed in that same city; OrthodoxWiki says the traditional view is that the two books were written about the year 60; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), in a catechetical booklet, concludes that the book was completed in Rome around AD 63 or 64; the Orthodox Study Bible gives about AD 75–85, some time after the Gospel of Luke; the Orthodox Church in America says the book was written toward the end of the first century; and the Jewish Annotated New Testament, noting that Luke's Gospel probably alludes to the destruction of the Temple and so dates after 70, holds that Acts was most likely composed early in the second century. Albert Barnes, in his older commentary, reasons from the same ending that the book was written at about the year 62 or soon after and that it is common to put it at about AD 63.[^jerome-dvi7][^ow-acts][^mileant][^osb-intro][^oca-acts][^jant-intro][^barnes-intro]

The date of Acts depends in part on the date of the Gospel, taken up in Book of Luke. A second question belongs to Acts alone: the book ends with Paul alive and preaching in his Roman house and says nothing of what followed, a silence that figures in the dating argument on both sides and is treated below under Controversy.

What lies behind it

Luke's preface speaks of "eyewitnesses and servants of the word" who delivered the tradition and of his own careful tracing of "all things accurately from the first" (Luke 1.2-3), and Chrysostom reads the second volume's opening as an appeal to that earlier claim. He asks why Luke puts Theophilus in mind of the Gospel and answers: "To intimate how strictly he may be depended upon."[^chrys-1] He goes on to draw the consequence for the sequel. A writer who has proved himself careful in reporting what he heard, he says, deserves still more confidence when his account is "not of things which he has received from others, but of things which he has seen and heard."[^chrys-1b] For the first twelve chapters, which describe events in Jerusalem, Samaria, and Caesarea before the "we" begins, the Eusebius quoted above says only that Luke was well acquainted with the rest of the apostles, and none of the Fathers quoted in this entry names a particular informant or discusses how their formula ("as he himself had seen") reaches those chapters.[^eus-3-4]

On the question of sources the Jewish Annotated New Testament says only that the writer had "considerable familiarity" with the Septuagint, Jewish customs and institutions, Greek literary traditions, and Roman political structures, and that the "we" may mean that he was present or had firsthand accounts, though it may equally be a device "to add verisimilitude."[^jant-intro] Brevard Childs, from the standpoint of canonical criticism, adds that a shift in a narrative from the first person singular to the plural often "signals a form by which to confront subsequent readers," and cites Acts as his example.[^childs-52] The older commentaries of Barnes and Wesley do not set out source theories in their introductions to Acts either.[^barnes-intro][^wesley-intro]

The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that Acts quotes the Psalms and Isaiah most often, along with Exodus, Jeremiah, Joel, Amos, and Habakkuk, and that "in every instance Acts presents the Greek translation," the Septuagint.[^jant-lxx] Bruce gives two instances. At the Council of Jerusalem James supports the mission to the Gentiles from Amos, and Bruce observes that the Septuagint's wording of that prophecy gave him a more direct argument than the Hebrew would have; and Stephen's long speech in the seventh chapter, he says, rests on the Septuagint from beginning to end.[^bruce-lxx] Both can be seen in the Scripture texts. The Brenton text of Amos reads, "that the remnant of men, and all the Gentiles upon whom my name is called, may earnestly seek me," and James in the World English Bible says, "that the rest of men may seek after the Lord: all the Gentiles who are called by my name"; and Stephen's statement that Joseph summoned Jacob and his relatives, "seventy-five souls," matches the Septuagint of Genesis ("all the souls of the house of Jacob who came with Joseph into Egypt, were seventy-five souls"). One statement in the same speech does not follow the Septuagint. Stephen says that Abraham moved from Haran "when his father was dead" (Acts 7.4), yet by the Septuagint's own figures Terah was seventy when Abraham was born and Abraham was seventy-five when he left Haran, and Terah lived to two hundred five, which leaves Terah alive for sixty years after the departure (Genesis 11.26; Genesis 11.32; Genesis 12.4); Bruce notes that Stephen's statement agrees instead with the chronology of the Samaritan Pentateuch, in which Terah dies at 145.[^lxx-acts]

The writer's first volume is also a source in a plainer sense, for much of Acts is built to echo it. The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost parallels Jesus' reception of the Spirit at the Jordan, that Stephen's trial and death are modeled on the trial and death of Jesus, and that Paul's raising of Eutychus resembles Peter's raising of Tabitha and the raisings of the widow's son and of Jairus's daughter in the Gospel.[^jant-parallels] Chrysostom saw the same continuity from the other direction. The Spirit, he says in the first homily, did many things in the Gospels also, "even as Christ here in the Acts still works in men as He did in the Gospels: only then the Spirit wrought through the Temple, now through the Apostles."[^chrys-1c] A reader of the two volumes in order meets one author working in one manner, first around a Person and then around the Spirit's work in His body.

Why it was written

The book is addressed, as the Gospel is, to Theophilus. The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that the address is formal and conventional, that Theophilus "may have been Luke's benefactor," and that his name, meaning "lover of God," may symbolize all readers who display such character.[^jant-1] The Church's tradition is more specific, but the two Orthodox sources cited here do not agree: OrthodoxWiki's article on St. Luke makes Theophilus "the governor of Achaia," while Bishop Alexander (Mileant) says that he lived in Antioch.[^ow-luke][^mileant] Chrysostom is struck by the care that the opening gives him, a Gospel and then a second book for one man, and takes the whole as a pastor's work.[^chrys-1d]

The purpose that Luke states for the Gospel is that Theophilus "might know the certainty" of what he had been taught (Luke 1.4). The second volume announces its plan in advance, in the risen Lord's own words: "you will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth" (Acts 1.8). The first part of Acts takes place in Jerusalem, the next in Judea and Samaria, and the rest sweeps outward to Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, so that the Lord's sentence works as a table of contents.[^acts-1-8][^jant-intro] Chrysostom says what the testimony is for. The apostles preach Christ chiefly in His humanity, because the first thing to be established is that He is risen and ascended, and so "this, in fact, is just what this Book is: a Demonstration of the Resurrection: this being once believed, the rest would come in due course."[^chrys-1e]

Chrysostom and Cyril read the book as the work of the Spirit as much as of the apostles. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, instructing candidates for baptism about the Holy Spirit, walks them through the book from Pentecost to Paul and returns again and again to "the power of the Holy Ghost." Of the first sermon he says:

So great was the grace which wrought in all the Apostles together, that, out of the Jews, those crucifiers of Christ, this great number believed, and were baptized in the Name of Christ.[^cyril-17]

The Orthodox Study Bible puts the same understanding in the language of the first volume: "In Luke's gospel, God is with us in His incarnate Son. In Acts, the incarnate Son of God is yet present in the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit."[^osb-intro]

The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction states what the Church takes from the book for her own life: it "is of great importance for understanding the organization and structure of the Church; its method of resolving controversies; the role of apostles, bishops, priests (elders), and deacons; and the spiritual life of the Church."[^osb-intro] The Study Bible's two sidebars on the book show what that means in practice. In Acts 2 it reads the sequence of repentance, baptism, and "the gift of the Holy Spirit" as the root of chrismation, which it sees again in Samaria and at Ephesus (Acts 8.14-17; Acts 19.1-7); in Acts 14 it reads the choice of Matthias's "office" (Acts 1.20), the ordination of the seven by the laying on of hands (Acts 6.6), and Paul and Barnabas's appointing of elders (Acts 14.23) as the biblical shape of the orders of bishop, deacon, and presbyter.[^osb-chrism][^osb-ord] The Orthodox Church in America says that the council of Acts 15 "is considered the prototype of all subsequent Church councils."[^oca-church]

The Jewish Annotated New Testament lists a defense of Christians in the eyes of Romans, a defense of Romans in the eyes of Christians, a defense of Paul's memory "particularly against charges of antinomianism," an explanation or reassurance to Christians anxious about the delay of Jesus' return, and an attempt to harmonize differing opinions among early Christians, and suggests that the author may also have been "highly critical of certain Roman political claims," since Acts applies to Jesus language ("Lord of all," Acts 10.36) that was used of imperial power.[^jant-intro] Some of these proposals sit easily beside the Fathers' account, which also reads the book as an apologetic and a pastoral work, but the commentary's early-second-century date and its judgment that Acts departs in places from Paul's own letters stand in tension with the earlier dates of Jerome and Bishop Alexander and with Chrysostom's reading of Acts alongside Galatians, as the Controversy section sets out. John McGuckin, an Orthodox historian, places the book at the head of a long line of Christian historians: the writer of Acts is "arguably the first church historian," and "certainly designed his account as a sacred history."[^mcguckin-23]

The two volumes were separated when the Gospels were gathered into a fourfold collection. Childs counts "severing the original linkage of Luke's two-volume work into two parts, with separate and distinct functions within the canon" as a major question for canonical reading, and Bruce observes that Acts, parted from its companion, took on a role of its own, joining the collection of the Gospels to the collection of Paul's letters.[^childs-53][^bruce-hinge] In the Church's canon lists the second volume stands in the place that function requires, directly after the four Gospels, although Bruce notes that this view of Acts as the link between Gospels and letters would now be contested by some scholars (see Controversy).[^lists-acts][^bruce-catholic]

Manuscripts and the text

No autograph of Acts survives, any more than of any other New Testament book.[^course-textcrit] The earliest witness cited here is on papyrus. Bruce reports that the Chester Beatty codex P45, from the early third century, is the earliest surviving codex to contain portions of all four Gospels and that it also contains Acts, an unusual pairing, since in the early textual history of the New Testament Acts was more often copied together with the Catholic Epistles.[^bruce-p45] Then come the great fourth- and fifth-century codices. OrthodoxWiki describes Codex Sinaiticus as a fourth-century uncial written between 330 and 350 and says that it arranges the New Testament as the four Gospels, the epistles of Paul, Acts, the General Epistles, and Revelation; Codex Vaticanus, slightly older, contains the Gospels, Acts, the General Epistles, and the Pauline Epistles; and Codex Alexandrinus, of the fifth century, is mainly Byzantine in its Gospels but follows Alexandrian readings "through the rest of the New Testament," Acts included, where the apparatus of the Novum Testamentum Graece cites it as a witness of "the 'first order.'"[^ow-codices]

Textual critics sort the Greek witnesses into three families: the Alexandrian text-type (about the second to fourth centuries, including Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, behind most modern translations), the Western (about the third to ninth centuries, common in the medieval Western Church), and the Byzantine (about the fifth to sixteenth centuries, the base of Erasmus's textus receptus, in about ninety-five percent of manuscripts).[^course-textcrit] For Acts the Western family has a leading witness in Codex Bezae (D), now in Cambridge University Library, which Bruce names as a representative of the Western text in the Gospels and Acts, alongside a variety of others; he adds that in the eighteenth century William Whiston argued that the Western text was the true primitive form of the New Testament, and that in the nineteenth John William Burgon defended the Byzantine text, the text of the majority of Greek manuscripts from the fifth to the fifteenth century, as the authentic and inspired one.[^bruce-bezae] The commentaries add a little at particular verses of Acts, as the next paragraphs show, but none of the sources cited here describes the character of the Bezan text of Acts, its relation to the Alexandrian text, or the arguments over which is earlier.

The apparatus of the New Revised Standard Version, as the Jewish Annotated New Testament prints it, shows how many places in Acts the witnesses divide. Among others, it flags Acts 8.37, where "other ancient authorities add all or most of verse 37" (Philip's "If you believe with all your heart, you may," and the eunuch's answer, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God"); Acts 15.34, where they add "But it seemed good to Silas to remain there"; Acts 24.6-7, where they add a clause ("and we would have judged him according to our law") and a sentence about the commander Lysias taking Paul "with great violence" out of the accusers' hands; Acts 28.29, where they add the verse about the Jews departing "arguing vigorously among themselves"; Acts 19.9, where some read that Paul taught in the hall "of a certain Tyrannus, from eleven o'clock in the morning to four in the afternoon"; Acts 15.20, Acts 15.29, and Acts 21.25, where some lack the word "strangled" from the list of things Gentile believers should avoid; and Acts 27.37, where the number of persons on the ship, printed as two hundred seventy-six, is given as "seventy-six" in some witnesses and "about seventy-six" in others.[^jant-apparatus]

The English texts quoted here do not agree with one another on these verses. The World English Bible lacks 8:37, 15:34, and the second half of 24:6 together with 24:7, yet prints 28:29; the Orthodox Study Bible, whose New Testament is the New King James Version, prints all of these verses.[^osb-readings][^ow-osb] At Acts 20.28 the three texts differ in a way that has been seen to bear on doctrine: Barnes says that the reading "of God" is so doubtful "that it should not be used as a proof-text on the divinity of Christ." The New Revised Standard Version reads "the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son," with footnotes recording that "other ancient authorities read of the Lord" and that the Greek may be rendered "with his own blood" or "with the blood of his Own"; the Orthodox Study Bible reads "the church of God which He purchased with His own blood"; and the World English Bible reads "the assembly of the Lord and God which he purchased with his own blood," which is the third of the three readings that Barnes says the manuscripts and versions exhibit.[^jant-apparatus][^osb-readings][^barnes-20-28]

Barnes, the older commentator on the shelf, remarks on Acts 8:37 that the verse is wanting in a very large number of manuscripts and is omitted in the Syriac and Ethiopic versions, and he reasons that if it was not in the original copy an early transcriber probably inserted it, adding that it states a truth taught elsewhere in Scripture.[^barnes-8-37] At Acts 20:28 he sets out the three readings of the manuscripts and versions and says which versions follow which, and in each place he reasons from manuscripts and versions to a judgment about the original text, which is the work textual criticism does.[^barnes-20-28]

On Acts 8:37, St. John Chrysostom's homily on the passage cites verse 36 ("what does hinder me to be baptized?") and then goes straight to verses 38 and 39, and the phrase "Son of God" and any confession by the eunuch appear nowhere in it. Chrysostom finds the eunuch's readiness in the passage he had been reading:

Do you observe that he has the doctrines (of faith) perfect? For indeed the Prophet had the whole, Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, Ascension, Judgment to come.[^chrys-19]

That proves nothing about the manuscript Chrysostom held, but it does show that an exposition as full as his could be given without the verse, and it is the same shape of text as the one the World English Bible prints. On Acts 20:28 the printed homily gives the clause in both of its forms within a single comment. Paul, Chrysostom says, tells the elders "to feed the Church of God," and the comment goes on: "See, it is from the Spirit you have your ordination. This is one constraint: then he says, To feed the Church of the Lord. Lo! Another obligation: the Church is the Lord's. And a third: which He has purchased with His own blood." The text does not say whether he was moving between two readings or between two ways of quoting one, and the translator's "(see note 3)" at the first form is not reproduced in the file.[^chrys-44]

The apparatus's note that some witnesses lack "strangled" in the decree of the Council of Jerusalem describes a reading that neither Clement of Alexandria nor Chrysostom followed. Clement quotes the decree as abstaining "from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication," and Chrysostom's homily, where it quotes the decree's final form (verse 29), gives the same four items in the same order.[^clem-strom4][^chrys-33]

The Orthodox Study Bible prints the fuller readings; the Byzantine texts, by one account, "predominate" and are "ongoing in the church"; and Chrysostom's comment on Acts 20:28 gives the clause in two forms. No Orthodox source cited here states a policy on critical editions of the Greek text.[^osb-readings][^course-textcrit]

Translations

Acts reached other languages early. OrthodoxWiki reports that Latin versions of the Scriptures were in use by the second century and were thought crude and provincial, and that in 382 Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to produce a standard Latin text, a work that began with a revision of the New Testament from Greek manuscripts and became the Vulgate, the official text of the Roman Church until 1979 in its Clementine form.[^ow-vulgate] The article does not say what Jerome did with Acts in particular. In the East, the booklet by Bishop Alexander (Mileant) lists the "ancient Syrian translation of the Bible known as 'Peshito'" among the early witnesses to the book, and OrthodoxWiki credits Rabbula of Edessa with the Peshitta New Testament; the Gothic Bible of Wulfila and the Old Church Slavonic Scriptures of Saints Cyril and Methodius carried the Scriptures to the Goths and the Slavs.[^mileant][^ow-peshitta][^ow-ulfilas][^ow-cm] Barnes, as noted above, records how a few ancient versions read at particular verses (the Syriac and Ethiopic at 8:37, and the Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic at 20:28).[^barnes-8-37][^barnes-20-28]

English translation begins with the Anglo-Saxon Gospels and runs through Wycliffe (1382), Coverdale (1538), and the Authorised Version (1611); later English versions include the Douay-Rheims, the Revised Version (1885), the American Standard Version (1901), the Revised Standard Version and its successors the NRSV (1989) and the NRSV Updated Edition (2023), the New King James Version used in the Orthodox Study Bible, and a range of dynamic-equivalence versions and paraphrases.[^course-english][^ow-osb] Translations differ in philosophy (formal correspondence, dynamic equivalence, paraphrase) and in the manuscript tradition each rests on. Acts shows both kinds of difference within a few chapters. The missing verses discussed above belong to the first kind, a difference in the Greek text that a version follows; the choice of words shows in smaller things. The World English Bible renders the Greek ekklesia "assembly" wherever it occurs, both for Israel in the wilderness (Acts 7.38) and for the believers at Antioch (Acts 13.1), where the NRSV says "congregation" in the first place and "church" in the second; and at Acts 2.4 the World English Bible says the disciples "began to speak with other languages," where the Orthodox Study Bible says "other tongues." The Jewish Annotated New Testament comments on that very phrase that, unlike the tongues discussed in First Corinthians 14, "the speaking is in languages that are understood by native speakers in attendance."[^jant-pentecost] Scripture quotations in this entry are from the public-domain World English Bible (Brenton for the Septuagint); the NRSV text and apparatus are those of the Jewish Annotated New Testament.

Controversy and Contestation

A book that tells the story of the Church invites argument about whether the story is told truly, and the argument begins with the claim on which everything else depends, that the man who tells it was there. The Jewish Annotated New Testament states the doubt carefully. Its introduction to Luke says that "neither the Gospel nor Acts, however, claims Lukan authorship, and sufficient distinctions between the portrait of Paul provided in his authentic epistles and his depiction in Acts call into question the author's personal familiarity with the apostle," and its introduction to Acts adds that the attribution to Luke first appears in the second century, that the author shows "considerable familiarity" with the Septuagint, Jewish customs, Greek literature, and Roman institutions, and that the "we" from chapter 16 onward "may suggest that the author was present at the events narrated or had access to firsthand accounts," though "it is also possible, however, that these details were included to add verisimilitude to the story."[^jant-luke-intro][^jant-intro]

The testimony the Church offers in reply is the early and unrivaled attribution already reviewed: the Muratorian list, Irenaeus naming "Luke, the disciple and follower of the apostles," Eusebius, and Jerome, with no competing name for the author in any source cited here; Barnes, a commentator, says that "all antiquity is unanimous" in ascribing the book to Luke.[^mur][^iren-i23][^eus-3-4][^barnes-intro] Behind the testimony stands a habit visible in the sources. Eusebius sorted the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul, and the other rival "Acts" into the doubtful and the rejected; Jerome rejected the story of Thecla because the canonical author, as Paul's companion, would have known of it; and he reports that a presbyter who composed it "for love of Paul" was convicted by John and resigned his office.[^eus-3-25][^jerome-dvi7] The sources cited here record ancient suspicion about other books and none about the authorship of this one, though a silence proves less than a statement would.

The critical commentary dates the book by reasoning that Luke's Gospel alludes to the destruction of Jerusalem (see Book of Luke), that Acts was written after the Gospel, and that the author "surely knew that Paul was dead, likely killed during Nero's persecution of Jesus' followers in 64 ce," yet "the book concludes with Paul preaching openly in Rome"; in its note on the last verses it adds that Acts "ends without narrating Paul's death, although the text often alludes to it."[^jant-intro][^jant-28] On this reading the ending is a literary decision by a writer who knew more than he says. The Orthodox sources divide. Jerome and Bishop Alexander (Mileant) argue from the ending to an early date, a book completed at Rome while Paul was still there, as Barnes does among the commentators; and Jerome finds in the Second Epistle to Timothy the sequel that Acts leaves out: at his first defense Paul "was dismissed by Nero, that the gospel of Christ might be preached also in the West," and was beheaded in the fourteenth year of Nero, on the same day as Peter.[^jerome-dvi5][^mileant] The Orthodox Study Bible and the Orthodox Church in America place the book later, at about AD 75–85 and at the end of the first century, which makes the ending a choice there as well, as in the critical view.[^osb-intro][^oca-acts]

Chrysostom does not argue about dates in the last of his fifty-five homilies. He asks what happened after the two years and offers two explanations. The writer, he suggests, "leaves the hearer thirsty for more," as the heathen authors do, or he stopped because it was not in his power to give the rest "from his own personal knowledge." The later years, Chrysostom tells his hearers, were more of what the book has already shown, trials and imprisonments and plots and deaths day by day, and what the reader has seen is a small part and a fair sample of the whole.[^chrys-55] He sets beside the ending Paul's plan, in the Letter to the Romans, to reach Rome on the way to Spain and to rest there with the Romans, and he remarks of the apostle who arrived instead in bonds that he did not foresee everything, adding that Paul entered the city a second time, when he was martyred.[^chrys-55] Whatever the reason for the silence, the book leaves Paul preaching "with all boldness, without hindrance," and Chrysostom treats the rest of his life as more of the same.

The journey to Spain has more than one witness. The Muratorian Fragment says that Paul departed for Spain, and Cyril of Jerusalem that he carried his preaching "as far as Spain."[^mur][^cyril-17] Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians, says that Paul, after teaching righteousness to the whole world, came "to the extreme limit of the west" before he suffered martyrdom, a phrase that does not name Spain.[^clem-rome-5] Chrysostom, commenting on Second Timothy, says in passing that after Paul had been in Rome "he returned to Spain."[^chrys-2tim-10] Bruce's remark is narrower than the tradition: he thinks that neither the author of the Acts of Peter nor the Muratorian compiler probably had any basis for the voyage apart from Paul's own statement of his plans in Romans.[^bruce-spain]

The commentary opens its treatment of reliability with an acknowledgment: "Modern scholarship has long debated the historical reliability of Acts." It grants that Gallio, Felix, and Festus were historical figures, that the sailing routes and the references to Roman law may point to a writer who was present or well informed, and its notes elsewhere confirm particular details, such as Claudius's expulsion of the Jews from Rome (from Suetonius), the death of Agrippa I in AD 44 (as told also by Josephus), and the Egyptian rebel of Acts 21.38.[^jant-intro][^jant-checks] But "many of the deeds and words of Peter, Paul, and the other apostles cannot be confirmed, and in several instances the information presented in Acts contradicts what we know from other sources," and "the selection of events, their ordering, the content of the speeches, and many of the details were determined by the theological and literary interests of the author."[^jant-intro]

Gamaliel, defending the apostles, cites the revolt of Theudas and then "after this man" Judas of Galilee "in the days of the enrollment" (Acts 5.36-37); the commentary places Judas in AD 6, "before Theudas," and Theudas in the mid-40s, and since it dates the death of Agrippa I, told seven chapters later, to AD 44, a Theudas of the mid-40s would fall after the point in the story at which the speech is set, a conclusion the commentary leaves to the reader.[^jant-theudas] The risen Lord appears to the apostles "over a period of forty days" (Acts 1.3), which the commentary says "contradicts Lk 24.50–53, which describes the ascension as taking place on the same day as the resurrection."[^jant-1] Judas's end in Acts 1.18, where "falling headlong, his body burst open," is set beside Matthew 27:5, where he "went away and hanged himself."[^jant-1b] The vision on the Damascus road is told three times, and in the first account the men with Paul "stood speechless, hearing the sound, but seeing no one" (Acts 9.7) while in the second they "saw the light and were afraid, but they didn't understand the voice" (Acts 22.9).[^jant-22]

Chrysostom notices that Paul himself retells the conversion on the Temple stairs and before Agrippa, and he reads this as providential: Paul tells it himself, he says, "that there might be no opening for different persons to relate the occurrence in different ways, but that he alone should be the authentic narrator."[^chrys-19] On Judas, he says that Peter does well to dwell on the punishment and not the sin, because this brought the disciples consolation.[^chrys-3] On the forty days, his first homily says what the interval was for without addressing the last chapter of Luke: the risen Lord "came, and again disappeared," leading the disciples to higher conceptions of Him, and the forty days gave sure evidence that they were seeing Him in His own person and not a phantom.[^chrys-1i] Chrysostom writes as a preacher and takes none of these up as an objection. John McGuckin observes that Luke "in his typical historicizing style" presents the glorification of Christ as "a linear sequence" (Resurrection, appearances, Ascension, descent of the Spirit) where John gathers the same events into one, and The Church works out how that arrangement serves the doctrine of Pentecost.[^mcguckin-13] Whether every item in the list above has an answer is another matter: the sources cited here do not resolve the order of Theudas and Judas, the two accounts of Judas's death, the relation of the forty days to the end of Luke, or the difference between the two hearings on the Damascus road.

Paul's own letters supply a further set of comparisons. After his conversion Paul says that he went to Arabia and "after three years" went up to Jerusalem and saw only Peter and James (Galatians 1.17-19), where Acts has Barnabas bring him to "the apostles" (Acts 9.26-27).[^jant-9] Of the council, Acts reports an apostolic decree about idols, blood, strangled meat, and sexual immorality, while Paul says of the Jerusalem leaders that "they only asked us to remember the poor" (Galatians 2.10), and the commentary adds that "Luke presents this divisive issue as being easily and amicably resolved," whereas "Paul's letters offer a different picture."[^jant-intro][^jant-15] Paul has Timothy circumcised (Acts 16.3), which the commentary says "seems contrary to the conclusion of the Jerusalem council (15.19) and Paul's teaching," though it adds that the action fits Luke's larger portrayal of Paul as someone against whom Jews have no legitimate reason to object.[^jant-16] And Acts reports that Paul was a Roman citizen, "a claim not verified from Paul's letters," and presents the great themes of later Christian thought "without the more developed argumentation" of those letters.[^jant-intro]

Tertullian's answer, written against Marcion, is that the two sources confirm one another. In telling of his conversion from persecutor to apostle, he says, Paul in Galatians is "confirming thereby the Acts of the Apostles, in which book may be found the very subject of this epistle, how that certain persons interposed, and said that men ought to be circumcised, and that the law of Moses was to be observed; and how the apostles, when consulted, determined, by the authority of the Holy Ghost, that a yoke should not be put upon men's necks which their fathers even had not been able to bear." The book that agrees with Paul so closely is, he adds, the book Marcion cannot afford to keep.[^tert-m5] Chrysostom reads Galatians with Acts open beside it. Commenting on the first chapter, he observes that "Luke shows by his own account" how long Paul had argued the question before going up to Jerusalem.[^chrys-gal1] On Paul's "I went up by revelation" he adds that Paul conferred privately with the Jerusalem leaders because the believers there were scandalized by the rumor that he taught Jews to forsake the Law, so that his accusers might see "that the Apostles found no discrepancy in his preaching, but confirmed it."[^chrys-gal2] In his homily on Acts 15 he places the moment of agreement in the council itself, remarking that "on this occasion, I suppose, it was that they received the right hand, as he says himself, They gave to me and Barnabas right hands of fellowship."[^chrys-33] Chrysostom takes the Arabian journey as Paul's zeal for unplowed ground, but no source cited here explains how Paul's "of the other apostles I saw no one except James" fits Acts' "brought him to the apostles."[^chrys-gal1]

Chrysostom, in his homily on Acts 16, is plainly astonished at the circumcision of Timothy: Paul, "he that has had so many battles about circumcision, he that moved all things to this end, and did not give over until he had carried his point, now that the decree is made sure, circumcises the disciple."[^chrys-34] Augustine, writing to Jerome about the dispute between Paul and Peter at Antioch, supplies a principle at length. Paul circumcised Timothy "lest to the Jews… it should seem that the Gentiles who had believed in Christ abhorred circumcision as they abhorred the worship of idols," and did not circumcise Titus "lest he should give occasion to those who said that believers could not be saved without circumcision."[^aug-ep82] On Augustine's account circumcision is a courtesy in one setting and a surrender in the other, and Paul's two decisions apply one rule to two situations. Chrysostom reads the later scene in the Temple, where Paul, advised by James to share the cost of four men's vow (Acts 21.20-26), "observed all the Jewish ceremonies," as an act of humility, and he draws a similar line between what leaves the Gospel untouched and what would injure it: "where the Gospel was not affected, he was the humblest of all men."[^chrys-gal1]

Where the critical commentary sees an idealized resolution at the Council of Jerusalem, the Orthodox sources cited here see the pattern of later councils. The Orthodox Church in America calls the meeting, held under the leadership of Saint James, the "prototype of all subsequent Church councils," the Orthodox Study Bible heads the apostles' letter as early canon law, and Chrysostom, reading the letter's phrase "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us," says the apostles show "that they do not act despotically."[^oca-church][^osb-council][^chrys-33] On the content of the decree the sources are less settled. Chrysostom reads the prohibition of blood as a prohibition of murder (his editor adds a cross-reference to Genesis 9:5); Augustine reports that many take it to mean flesh from which the blood has not been poured out, while others give the words a different meaning, and he thinks the apostles chose "an easy observance" suited to the time when the two walls of Jew and Gentile still stood within the Church, an observance that no Christian now feels bound to keep.[^chrys-33][^aug-faust32] The Council of Jerusalem treats the decree in detail. Tertullian and Chrysostom, in short, read the letter of the council and the epistle to the Galatians as two accounts of one agreement, and Acts describes the council itself as the apostles and elders gathering with "the whole assembly" (Acts 15.22).

The speeches, which fill a large part of the book, are read by critics as the writer's own compositions on an occasion. Their content, the commentary says, was "determined by the theological and literary interests of the author," and Brevard Childs, writing from a canonical standpoint, observes that in Acts the speeches of the individual apostles "were fashioned into one uniform pattern."[^jant-intro][^childs-51] An Orthodox reader can grant a good deal of this. In the homilies cited here Chrysostom treats the speeches as what was said, and he explains their shape by the audience. The apostles speak chiefly of Christ's humanity because their hearers could not yet bear more: "gently and by degrees he leads them on to higher truths. Nay, at Athens Paul even calls Him man simply, without saying more."[^chrys-1f] The same homilist observes that Paul's address at Athens draws on the Greeks' own sayings and identifies the line "For we are also His offspring" as the poet Aratus's.[^chrys-38]

The commentary says the book "paints an idealized church expanding in an orderly, harmonious fashion, from Jerusalem to Rome and from Jew to Gentile," a community that shares possessions and observes an agreed set of ethical norms.[^jant-intro] "Early Catholicism" is the label that some critics attach to Acts, as Childs notes, along with Ephesians and Second Peter, and Bruce reports that some see the book as departing from the perspective of Paul and the Gospels alike and as laying a foundation for Catholicism as distinct from catholicity.[^childs-49][^bruce-catholic] Bruce's own judgment runs the other way: Acts is the joint on which the New Testament collection turns, a catholic work in which Peter, Paul, James, Stephen, and Philip are all honored, and one that could never have been tolerated by those who rejected every strand of apostolic Christianity but one.[^bruce-hinge]

The Orthodox Study Bible's answer to the charge of idealization is a principle: the book "is not to be read as a blueprint for reproducing the specific details and aspects of the Church which we read there." John Behr states it more sharply in a different context: "It would be a mistake to look to the past in an attempt to find an original and pristine Christianity, whether that of the Jerusalem community described in the book of Acts, the early Christianity of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, or the later eras of imperial Christianity."[^osb-intro][^behr-46] The text bears this out, because the community of Acts is shown quarreling as well as praying: there is a complaint of the Hellenists against the Hebrews over the daily distribution (Acts 6.1), "no small discord and discussion" over circumcision (Acts 15.2), and a contention between Paul and Barnabas "so sharp that they separated from each other" (Acts 15.39), and a lie to the Holy Spirit is punished inside the community itself (Acts 5.1-11). Chrysostom draws from the harmony a standard for the present. His eleventh homily, on the believers who held everything in common, says: "If this were done now, we should live more pleasant lives, both rich and poor," and then asks his hearers to picture in words a city in which all sell their possessions and bring them into the common stock.[^chrys-11] Cyril of Jerusalem presents the same community to his catechumens as the work of the Holy Spirit, down to the judgment on Ananias and Sapphira, "who attempted to lie to the Holy Ghost."[^cyril-17]

The commentary observes that Acts treats the Temple, the synagogue, and the festivals with attention and familiarity, and that the Pharisees appear as believers in resurrection and, in Gamaliel, as a respected leader.[^jant-intro][^jant-theudas] It also finds that the later moves toward the Gentiles stem from the rejection of the preaching by Jews (Acts 13.46; Acts 18.5-6; Acts 28.23-28), that "Acts replaces an ethnic distinction with a theological distinction," and that those who reject Jesus are, in the book's logic, excluded from God's community.[^jant-intro] On the speech of Gamaliel it adds that by putting the instruction in the mouth of a respected Jewish leader Acts portrays later Jewish opposition to Christianity as an act against God and contrary to Judaism.[^jant-theudas] And on Peter's remark that "it is an unlawful thing for a man who is a Jew to join himself or come to one of another nation" (Acts 10.28), it notes that the statement is rarely reflected in Jewish writings and represents a common perspective among Gentiles.[^jant-10]

The Church can grant that the book records a painful parting and still read it differently. Chrysostom notices the gentleness of Paul's last words to the leaders in Rome (Acts 28.17-20): "See what friendliness of expression my nation: he does not hold them as aliens."[^chrys-55b] The Orthodox Church in America describes the Church as entering Roman society "under the veil" of Judaism and then becoming separated from the Jewish faith, a separation sharpened by the destruction of the Temple.[^oca-church] The believers in Acts are Jews to begin with. The admission of Cornelius's household is brought about by two visions and by the Spirit falling on them while Peter is still speaking (Acts 10.44-47), and the Jewish believers of Jerusalem, as James describes them to Paul, "are all zealous for the law" (Acts 21.20). Paul himself says before the council, "I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees" (Acts 23.6), and Amy-Jill Levine, the co-editor of the Jewish Annotated New Testament, is reported to have made the point in a question-and-answer session that "Paul is a Jew, a Pharisee, and this never changes."[^course-lecture] The Fathers' readings of the Jewish response to the gospel are not all as gentle as Chrysostom's comment on Paul. In his homily on Pentecost the same preacher reads the fall of Jerusalem as the answer to the mockers who said the apostles were "full of new wine," and that reading is a patristic counterpart, of a harsher kind, to the critical commentary's concern about how Acts portrays Jewish opposition.[^chrys-4]

The text of Acts has been disputed in ways that can be shown here only at the edges. Bruce records two opposite loyalties in the history of New Testament textual study, Whiston's for the Western form as the primitive one and Burgon's for the Byzantine as the inspired one, and the apparatus of the New Revised Standard Version shows witnesses dividing over verses that reach into doctrine (Acts 20.28), baptismal practice (Acts 8.37), and the wording of the Council's decree (Acts 15.20).[^bruce-bezae][^jant-apparatus] Barnes shows how a textual choice can touch doctrine, saying of Acts 20:28 that the reading "of God" is too doubtful to serve as a proof-text for the divinity of Christ and is not needed, since other passages are undisputed.[^barnes-20-28] Chrysostom uses "purchased with His own blood" as one of three reasons for the elders' care.[^chrys-44] None of the sources cited here sets out an Orthodox policy for choosing among the readings.

Not everyone in the early centuries wanted this book. According to Tertullian, Marcion rejected Acts, and he says his followers refused it "because they declare no other God than the Creator, and prove Christ to belong to no other God than the Creator; while the promise of the Holy Ghost is shown to have been fulfilled in no other document than the Acts of the Apostles," and Bruce adds that Acts supplied independent testimony to the genuine apostleship of the very men whom Marcion condemned as apostates.[^tert-m5][^bruce-marcion-acts] Tertullian's rule for heretics who reject the book is that they "can neither belong to the Holy Spirit… nor can they presume to claim to be a church themselves who positively have no means of proving when, and with what swaddling-clothes this body was established," and he challenges them to show who Paul was and how he became an apostle.[^tert-pres22][^tert-pres23] The Manichaeans refused it for the reason Augustine gives. It narrates the coming of the Paraclete, and they said the Paraclete had come through Mani. In his treatise against Mani's Fundamental Epistle Augustine says that he must believe Acts if he believes the Gospel, since Catholic authority commends both, and that "the advent of the Holy Spirit is narrated with perfect clearness in the Acts of the Apostles"; in his reply to Faustus he calls it the canonical Acts, which the Manichaeans reject.[^aug-fund][^aug-profit][^aug-faust19]

The Ebionites, according to Irenaeus, used Matthew only and "repudiate the Apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law."[^iren-i26] The sources do not say that they rejected Acts by name, but a community that repudiated Paul had no place for the book in which he has his. Bruce adds that other sectarians took James as the apostle par excellence and regarded Paul as the enemy who, in Jesus' parable, sowed weeds among the wheat of the gospel.[^bruce-sectarians] The book also appears in the genealogy of heresy that Irenaeus draws. Simon Magus, whom he introduces on Luke's authority, is the man "from whom all sorts of heresies derive their origin," and the Nicolaitans, he says, are followers of "that Nicolas who was one of the seven first ordained to the diaconate by the apostles," a name from Acts 6.5.[^iren-i23][^iren-i26] Bruce's judgment on all of this is that the Church of the second century, facing Marcion at one end and the party of James at the other, kept Acts because it did justice to every strand of apostolic Christianity.[^bruce-hinge]

Many New Testament books drew doubts in the ancient Church; Eusebius lists the epistles of James and Jude, Second Peter, and the second and third of John among the disputed writings. He puts Acts among the accepted ones, immediately after "the holy quaternion of the Gospels," and Cyril, Athanasius, the Synod of Laodicea, and the Council of Carthage all list it.[^eus-3-25][^lists-acts] Within the Church the sources cited here record no ancient doubt over its canonical standing, and Barnes says that its authenticity "has not been called in question at any time in the church."[^barnes-intro] Chrysostom's own difficulty with the book was neglect: "To many persons this Book is so little known, both it and its author, that they are not even aware that there is such a book in existence."[^chrys-1g]

Methods of Criticism

Acts can be read as three books bound in one cover: a traveler's log in the "we" passages, a founding history of the Church in the early chapters and the council, and a gathering of sermons in the speeches. The critical methods taken up below approach one or another of these. Beside these approaches the Fathers read Acts as one witness to the work of the Spirit.

Textual criticism tries to recover what Luke wrote. Within the historical-critical schools it is called "low" criticism; its goal is to reconstruct the original text, and its result is a critical text (Westcott-Hort in 1881, Nestle-Aland from 1952, with a twenty-eighth edition in 2013), though scholars divide between an eclectic approach and a priority for the Byzantine text, and text-critical work precedes translation.[^course-textcrit] For Acts the three families are the ones set out under the manuscripts above; the Alexandrian text behind Vaticanus and Sinaiticus underlies most modern translations; the apparatus of the New Revised Standard Version marks a long series of verses where witnesses add or lack material; and Codex Bezae and its companions belong to the Western family.[^course-textcrit][^jant-apparatus][^bruce-bezae] Bruce places the question in its history. In the eighteenth century Whiston held that the Western text was the primitive one; in the nineteenth Burgon held the Byzantine to be the inspired one; and a generation of editors, from Lachmann to Westcott and Hort, built their texts on the earliest manuscripts, so that a Scots Bible teacher of the past could say that where they agreed there one had what the Spirit said, a confidence Bruce observes that few would now share.[^bruce-bezae] Orthodox reception, so far as the sources show, has been practical. The Orthodox Study Bible prints the fuller readings, Chrysostom's own quotations show variation (two forms of Acts 20:28, silence on Acts 8:37), Barnes weighs manuscripts and versions at both verses, and no source cited here states a policy on critical editions.[^osb-readings][^chrys-44][^chrys-19][^barnes-8-37][^barnes-20-28]

Source criticism looks for the written or spoken material behind the book. In the Gospels the method sets Mark beside Matthew and Luke; Acts has no parallel narrative to set beside it, and the sources cited here accordingly say little about its written sources. They give what the book gives about itself: the "we," which the Jewish Annotated New Testament reads as either presence, firsthand accounts, or "verisimilitude"; the dependence on the Septuagint; and Luke's own earlier volume.[^jant-intro][^jant-lxx] Childs adds, from the canonical side, that such a shift frequently "signals a form by which to confront subsequent readers," and he cites Acts.[^childs-52] The older commentaries of Barnes and Wesley set out no detailed proposals about written sources behind Acts in their introductions.[^barnes-intro][^wesley-intro] The ancient testimony takes up the same question in its own terms. The Muratorian compiler, Eusebius, and Jerome say how Luke knew what he reports: he wrote what took place in his presence (the Fragment), or what he had seen himself (Eusebius and Jerome), and he was close to Paul and the other apostles. None of them mentions the "we." Bruce, who does connect the compiler's phrase with the "we" sections, judges that the explanation does not fit the book as it stands.[^mur][^eus-3-4][^bruce-mur]

Form criticism looks at the smaller units that the author gathered and asks what situation in the early Church produced them. One critique calls the method "completely hypothetical, since we don't have anything that isn't text from that period," while allowing that it can name patterns, prayers, and sayings and that each form of criticism is good for use.[^course-lecture] Acts is full of units of the kind it studies: the sermons of Peter and Paul, the prayers (Acts 1.24-25; Acts 4.24-30), the miracle stories, and the summary statements that mark the growth of the community, which the Jewish Annotated New Testament lists as recurring at 2:42–47, 4:32–35, 5:12–16, 6:7, 9:31, 16:5, and 19:20.[^jant-16] Childs' remark that the speeches of the individual apostles have been "fashioned into one uniform pattern" is a form-critical observation. His wider criticism is aimed at the tradition-historical method that reconstructs the stages behind a text, which he finds "largely hypothetical" because no historical community ever heard the material in the forms that the schemes suppose, and it bears on form criticism's reconstructed settings as well.[^childs-51][^childs-hyp] McGuckin, writing as an Orthodox historian, grants that recent study can distinguish the forms of the Aramaic preaching of the first generation from the more Greek forms of the second, and insists that Orthodoxy sees "no great chasm" between Jesus' teaching and its transmission by the first disciples.[^mcguckin-28] For Acts this bears on the speeches, which Chrysostom, as seen above, takes as the apostles' own words fitted to their hearers.

Redaction criticism studies what an author has done with the material he received. In the Gospels it works by setting two accounts side by side; in Acts the nearest equivalents are Luke's own Gospel, Paul's letters, and the book's internal repetitions. Many of the notes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament work in this manner. They observe that Stephen's trial and death are modeled on Jesus' and that his final words echo Jesus' on the cross, that the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost parallels the Spirit's descent at the Jordan, that the Pauline and Petrine miracles echo those of the Gospel, that the three accounts of the Damascus road differ in their details, that the Council of Jerusalem is told as an amicable resolution where Paul's letter suggests more strain, and that the book's portrayal of Rome and of the Jews serves its own purposes.[^jant-parallels][^jant-22][^jant-15] Chrysostom notices the writer's choices without calling them editing. He observes that the writer "accounting the title of Gospel to be too great for him" calls his first book a "treatise," and that the writer's economy of detail is itself a choice, since the sacred writers had no ambition to be writers of books.[^chrys-1][^chrys-1h] Behr cautions that biblical study "dominated by the presuppositions of a historical-critical method" is occupied with "the original text, its context and redaction, and its interpretation (in terms of what it meant rather than means)," and Childs warns that a construction of a book's structure that removes parts of it "should be viewed with suspicion"; on their terms an Orthodox reading may follow a redactor's hand and still ask what the book, as the Church has received it, now says.[^behr12][^childs-49]

Historical-critical and social-scientific study reads Acts against the world that produced it. For this book the commentary's principal claims are that it was written, most likely, early in the second century by an author with considerable familiarity with the Septuagint, Jewish customs, Greek literature, and Roman institutions; that its genre is still debated ("whether as history, biography, or novel"); that it provides important information on Jewish institutions and customs of that time; and that its picture of Jewish and Roman figures serves the author's ends. It reads the division between Hellenists and Hebrews in Jerusalem as largely one of language, notes the God-fearing Gentiles on the edges of the synagogue, and sees the sea voyage as built from "many elements common in contemporaneous literature: detailed itineraries, violent storms, shipwrecks, the crew's flight."[^jant-intro][^jant-6][^jant-27] The Orthodox voices cited here put the weight elsewhere. McGuckin warns that the sparseness of the sources for the Church's first generation has produced "a flourishing of speculation passing off as history," and the Orthodox Study Bible calls the book "a spiritual and theological record of how the Church developed, as seen through the actions of the early Christians."[^mcguckin-29][^osb-intro]

For narrative, literary, and canonical readers the first question about Acts is that it is the second volume of a single work, and the canon's separation of Luke from Acts is, in Childs' view, a "major canonical issue" for any reader to ask about, because the two books now do different jobs, the first among the four Gospels and the second as the link between the Gospels and the letters.[^childs-53][^bruce-hinge] Childs notes, too, that an author's purpose is "often most clearly stated in the praescript or in the conclusion," and he cites Acts 1:1–5 beside Luke 1:1–4, which for Acts means reading the opening verses together with the closing image of Paul preaching "without hindrance."[^childs-49] Narrative readings add the shape of the story: the three-stage geography of Acts 1.8, the voyage to Rome, in which, as the commentary puts it, "neither human resistance nor forces of nature can prevent Paul from reaching his divinely appointed end," and an ending that stops on Paul still preaching, with his death left unnarrated, as the commentary notes of the last verses.[^jant-27][^jant-28] John Behr gives the book a place in the larger story of the Passion. The cycle of liturgical feasts, he says, follows the book of Acts in celebrating the Ascension and Pentecost separately, while "their unity in the Passion of Christ should never be forgotten."[^behr-35] The Church's liturgical use is itself a canonical shaping of the book: Acts supplies the epistles of the Liturgy from Pascha to Pentecost, is read over the tomb of Christ on Holy Friday, and is read over the body of a deceased priest.[^lit-acts][^course-canonical]

The patristic reading proceeds on the four senses of Scripture: the literal, which is never abandoned, and the allegorical or typological, the tropological or moral, and the anagogical. John Cassian lays out the same fourfold scheme in his fourteenth Conference, with Jerusalem as his example of a city that is at once historical, allegorical, anagogical, and tropological.[^course-lecture][^cassian-14] Chrysostom's homilies on Acts give examples of the second and third senses. He opens his homily on Pentecost with a type: "Do you perceive the type? What is this Pentecost? The time when the sickle was to be put to the harvest, and the ingathering was made." The Spirit comes, he says, as the keen-edged sickle of the word at the feast of the harvest.[^chrys-4b] The shipwreck chapters he reads as a map of the Christian life: "Look at our whole life: it is just such (as was this voyage)," and Paul "is sailing even now with us, only not bound as he was then."[^chrys-53] Cyril of Jerusalem retells many of its episodes to his catechumens as a catechesis on the Spirit, and the anonymous Exposition of the Chapters of the Acts of the Apostles divides it into forty chapters and forty-eight sections, each with a short summary of its contents, "after the history of Luke, the evangelist and historian."[^cyril-17][^exposition]

The reading with which Acts itself equips its interpreters is Philip's on the road to Gaza. The eunuch, reading Isaiah, says, "How can I, unless someone explains it to me?" (Acts 8.31), and Behr remarks that when the eunuch then asks, "About whom does the prophet say this?" (Acts 8.34), he shows that "meaning" resides in the person of whom the text speaks.[^acts-8][^behr-43] St. Vincent of Lérins gives the Church's reason for reading Scripture with the Church: "owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense," so that the rule for understanding the prophets and apostles must be framed "in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation."[^vincent]

The Church receives Acts in the setting that her own calendar provides. She reads it between the Resurrection and Pentecost as the account of what the Spirit did to the first witnesses, and the Orthodox Study Bible's sidebars read the same pattern of baptism and the gift of the Spirit as the root of chrismation.[^lit-acts][^osb-chrism] She reads it as the Beroeans read, "examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so" (Acts 17.11), in the company of the saints who have answered the eunuch's question before her, and she goes on reading, year after year, the book that tells how the Church, whose birth she confesses at Pentecost, came into the world.[^acts-17]

Sources

[^acts1]: Acts 1.1-2; Acts 1.3; Acts 1.4; Acts 1.5; Acts 1.9; Acts 1.13-14 (WEB). [^acts2]: Acts 2.1-11 (WEB). See Pentecost. [^acts28]: Acts 28.30-31 (WEB). [^acts-we]: Acts 16.10; Acts 20.6; Acts 21.17; Acts 27.1; Acts 28.16 (WEB). [^acts-1-8]: Acts 1.8 (WEB). [^acts-8]: Acts 8.31; Acts 8.34 (WEB). [^acts-17]: Acts 17.11 (WEB). [^acts-summary]: Acts 1.3-11; Acts 1.13-26; Acts 2.1-47; Acts 3.1-10; Acts 4.12; Acts 5.1-11; Acts 5.17-42; Acts 6.1-6; Acts 7.1-60; Acts 8.4-40; Acts 9.1-19; Acts 9.36-42; Acts 10.1-48; Acts 11.1-30; Acts 12.1-19; Acts 13.1-52; Acts 14.1-20; Acts 15.1-41; Acts 16.1-40; Acts 17.1-34; Acts 18.1-17; Acts 19.1-41; Acts 20.1-38; Acts 21.1-40; Acts 22.1-29; Acts 23.6-35; Acts 24.27; Acts 25.1-12; Acts 26.1-32; Acts 27.1-44; Acts 28.1-31 (WEB). [^lxx-acts]: Acts 15.16-17 (WEB), compare Amos 9.11-12 (Brenton); Acts 7.14 (WEB), compare Genesis 46.27 (Brenton); Acts 7.4 (WEB), compare Genesis 11.26, Genesis 11.32, Genesis 12.4 (Brenton); F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 54 and n. 34. [^osb-intro]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Acts. [^osb-chrism]: The Orthodox Study Bible, sidebar "Chrismation," at Acts 2. See Chrismation. [^osb-ord]: The Orthodox Study Bible, sidebar "Ordination," at Acts 14. [^osb-council]: The Orthodox Study Bible, Acts 15, section headings. [^osb-readings]: WEB, Acts 8.36–38, 15.33–35, 24.6–8, Acts 28.29, Acts 20.28, Acts 27.37, Acts 2.4; The Orthodox Study Bible, Acts 8.37, Acts 15.34, Acts 24.6-7, Acts 28.29, Acts 20.28, Acts 27.37, Acts 2.4. [^oca-gospels]: Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels." [^oca-acts]: Orthodox Church in America, "Acts of the Apostles." [^oca-church]: Orthodox Church in America, "The Church." [^ow-acts]: OrthodoxWiki, "Book of Acts." [^ow-luke]: OrthodoxWiki, "Apostle Luke." [^lit-acts]: Orthodox Church in America, "Easter Sunday: The Holy Pascha"; Orthodox Church in America, "Post-Easter Sundays"; OrthodoxWiki, "Pentecostarion"; OrthodoxWiki, "Book of Acts"; Orthodox Church in America, "Acts of the Apostles"; Bishop Alexander (Mileant), "The Book of Acts and Ecumenical Epistles." [^mileant]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), Toward Understanding the Bible, part 7, "The Book of Acts and Ecumenical Epistles." [^sinaiticus]: OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Sinaiticus." [^lists-acts]: Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History 3.25.1–2; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.36; Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.5; Synod of Laodicea, canon 60 (genuineness questioned); Council of Carthage (397); Bishop Alexander (Mileant), Toward Understanding the Bible. [^jant-intro]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Acts of the Apostles" (introduction by Gary Gilbert), 197–98. [^jant-luke-intro]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Gospel according to Luke" (introduction by Amy-Jill Levine), 96. [^jant-lxx]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Acts of the Apostles," introduction, 198. [^jant-1]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 1.1–14, 199. [^jant-1b]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 1.15–26, 200; Acts 1.18; Matthew 27.5 (WEB). [^jant-6]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 6.1–7, 209–10. [^jant-9]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Acts 9, 216 and 218; Galatians 1.17-19; Acts 9.26-27 (WEB). [^jant-10]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 10.28, 219; Acts 10.28 (WEB). [^jant-15]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 15.1–35, 227; Galatians 2.10 (WEB). [^jant-16]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Acts 16, 230. [^jant-22]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 22, 242; Acts 9.7; Acts 22.9 (WEB). [^jant-27]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 27.1–28.31, 249. [^jant-28]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 28.17–31, 252. [^jant-apparatus]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (NRSV text and notes), textual notes at Acts 8.37 (216); 15.17–18; 15.20 (229); 15.24, 15.29, 15.34 (230); 19.9 (236); 20.28 (239); 21.25 (241); 24.6–8 (245); 27.37 (250); 28.29 (253). [^jant-checks]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Acts 12.20–25 (222), 18.1–17 (234), and 21.37–22.29 (242). [^jant-theudas]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 5.17–42, 209, and note on Acts 12.20–25, 222; Acts 5.36-37 (WEB). [^jant-parallels]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Acts 2.1–13 (200–201), 6.8–8.1a (210), 7.54–8.1a (213), and 20.7–12 (238). [^jant-pentecost]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 2.1–13, 200–201. [^mur]: The Muratorian Fragment (c. 170), lines 34–39 (Metzger translation). [^bruce-we]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 163 n. 11. [^bruce-mur]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 162–63. [^bruce-apocr]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 163. [^bruce-lxx]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 53–54. [^bruce-hinge]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 131–32 and 151–52. [^bruce-bezae]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 285–87 and n. 4; list of abbreviations, xii. [^bruce-p45]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 128. [^bruce-catholic]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 151 n. 4. [^bruce-spain]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 163; compare Romans 15.24 (WEB). [^bruce-marcion-acts]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 151–52, citing Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 22–23. [^bruce-sectarians]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 152 and n. 6, citing Clementine Recognitions 1.70 and Epistle of Peter to James 2. [^childs-49]: Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 49–50. [^childs-51]: Childs, The New Testament as Canon, 51. [^childs-52]: Childs, The New Testament as Canon, 52. [^childs-53]: Childs, The New Testament as Canon, 53. [^childs-hyp]: Childs, The New Testament as Canon. [^behr12]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2006), 12–13. [^behr-35]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 35–36. [^behr-43]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 43–44. [^behr-46]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 46. [^mcguckin-13]: John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 12–13. [^mcguckin-23]: McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church, 23. [^mcguckin-28]: McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church, 27–28. [^mcguckin-29]: McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church, 28–29. [^chrys-1]: St. John Chrysostom, Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-1b]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-1c]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-1d]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-1e]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-1f]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-1g]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-1h]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^chrys-3]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 3. [^chrys-4]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 4. [^chrys-4b]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 4. [^chrys-11]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 11. [^chrys-19]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 19. [^chrys-33]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 33. [^chrys-34]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 34. [^chrys-38]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 38. [^chrys-44]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 44. [^chrys-53]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 53. [^chrys-55]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 55. [^chrys-55b]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 55. [^chrys-gal1]: Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, ch. 1. [^chrys-gal2]: Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, ch. 2. [^cyril-17]: St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 17, §§21–26. [^clem-strom4]: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 4.15; compare Stromata 5.11 (Acts 17.24-25). [^iren-i23]: St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.23.1–2 (quoting Acts 8.9-11). [^iren-i26]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.2–3. [^tert-m5]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.2. [^tert-pres22]: Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 22. [^tert-pres23]: Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 23. [^aug-fund]: St. Augustine of Hippo, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus 6 and 10. [^aug-profit]: Augustine, On the Profit of Believing (section number not given). [^aug-faust19]: Augustine, Against Faustus 19.31. [^aug-faust32]: Augustine, Against Faustus 32.13. [^aug-ep82]: Augustine, Letter 82 (to Jerome), §12; see also §8 (Acts 16.3; Acts 18.18; Acts 21.26). [^eus-3-4]: Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History 3.4.7. [^eus-3-25]: Eusebius, Church History 3.3.2; 3.25.3–6. [^jerome-dvi5]: St. Jerome, On Illustrious Men 5. [^jerome-dvi7]: Jerome, On Illustrious Men 7. [^exposition]: An Exposition of the Chapters of the Acts of the Apostles (author uncertain). [^vincent]: St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory 2 [5]. [^ow-codices]: OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Sinaiticus"; "Codex Vaticanus"; "Codex Alexandrinus." [^ow-osb]: OrthodoxWiki, "Orthodox Study Bible." [^ow-vulgate]: OrthodoxWiki, "Vulgate." [^ow-peshitta]: OrthodoxWiki, "Rabbula of Edessa." [^ow-ulfilas]: OrthodoxWiki, "Ulfilas." [^ow-cm]: OrthodoxWiki, "Cyril and Methodius." [^course-textcrit]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^course-english]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^course-lecture]: Course lecture notes, Gospels and Acts. [^course-canonical]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts.

[^bruce-sundberg]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, ch. 9, n. 2, citing A. C. Sundberg, "Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List," Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973), and E. Ferguson, "Canon Muratori: Date and Provenance," Studia Patristica 18.2 (1982). [^barnes-intro]: Albert Barnes, Notes on the New Testament, introduction to Acts. [^wesley-intro]: John Wesley, Notes on the New Testament, introduction to Acts. [^barnes-8-37]: Barnes, Notes on the New Testament, note on Acts 8:37. [^barnes-20-28]: Barnes, Notes on the New Testament, note on Acts 20:28. [^clem-rome-5]: St. Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians 5. [^chrys-2tim-10]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Timothy, Hom. 10. [^chrys-1i]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^cassian-14]: John Cassian, Conferences, Conf. 14.