Acts: What My Friends Did Next

At a Glance

Who wrote it: The same writer as Luke. It opens by reminding Theophilus of the first book I wrote (Acts 1:1). In a few passages the story suddenly says we, as if the writer were traveling with Paul. Whether that is memory, a borrowed travel diary or a style choice is debated.

When: Probably in the 80s or 90s. Some scholars place it as late as the early 100s.

Written for: Theophilus again, and readers across the Roman world. They needed to know how a Jewish movement came to welcome Gentiles and reach Rome, and that Rome had no case against it.

What it remembers of me: Almost nothing of my life, except that I went about doing good and healing (Acts 10:38). It does keep one saying of mine that no gospel has: It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).

How close it stays to me: Very close on the poor and the stranger.

If you only read three chapters: Acts 2, Acts 4 and Acts 15.

Words to Know

Pentecost — the Jewish Feast of Weeks, a harvest festival fifty days after Passover. The Greek name means fiftieth.

Apostle — someone sent. It meant my twelve, but Paul and others claimed the title too.

Gentile — anyone who is not Jewish.

Hellenists — Jews whose everyday language was Greek, many of them from outside my country.

The Way — the earliest name for my movement in Acts, before anyone was called Christian.

The Book in Brief

Acts opens where Luke ends, with a note to the same Theophilus. For forty days after my death I show myself alive to my friends and speak about God’s kingdom. They ask whether I will now restore the kingdom to Israel. I tell them to wait for the Holy Spirit and to be my witnesses to the ends of the earth, and a cloud takes me from their sight.

Chapters 2 to 7 stay in Jerusalem. At the Feast of Weeks the Spirit comes on my friends with wind and fire, and they speak in other languages. Peter preaches, and about three thousand are baptized. The believers share everything they own. Peter and John heal a lame man at the Temple gate, and refuse when the council orders them to stop preaching. A couple named Ananias and Sapphira lie about money they have given, and both fall dead. When Greek-speaking widows are left out of the daily food, seven men are chosen to serve. One of them, Stephen, is stoned to death while a young man named Saul looks on.

In chapters 8 to 12 the movement spreads. Philip preaches in Samaria and baptizes an Ethiopian official on a desert road. Near Damascus a light from the sky throws Saul to the ground, and he hears my voice. Blinded, then healed, he is baptized and preaches about me. Peter goes to the house of Cornelius, a Roman officer, and the Spirit comes on Gentiles. In Antioch my followers are first called Christians. King Herod kills James, John’s brother, and jails Peter, but an angel frees him.

From chapter 13 on, the book follows Saul, now called Paul. With Barnabas he sails to Cyprus, then travels inland, where one town takes them for gods, then stones Paul. In chapter 15 the leaders meet in Jerusalem and decide that Gentile believers need not be circumcised. Paul and Silas cross into Macedonia. In Philippi Lydia takes them in, and an earthquake opens their prison. Paul speaks to the philosophers in Athens, stays a year and a half in Corinth, and is brought before Gallio. In Ephesus silversmiths who make shrines of Artemis start a riot.

In chapter 21 Paul goes back to Jerusalem. A crowd accuses him of bringing Gentiles into the Temple and tries to kill him, and Roman soldiers arrest him. He is held for two years at Caesarea, defends himself before Felix, Festus and King Agrippa, and appeals to the emperor.

Chapters 27 and 28 tell of his voyage to Rome as a prisoner, and a shipwreck on Malta. In Rome he lives for two years in a rented house, welcoming all who come and preaching God’s kingdom.

All who believed were together, and had all things in common. They sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all, according as anyone had need (Acts 2:44–45).

Two chapters later, Luke says it again, in more detail. Not one of them claimed that anything of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common … For neither was there among them any who lacked, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds … and distribution was made to each, according as anyone had need (Acts 4:32–35).

Neither was there among them any who lacked. That line is not an accident. It echoes the Law of Moses, where God tells my people what the land would look like if they kept the year of release: there will be no poor with you (Deuteronomy 15:4). Luke is telling you that my first followers finally did what the Law had asked for.

This is the earliest picture of the church in your Bible. Later Christians have called it a phase, an experiment, an ideal for monks. Luke does not call it any of those things. He tells it as the moment the Spirit came down and the community was what it was meant to be.

Eighteen centuries later, a German writer made famous a slogan about giving to each according to his needs. He was not the first to say it.¹

A second volume

Acts is the second half of a two-part work. The gospel of Luke takes the story from my birth to Jerusalem. Acts takes it from Jerusalem to Rome.

The plan is in the first chapter. Before I leave, I tell my friends, You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8). That is the table of contents. The first chapters stay in Jerusalem. Then the movement spreads to Judea and Samaria. Then Paul carries it across the sea, and the book ends with him in Rome, the capital of the world.

Notice the question my friends asked me first, in that same scene: Lord, are you now restoring the kingdom to Israel? (Acts 1:6). Even after everything, they were still expecting what I had taught them to expect: God’s rule, here, for my people. That question tells you more about what I preached than a hundred later sermons.

Pentecost

Fifty days after the Passover at which I died, my friends were together in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks. Luke describes wind and fire, and They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other languages (Acts 2:4). Pilgrims from every part of the Jewish world heard them in their own languages.

Peter stood up and explained it with a passage from the prophet Joel: I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Yes, and on my servants and on my handmaidens in those days, I will pour out my Spirit (Acts 2:17–18).

Sons and daughters. Young and old. Male and female servants. On the first day of the church, as Luke tells it, the Spirit was given to everyone, including the people with the least standing in any room. The first sermon of the church said that women would prophesy.

The first fight was about food for widows

The first quarrel inside my movement was not about doctrine. It was about dinner.

A complaint arose from the Hellenists against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily service (Acts 6:1). There was a daily distribution of food, and the widows of the Greek-speaking believers were being missed.

The apostles did not ignore it. They appointed seven men, all with Greek names, to run the distribution. One of them was Stephen.

Stephen was the first of my followers to be killed. He was stoned outside the city after a speech against the Temple, and Luke adds a detail that will matter for the rest of the book: The witnesses placed their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul (Acts 7:58).

Saul, three times

Saul became Paul, and Acts tells the story of how it happened three times. Once in Luke’s own voice, and twice in speeches by Paul. They do not agree.

In the first telling, the men traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the sound, but seeing no one (Acts 9:7). In the second, Paul says, Those who were with me indeed saw the light and were afraid, but they didn’t understand the voice (Acts 22:9). In the third, we had all fallen to the earth (Acts 26:14), and the voice now quotes a Greek proverb: It is hard for you to kick against the goads.

Heard the voice, or did not hear it. (In the Greek of Acts 22:9, they plainly did not hear it.) Stood, or fell. Paul himself, in his own letters, never tells the story of the road at all. He says only that it pleased God to reveal his Son in me (Galatians 1:16), and that I appeared to him last of all (1 Corinthians 15:8; compare 1 Corinthians 9:1).

Luke was not careless. Ancient historians retold important events in different ways for different audiences. But it means that the famous scene, with the blinding light on the Damascus road, comes to you through a writer who did not mind telling it three ways.

Peter and the Roman officer

The turning point of Acts is not Paul. It is Peter, in chapter 10.

Peter has a vision of a sheet let down from heaven, full of animals the Law calls unclean, and a voice telling him to eat. He refuses. The voice says, What God has cleansed, you must not call unclean. Then messengers arrive from Cornelius, a Roman centurion who worships the God of Israel, asking Peter to come.

Peter goes into the house of a Gentile, an officer of the occupying army, and says, You yourselves know how it is an unlawful thing for a man who is a Jew to join himself or come to one of another nation, but God has shown me that I shouldn’t call any man unholy or unclean (Acts 10:28). And then: Truly I perceive that God doesn’t show favoritism; but in every nation he who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him (Acts 10:34–35).

Everything after that follows from it. If a Roman soldier and his household could belong, without first becoming Jews, then the door was open.

The meeting in Jerusalem

The door being open caused the biggest argument of the first generation. Some men came down from Judea and taught the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised after the custom of Moses, you can’t be saved” (Acts 15:1).

The leaders met in Jerusalem. Peter spoke. Paul and Barnabas spoke. And then my brother James, who led the community in Jerusalem, gave the decision: my judgment is that we don’t trouble those from among the Gentiles who turn to God, but that we write to them that they abstain from the pollution of idols, from sexual immorality, from what is strangled, and from blood (Acts 15:19–20).

No circumcision. Four rules, and every one of them made it possible for a Jew who kept the Law to sit at the same table as a Gentile believer.

Paul describes what seems to be the same meeting in his letter to the Galatians, and his account is different. He never mentions the four rules. In his version, the leaders asked only one thing: that he remember the poor (Galatians 2:10). Historians still argue over how the two accounts fit together.²

Go deeperA longer Acts

Acts has come down to us in two forms, and the gap between them is wider than for any other book of the New Testament.

Most modern Bibles follow the form found in the oldest copies from Egypt. Another form, which scholars call the Western text, is nearly a tenth longer. Its chief witness is Codex Bezae, a manuscript with Greek on one page and Latin on the facing page, copied around the year 400. The reformer Theodore Beza gave it to the University of Cambridge in 1581, and it is still there.³

Many of its extra words are small, vivid details. When an angel leads Peter out of prison, it says that they “went down the seven steps.” In Ephesus, it says, Paul taught in the hall of Tyrannus “from the fifth hour to the tenth,” about eleven in the morning to four in the afternoon, probably the hours when the hall was free in the heat of the day.⁴

Some of its changes go deeper. Look again at James’s decision. In Codex Bezae the words from what is strangled (Acts 15:20) are missing, and a new line is added: the Gentiles should not do to others what they would not want done to themselves. Rules about food have become rules about conduct: no idols, no sexual immorality, no shedding of blood, and the golden rule in its old negative form.⁵

Was the Western text a second edition by the writer himself, as a few scholars have argued? Or was it the work of later copyists who explained and improved as they went? Most think the second. Either way, it shows that early Christians felt free to reshape even the apostles’ decision.

Luke’s Paul and Paul’s Paul

Acts is our only story of Paul’s travels. Without it, we would have only his letters. But the Paul in Acts and the Paul in the letters are not quite the same man.

In Acts, Paul goes to Jerusalem soon after his conversion, where Barnabas introduces him to the apostles (Acts 9:26–27). In Galatians, Paul swears he did not go up to Jerusalem then. He went away to Arabia, and only after three years went to Jerusalem, where he met Peter and of the other apostles I saw no one except James, the Lord’s brother (Galatians 1:17–19).

In Acts, Paul has his young helper Timothy circumcised, because of the Jews who were in those parts (Acts 16:3). In Galatians, Paul writes, if you receive circumcision, Christ will profit you nothing (Galatians 5:2).

In Acts, Paul is a Roman citizen and uses it more than once to protect himself (Acts 16:37; 22:25–28). In his letters, he never mentions it. In his letters, Paul fights fiercely to be called an apostle. In Acts, he is never called one, except twice together with Barnabas (Acts 14:4, 14). And Acts, which tells you so much about Paul, never once mentions that he wrote letters.⁶

Most scholars conclude that the writer of Acts admired Paul but did not have his letters in front of him, and that he smoothed Paul’s story into a more peaceful one, with fewer fights with Jerusalem.

Go deeperWho is the “we” in Acts?

Four times in Acts, the story suddenly switches from they to we. The first comes after Paul’s vision of a man from Macedonia: immediately we sought to go out to Macedonia (Acts 16:10). The others come on the way to Jerusalem in chapters 20 and 21, and on the voyage to Rome in chapters 27 and 28. Each time, we disappears as quietly as it came.⁷

There are three main explanations, and each has serious defenders.

The writer was there. This is the oldest answer. Around 180, Irenaeus used these passages to argue that Luke traveled with Paul. Many modern scholars, among them Joseph Fitzmyer, still think it is the simplest explanation.⁸

The writer used someone else’s diary. On this view, the writer of Acts had a travel record kept by one of Paul’s companions and left its we in place when he copied it. That would explain why these passages are so full of small details: ports, days, winds.

It is a way of telling a story. In 1978 Vernon Robbins pointed out that most of the we passages are sea voyages, and argued that Greek writers often told sea voyages in the first person, whether or not they had been aboard. His critics answered that his examples are not as close as he claimed.⁹

One old copy of Acts adds a fifth we, earlier, in Antioch, where my followers were first called Christians. That fits an old tradition that Luke came from Antioch.¹⁰

If the first answer is right, the writer knew Paul personally. Then the differences between his Paul and the Paul of the letters are harder to explain. That is why the question still matters.

Speeches

About a third of Acts is speeches: Peter at Pentecost, Stephen before the council, Paul in Athens, Paul before governors and a king.

Nobody was taking notes. Ancient historians said openly that they composed speeches for their characters. The Greek historian Thucydides wrote that he gave his speakers the words he thought the occasion called for, keeping as close as he could to the general sense of what was said.¹¹ The speeches in Acts all sound like the same man, and that man is Luke.

They are still worth reading. They tell you what the church of Luke’s day thought the first preachers should have said. Just do not read them as transcripts.

A slip with the dates

In one speech, a respected teacher named Gamaliel urges the council to leave my followers alone. He reminds them of earlier movements that came to nothing. For before these days Theudas rose up … After this man, Judas of Galilee rose up in the days of the enrollment (Acts 5:36–37).

The Jewish historian Josephus describes both men. Judas of Galilee led his revolt over the census in the year 6. Theudas led his crowd to the Jordan in the 40s, about ten years after the scene in which Gamaliel supposedly mentions him, and about forty years after Judas, not before.¹²

That is the kind of slip you make when you are writing a speech fifty years later.

Rome has no case

Acts was written for readers in the Roman world, and it keeps telling them the same thing. Roman officials keep finding that my followers have broken no Roman law.

In Corinth, the governor Gallio throws the case out: if they are questions about words and names and your own law, look to it yourselves (Acts 18:15). Gallio was a real man, the brother of the philosopher Seneca, and an inscription found at Delphi dates his time in Corinth to about 51 or 52. That inscription is one of the few fixed dates we have for Paul’s life.¹³

Later, after hearing Paul, the Roman governor Festus and King Agrippa agree, This man does nothing worthy of death or of bonds, and Agrippa adds, This man might have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar (Acts 26:31–32).

Luke wanted Roman readers to know that the movement was no danger to them. That was true in one sense. My followers were not raising an army. But the same book also shows a crowd in Thessalonica crying that These who have turned the world upside down have come here also (Acts 17:6). And when the council orders Peter and the apostles to stop preaching, they answer, We must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).

Both are in Acts. My followers were harmless to Rome’s army, and dangerous to its way of life.

Go deeperGallio, the philosopher’s brother

Gallio is one of the few people in Acts whom we know well from Roman writers.

He came from a rich family in Spain. His father was Seneca the Elder, a writer on rhetoric, and his younger brother was Seneca the philosopher, who became tutor to the young Nero. Gallio was adopted by a senator named Lucius Junius Gallio and took his name. Seneca dedicated two of his books to him, On Anger and On the Happy Life.¹⁴

Seneca also remembered Gallio’s time in Greece. In one of his letters he recalls that when Gallio began to run a fever in Achaia, he took ship at once, insisting that the sickness belonged to the place, not to his body.¹⁵

The stone at Delphi that fixes his dates survives in broken pieces, the first of them published in 1905. It is a letter from the emperor Claudius that calls Gallio “my friend and proconsul.” Claudius’s titles in the letter date it between January and August of 52. A governor of Achaia usually served for one year, so Gallio most likely governed from 51 to 52, and Paul’s year and a half in Corinth (Acts 18:11) falls around 50 to 52.¹³¹⁶

Gallio’s luck did not last. In 65 Nero forced Seneca to take his own life, and Gallio fell under suspicion too. He did not long survive his brother.¹⁷

The governor who threw my followers’ case out of court in Corinth died under the same emperor who, by early tradition, put Paul to death.

The women in Acts

Acts names women who led.

Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira (Acts 16:14), a businesswoman dealing in expensive cloth, is the first convert Luke names in Europe. The church in Philippi met in her house.

Priscilla and her husband Aquila were tentmakers who worked with Paul. When a gifted preacher named Apollos arrived in Ephesus, Priscilla and Aquila … took him aside, and explained to him the way of God more accurately (Acts 18:26). In most of the places where the couple is mentioned, she is named first, which was unusual.¹⁸

Tabitha in Joppa was full of good works and acts of mercy (Acts 9:36). Luke calls her a certain disciple. It is the only place in the New Testament where the feminine form of the word disciple is used.

And the evangelist Philip had four virgin daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:9). Joel’s prophecy from the first sermon, coming true in one house.

The ending that is not an ending

Acts ends in Rome. Paul has been brought there as a prisoner, to have his case heard by the emperor. Then:

Paul 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 28:30–31).

That is the last sentence. Luke does not tell you what happened at the trial. He does not tell you how Paul died, though by the time he wrote, he almost certainly knew. Early Christian tradition says Paul was executed in Rome under Nero, in the 60s.¹⁹

Why stop there? Nobody knows. Perhaps Luke wanted to end with the message moving freely through the capital of the world, without hindrance, rather than with an execution. His first book had already told of one execution. This one he ended with an open door.

Go deeperWhy does Acts stop there?

Scholars have offered other answers, and there is some evidence about how Paul died.

The story had not ended yet. In 1911 the German historian Adolf Harnack argued that Acts ends with Paul still waiting for trial because that is where things stood when it was written, in the early 60s. A few scholars still hold this view.²⁰ Most do not. The writer used Mark, which most date around 70, and his gospel seems to know of Jerusalem’s fall: when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is at hand (Luke 21:20). In Acts itself, Paul tells the leaders of the church at Ephesus, I know that you all … will see my face no more (Acts 20:25). The writer seems to know that Paul never came back.

How Paul died. The letter of the church in Rome known as 1 Clement, written around 96, says that Paul bore witness before rulers and then left the world.¹⁹ Around the year 200, a Roman Christian named Gaius wrote that he could show visitors the “trophies” of the apostles who founded the church in Rome, on the Vatican hill and on the road to Ostia.²¹ The great church of Saint Paul Outside the Walls stands on that road today. In 2009 the Vatican announced that bone fragments from the stone coffin beneath its altar had been carbon-dated to the first or second century.²² Whether they are Paul’s, nobody can prove.

So the writer almost certainly knew how the story ended, and chose not to tell it.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Acts 2:44–45 and Acts 4:32–35, then Deuteronomy 15:4.

You will find: the first church holding everything in common, and the Law’s promise that there would be no poor among my people.

Then compare Acts 9:26–27 with Galatians 1:17–19. When did Paul first meet the apostles?

The Short Version

• Acts is the second volume of Luke, taking the story from Jerusalem to Rome.
• The first church held everything in common, and nobody among them was in need.
• The first quarrel in the church was about food for widows, and the great argument was over circumcision, settled by my brother James.
• Luke’s Paul is calmer than Paul’s own letters, and Acts never mentions that he wrote any.
• The book keeps showing Rome finding no crime, and it ends with Paul preaching in Rome “without hindrance.”