The Acts of the Apostles

The Acts of the Apostles is the second of Luke’s two volumes, opening with an explicit back-reference to “the former treatise” addressed to Theophilus (Acts 1:1) and carrying the gospel story forward from the Ascension to Paul’s preaching in Rome. Built on the risen Lord’s programmatic promise of witness “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8), it is the only narrative history of the apostolic Church in the New Testament — a book whose true protagonist, as Chrysostom saw, is the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost. This file sets out what Acts is, how it is structured, and how the Orthodox Church reads it; its standing as history is taken up in the companion file.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

One Work in Two Volumes

Acts does not begin a new book so much as resume an interrupted one. “The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, until the day in which he was taken up” (Acts 1:1–2), the author writes, naming the same patron addressed in the dedication of the third Gospel (Luke 1:3) and picking up precisely where that Gospel closed, at the Ascension. The two works are a single literary and theological project — what modern scholarship habitually calls “Luke–Acts” — bound by their common dedication, their continuous chronology, and a shared style and vocabulary that mark them as the work of one hand (the unity of the project is treated at The Third Gospel). The phrasing is itself programmatic: if the Gospel records what “Jesus began both to do and teach,” then Acts is the continuation of that same doing and teaching, now through the Spirit and the apostolic Church. The risen Christ does not withdraw from the story; he acts in it from heaven.

That continuity is why the Church has always read Acts as the indispensable bridge between the Gospels and the Epistles. Without it the New Testament would leap from the empty tomb directly to letters written to churches whose founding it never narrates; Acts supplies the connective history — Pentecost, the Jerusalem community, the Gentile mission, the career of Paul — that makes the Epistles intelligible (on Acts within the canon, see Holy Scripture).

The Programmatic Word: Acts 1:8

The whole book unfolds as the working-out of a single sentence. Before the Ascension the risen Lord tells the apostles: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This verse is the table of contents of Acts in advance. The geography it names is the geography the narrative then traces: the Jerusalem chapters (Acts 1–7), the spread through Judea and Samaria (Acts 8), and the widening Gentile mission that reaches Antioch, Asia Minor, Greece, and finally Rome — “the uttermost part of the earth” embodied in the imperial capital (Acts 28). The movement is centrifugal, from the Temple outward, and its engine is the promised “power” of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit as Protagonist

For this reason the verdict, ancient and modern, is that the conventional title is a half-truth: the book records less the acts of the apostles than the acts of the Holy Spirit through them. The narrative pivots on Pentecost, where the Spirit descends “as of a rushing mighty wind” and rests on the disciples in tongues of fire (Acts 2:1–4), and thereafter every decisive advance is the Spirit’s initiative — sending Philip to the Ethiopian (Acts 8:29), telling Peter to go to Cornelius (Acts 10:19–20), setting apart Barnabas and Saul (Acts 13:2), and redirecting Paul’s route (Acts 16:6–7). John Chrysostom opens his homiletic course on the book by observing that many in his own day did not so much as know that the book existed, and insists that its true subject is the demonstration of the Spirit’s power in the apostles’ lives (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 1, trans. NPNF Series I Vol. 11). The Spirit-centered reading is not a modern discovery but the Church’s own (on the Lukan theology of the Spirit, see The Spirit and the Poor).

The Structure of the Narrative

Acts moves in two great arcs, hinged on the conversion of the Gentiles. The first arc is centered on Jerusalem and on the Apostle Peter. After the Ascension and the choosing of Matthias (Acts 1), Pentecost gives birth to the Church, and Peter’s first sermon brings three thousand to baptism (Acts 2). The Jerusalem community shares its goods and grows under apostolic preaching and signs (Acts 2–5). The martyrdom of Stephen, the first to die for Christ, follows his great speech rehearsing Israel’s history (Acts 7), and his death scatters the disciples and so launches the mission beyond Jerusalem (Acts 8). The persecutor Saul is struck down and converted on the Damascus road (Acts 9), and the baptism of the Roman centurion Cornelius — prepared by Peter’s rooftop vision — opens the door of faith to the Gentiles and is defended before the Jerusalem church (Acts 10–11). Peter’s deliverance from prison (Acts 12) closes this first arc.

The second arc follows the Apostle Paul outward (his career is the subject of St. Apostle Paul; for the Petrine half, see St. Apostle Peter). From Antioch, Barnabas and Saul are sent on the first missionary journey (Acts 13–14). The question their success forces — whether Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep the Law — is settled at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15), where the apostles and elders, “it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us” (Acts 15:28), lay no such yoke on the Gentiles. This decision is the theological turning-point of the book. Paul then undertakes the second and third journeys through Asia Minor and Greece (Acts 15:36–21:16), is arrested in Jerusalem, defends himself before governors and king (Acts 21–26), appeals to Caesar, and is carried by sea to Rome through the storm and shipwreck of Acts 27, arriving to preach in the capital (Acts 28).

The Great Speeches

A striking proportion of Acts — by common count nearly a third — consists of speeches, and Luke uses them to carry his theology. Peter’s Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:14–36) is the model of the earliest apostolic preaching: it interprets the outpoured Spirit by the prophet Joel, proclaims the crucified and risen Jesus as “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36), and calls for repentance and baptism. Paul’s address before the philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:22–31) shows the gospel meeting the Greek world on its own ground, beginning from the altar “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” and the testimony of the poets before turning to the resurrection. Stephen’s defense (Acts 7) and Paul’s apologies before Felix, Festus, and Agrippa (Acts 24–26) round out a body of oratory that is one of the book’s chief vehicles of meaning — and one of the chief subjects of the historical debate (see Luke the Historian).

The “We” Passages and the Open Ending

At four points the narrative shifts without warning into the first-person plural: “we endeavoured to go into Macedonia” (Acts 16:10), and again through the close of the third journey and the whole voyage to Rome (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–21:18; 27:1–28:16). On the traditional reading these “we” passages mark the stretches where the author was himself present as Paul’s companion — the principal scriptural ground for identifying him with “Luke the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14); the case is set out in Companion of Paul. The book then ends, famously, in the air: Paul dwells two years in Rome under house arrest, “preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him” (Acts 28:30–31). Luke records neither Paul’s trial before Caesar nor his death. Whether this abrupt and victorious close implies that Acts was written before those events — and so dates the book to the early 60s — is one of the standard arguments in the dating question (see The Dating of Luke–Acts).

Acts in the Life of the Church

In the Orthodox Church Acts is not only studied but proclaimed. From Pascha through Pentecost the book is read continuously in the Divine Liturgy, so that the season of the resurrection is also the season in which the Church relives her own birth — fittingly, since Acts is the story of the Spirit who is given at its end (the apostolic age is set within Pre-Schism Church). The Fathers honored it as Scripture: Irenaeus drew on it for the apostolic preaching and named Luke its author (Irenaeus, AH 3.14.1, trans. ANF Vol. 1), and Chrysostom expounded it line by line in fifty-five homilies (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, trans. NPNF Series I Vol. 11). Read as Scripture and prayed in the liturgy, Acts is the Church’s memory of the Spirit’s first work.

References

The Acts of the Apostles, cited by chapter and verse: the prologue (Acts 1:1–2); the programmatic word (Acts 1:8); Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4); Peter’s sermon (Acts 2:14–36); Stephen (Acts 7); the Gentile mission (Acts 10–11); the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:28); the Areopagus speech (Acts 17:22–31); the “we” passages (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–21:18; 27:1–28:16); the open ending (Acts 28:30–31).
The Gospel according to Luke, the dedication to Theophilus (Luke 1:3).
John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 11. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1889. (Homily 1 on the book’s subject and the ignorance of it in his day; the fifty-five-homily course.)
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.14.1. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885. (Luke as author of Acts and the inseparable follower of Paul.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 3.4. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (Luke as author of the Gospel and the Acts.)