Explain the Purpose of Acts of the Apostles.

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James Sandberg        RE – GRP        20/04/2007

Explain the Purpose of Acts of the Apostles.

“In one sense Acts is the most important book in the New Testament. It is the simple truth that if we did not possess Acts, we would have, apart from what we could deduce from the letters of Paul, no information whatever about the early church.” – William Barclay (Acts of the Apostles 1976).

This book is called the “Acts of the Apostles” but other from Paul this book only mentions three other Apostles, in Acts 12:2 we get a brief account that says James, brother of John was executed by Herod, john also appears in the book, but he never speaks, nor are we given any information about him. Peter is the only other Apostle (apart from Paul) who the Author goes into any detail on. But even Peter, Jesus’ rock, soon fades from the scene.

In Greek there is no ‘The’ at the beginning of the sentence, the correct title is “Acts of Apostolic Men” – (Ronald Brownrigg) and this is what it is, a series of typical acts from the early heroic figures of the early church.

To understand this question one must first understand the entire problem with which scholars are struggling with, and one of the key questions is: Who wrote Acts? Was it Luke? Who most modern scholars believe it to be. Or is it some other unnamed person? In the entire New Testament Luke is only mentioned three times: Colossians 4:14, Philemon 24:2 and 2 Timothy 4:11. This makes it very hard to find out any information about Luke him self. We know that there was a Luke who was a physician and that he might have been with Paul at key moments, but that is mainly speculation. It is dedicated to Theophilus just as the Gospel according to Luke was. But this is not definite proof that they were written by the same person, for Theophilus, if he truly existed could have had both books made by different people. Some people say that if Luke is who we think he is then, he could not possibly have been the author, because he dies not show the kind of knowledge we would expect of a close associate of Paul. But then this is not really very accurate, because it would depend on when Luke wrote Acts. If he wrote it many years later, then he memory of the event might have been clouded, and everyone sees different events in different ways. So if the Author went around interviewing people so that he could get many peoples point of view then he might have got conflicting information, and this might have come through slightly in his writing. Fitzmyer and Barrett both say that there is more evidence pointing to Luke than to any other person, and there is more pointing to him, than away from him. So for the purpose of this essay I will refer to the Author of Acts of the Apostles as Luke.

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“There are two ways of writing History. There is the way that attempts to trace the course of events from week to week and from day to day; and there is a way that, as it were, opens a series of windows and gives us vivid glimpses of great moments and personalities of any period. The second way is the way of Acts” – William Barclay (Acts of the Apostles Vol. III 1976). This quote suggests that Acts wasn’t written as a boring narrative (as any reader will know) but as an overview of about 35 years in the ...

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