Acts of the Apostles — themes & analysis

Fifty days after Passover, on the festival of Shavuot — called Pentecost in Greek, the celebration of the giving of the law at Sinai — the disciples are gathered together in one place in Jerusalem. There is a sound like a rushing mighty wind. Tongues as of fire come to rest on each of them. They are all filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to speak in other languages. The crowd in Jerusalem for the festival — pilgrims from across the Mediterranean and the Near East — hears the disciples each in his own language. Luke names the languages with a deliberateness that is the inverse of the tower of Babel. There the languages were scattered as a judgment; here they are gathered into a single intelligibility, not by everyone speaking one language but by each person hearing his own.

Peter stands and preaches the first Christian sermon. He quotes the prophet Joel — in the last days, says God, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh — and applies the prophecy to what has just happened. He retells the story of Jesus, the crucifixion and resurrection, and applies Psalm 16 to it: God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified. The crowd is cut to the heart and asks what they should do. Peter says: repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Three thousand are baptized that day.

What Pentecost establishes is the pattern the rest of the book follows. The Spirit is the active force; the disciples are instruments; the result is preaching, baptism, and the formation of communities. Every major turning point in Acts is initiated by the Spirit. The Spirit sends Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch in chapter 8. The Spirit tells Peter to go with the men from Cornelius's house in chapter 10. The Spirit sets apart Barnabas and Saul from Antioch in chapter 13. The Spirit forbids Paul to enter Bithynia in chapter 16, redirecting him toward Macedonia and the first European mission. The book is saturated with this language. Luke is making, throughout, an argument that the apostles are usually surprised by what they end up doing. Peter is surprised that he is going to Cornelius's house. The Jerusalem church is surprised that Gentiles are receiving the Spirit. Paul is surprised by the Macedonian call. The disciples are not the protagonists of their own story.

Where to follow it: Acts 2 (Pentecost and Peter's sermon), Acts 8 (Philip and the Ethiopian), Acts 10 (the great sheet at Joppa), Acts 13 (the Spirit sends Barnabas and Saul), Acts 16 (the Macedonian call).

You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth — Acts 1:8, spoken by the risen Jesus just before the ascension. The verse is the table of contents for the book. The narrative does exactly what the verse says it will do. Chapters 1–7 are Jerusalem. Chapter 8 begins with the scattering after Stephen's stoning, which sends the disciples into Judea and Samaria; chapter 8 itself is the Samaritan mission of Philip. Chapters 9–12 widen the circle further, into the coastal cities and into Antioch, where the disciples are first called Christians and where the Gentile mission begins in earnest.

From chapter 13 forward, the geographical reach expands with each journey. Cyprus, southern Asia Minor, central Asia Minor, then across the Aegean into Macedonia and Greece — Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth — then back to Asia Minor for the long Ephesus years, then back through Greece and back to Jerusalem, and from there under guard to Caesarea, by sea to Sidon and Crete and Malta, and finally to Rome. The end of the earth, in the geography of Luke's audience, is Rome. The empire's capital is the natural endpoint of the narrative because Rome is, for the writer's purposes, the symbolic and political horizon of the world the early Christians lived in.

The book ends with Paul there, under house arrest, awaiting his trial before Caesar — which never appears in the narrative — welcoming all who come to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, unhindered. The last word of the book in Greek is akōlytōs — unhindered. Luke ends on that word because the book has been an argument that the gospel cannot be hindered. Every effort to suppress it has failed. The Sanhedrin tried in Jerusalem; Stephen was killed and the gospel went out into Samaria. Herod killed James and imprisoned Peter; Peter was rescued by an angel. Paul was arrested in Jerusalem; Roman tribunes protected him. Storms and shipwrecks have not stopped him. He is now in Rome. The apostle's eventual death — probable under Nero in the mid-60s — is not narrated because, on Luke's reading, it is not the point.

Where to follow it: Acts 1:8 (the programmatic verse), Acts 8 (scattering into Samaria), Acts 13 (the first journey begins), Acts 17 (Athens and the Areopagus), Acts 28 (Rome — akōlytōs).

Acts is structured around two great figures, and the symmetry of the structure is part of the writing. Peter is the protagonist of the first half (chapters 1–12), Paul of the second (13–28). The transition is gradual. Peter's last major scene is his miraculous escape from Herod's prison in chapter 12; Paul's first missionary journey begins in chapter 13. The two meet at the Jerusalem Council in chapter 15; after that, Peter disappears entirely from the narrative.

Luke's portrait of Peter is consistent with the gospel's portrait. He is impulsive, devoted, often surprised by what God is doing. He preaches at Pentecost, heals a lame man at the temple gate, defies the Sanhedrin (we must obey God rather than men), is delivered from prison by an angel. Most importantly, he is the first apostle to baptize a Gentile. The Cornelius episode in chapters 10–11 is the structural pivot. Peter has a vision at Joppa of a great sheet let down from heaven full of all kinds of unclean animals; a voice tells him to kill and eat; he refuses; the voice replies: what God has cleansed, you must not call common. The vision repeats three times. As Peter is wondering what it means, men arrive from Cornelius's house in Caesarea, asking him to come. He goes. He preaches. The Spirit falls on the Gentile household before he has finished speaking. He has them baptized.

Paul's portrait is more complex. He appears first as the young Pharisee Saul, holding the cloaks of those who stone Stephen. In chapter 9 he is on the road to Damascus, meaning to arrest Christians there, when he is struck blind by a vision of the risen Jesus and converted. Luke tells the conversion story three times in the book — once as narrator in chapter 9, once in Paul's defense before the Jerusalem crowd in chapter 22, once before King Agrippa in chapter 26. The repetition is deliberate. The two figures together carry the book's theological argument. Peter, the disciple of Jesus, opens the door to the Gentiles. Paul, the former persecutor turned apostle, walks through it and carries the gospel to the empire. The order matters. Luke is at pains to show that the Gentile mission is not a Pauline innovation against the Jerusalem apostles but a development that began with Peter, was confirmed at the Jerusalem Council, and was carried forward by Paul with full apostolic backing.

Where to follow it: Acts 2 (Peter at Pentecost), Acts 9 (Paul on the Damascus road), Acts 10 (Peter and Cornelius), Acts 15 (both at the Jerusalem Council), Acts 26 (the third conversion account).

Acts 15 is the structural centre of the book and the most consequential meeting in early Christian history. The question is whether Gentile converts to the Christian movement must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses. Some men from Judea have been teaching in Antioch that without circumcision they cannot be saved. Paul and Barnabas have argued against them. The dispute cannot be settled in Antioch, and the church sends them to Jerusalem to put the question to the apostles and elders.

The meeting itself is described with surprising restraint. There is much debate. Peter stands and reminds the council of what happened with Cornelius — God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith. Why then are you putting God to the test by placing on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? Paul and Barnabas describe the signs and wonders God has done among the Gentiles through them. James, the brother of the Lord, who appears here as the leading figure in the Jerusalem church, gives the verdict: his judgment is that the Gentiles not be troubled, and need only abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. No circumcision. A letter is sent to the Gentile churches.

The decision is one of the most consequential in the history of religion. It cuts the cord that had tied the new movement to the boundaries of Israel and makes possible the transformation of a Jewish messianic sect into a religion that could spread across the Roman empire and beyond. Without the Jerusalem Council, there is no Gentile Christianity in any form modern readers would recognize. With it, the door is open, and the Pauline mission of chapters 13–28 can do what it does. Luke's careful framing — the speeches in order, the Spirit's role explicit, the consensus of the apostles and elders — is his argument that the decision was not a Pauline coup but the considered judgment of the whole apostolic church together.

Where to follow it: Acts 10–11 (Cornelius — the founding precedent), Acts 15 (the council itself), Acts 21 (Paul reports back to Jerusalem).

The last verse of Acts is unexpectedly brief, and readers have noticed for two thousand years that the book does not end the way one would expect. Paul has been on trial in Caesarea before the governors Felix and Festus, has appealed as a Roman citizen to the emperor's court, has been put on a ship for Italy, has survived a hurricane and a shipwreck off Malta, and has finally arrived in Rome. The book gives one chapter to his arrival and to the meetings with the Jewish community there. Then the closing two verses: he lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. The book ends. There is no trial, no verdict, no death.

What happened to Paul? Early Christian tradition holds that he was tried, possibly released for a time, and finally executed under Nero, probably in the mid-60s, beheaded by sword as a Roman citizen on the Ostian Way outside Rome. Luke, writing twenty or thirty years later, would have known what happened. He chooses not to tell the reader. The ending is deliberate. The book is not the biography of Paul; it is the story of how the gospel reached the ends of the earth. By the end of chapter 28, the gospel is in Rome, being preached openly and without hindrance. The final word of the book in Greek is akōlytōs — unhindered — and Luke ends on it because that is the point.

The ending also leaves the reader in a particular position. The book stops while the work is unfinished. The kingdom is being preached in Rome, but the world has not been reached; the imperial trial has not happened; the apostle is alive and teaching. The narrative is open. The implication, for the reader of the next generation and every generation after, is that the work continues. Luke's last word is an instruction the book never quite says aloud: keep going.

Where to follow it: Acts 25 (the appeal to Caesar), Acts 27 (the shipwreck), Acts 28 (Rome — the final word).