Acts of the Apostles

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The Acts of the Apostles is the fifth book of the New Testament: a continuous narrative of the first Christian generation, opening where the Gospel of Luke ends — with the risen Jesus departing — and following the movement he left behind as it spread from Jerusalem outward to Rome. It is the one early Christian text that sets out to tell, at length, what happened next.

The book presents itself as the second half of a single work. Its prologue is addressed, like Luke’s, to one Theophilus — a name that means “friend of God,” and may be a patron, a class of reader, or both — and from antiquity the two volumes have been ascribed to Luke, a companion of Paul; on the strength of that pairing scholars commonly speak of “Luke-Acts” as one author’s project. The attribution is traditional rather than certain. The text names no author; the ascription to Luke surfaces only in the later second century, with Irenaeus and the Muratorian list, and rests in part on stretches of the narrative that shift without warning into the first-person plural — the so-called “we passages,” where the storyteller travels with Paul by sea and land. Whether that “we” records an eyewitness, a borrowed source, or a convention of ancient sea-voyage writing is among the durable problems of the book. Most critical study now places the composition late in the first century or early in the second, a generation or more after the events it describes; Richard Pervo, whose 2009 Hermeneia commentary is the standard recent treatment, argues for a date around 115, on the grounds that the writer knows Paul’s letters as a gathered collection and draws on Josephus, and that his preoccupations are those of the early second-century apologists. What the text offers is therefore not a contemporary report but an ordered account, shaped to a purpose: to show the gospel moving by stages, under what the writer presents as divine direction, from a Jewish sect in Judaea into the gentile cities of the empire.

The two-part spine

Its narrative spine is two figures. The first half turns on Peter and the Jerusalem community, beginning with Pentecost — the descent of the Holy Spirit on the gathered disciples fifty days after the resurrection. A sound like a rushing wind fills the house; tongues as of fire rest on each of them; they begin to speak, and the pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks hear, each in his own language, the praise of God. The scene is the book’s engine. What was promised in the Gospels arrives, and the scattered followers of a crucified teacher become a community that preaches in the open and adds thousands at a stroke. Peter’s first sermon sets the pattern for the speeches that punctuate the whole work — a third of Acts is direct address, the writer’s chief instrument for interpreting his own story.

What follows in the early chapters is a portrait of that first community living by a single purse. They hold their goods in common, sell what they have, and lay the proceeds at the apostles’ feet, so that none among them is in want; the practice is reported as a mark of the Spirit’s presence rather than a program, and Acts notes both its glory and its first fracture, in the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, who keep back part of the price and lie about it. Out of the same community comes the office of deacon, and out of that office the book’s first martyr: Stephen, seized for blasphemy, who answers his accusers with a long recital of Israel’s history and is stoned outside the city while a young man named Saul holds the cloaks of the killers. The death of Stephen scatters the believers and, in the book’s economy, plants the gospel in the very places persecution drives it.

The second half follows that same Saul, who becomes Paul. His conversion on the road to Damascus — a light, a voice, three days blind — is told three times in the book, a repetition that signals its weight. From there Acts traces his journeys through Asia Minor and Greece: the founding of congregations at Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus; the speech to the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers on the Areopagus at Athens, where Paul meets the Greek world on its own ground, points to its altar to an unknown god, and quotes its own poets back to it; the riots and arrests; the long voyage and shipwreck on Malta; and his arrival at the capital of the Roman empire, where the book stops without recording his fate. Acts is, among other things, a map of the Mediterranean as the gospel crossed it — its provincial titles, its sea-lanes, its courts and custody — and the accuracy of that map has been a battleground of its modern study. Between the two halves stands the turn on which the whole narrative pivots: the council at Jerusalem, where the question of whether gentile converts must be circumcised and keep the Mosaic law was put and answered. The decision — that they need not — is the moment a Jewish renewal movement becomes a religion open to the nations, and Acts presents it as reached by the apostles and elders together, under the Spirit, rather than imposed. Everything after it is the working out of that opening. The last chapter leaves Paul in Rome under guard, in his own rented lodging, receiving all who come and preaching the kingdom for two whole years without hindrance — and there the narrative simply stops. It does not record his trial, his release, or his death, though the writer, composing decades later, surely knew how the story ended. The silence is one of the book’s puzzles: read by some as evidence of an early date, before Paul’s execution; by others as a deliberate close, the gospel reaching the empire’s center being the point at which the writer wished to leave it, unhindered and still in motion.

Simon in Samaria

For the Western esoteric tradition, one brief episode has carried weight out of all proportion to its length. After Stephen’s death the believers scatter, and Philip carries the gospel into Samaria, where he finds a man already there before him: Simon, a magician whom the people called “the power of God that is called Great.” Simon Magus accepts baptism with the rest; then, seeing the apostles confer the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands, he offers them money for the same power and is met with a curse rather than a price — his silver to perish with him. From that exchange descends the word simony, the buying or selling of sacred office, which outlived the man by many centuries and became a charge that shook the medieval church. The verses themselves are spare. They give Simon no doctrine, leave him chastened rather than condemned, and say nothing of what became of him.

The few lines became the seed of a vast later literature. To the heresiologists, Simon was not a footnote but a fountainhead. Justin Martyr, himself a Samaritan, reported in the middle of the second century that Simon came from the village of Gitta, worked wonders at Rome in the reign of Claudius, was honored there as a god, and traveled with a woman named Helena whom he had redeemed from a brothel at Tyre and named the First Thought, the ennoia of his mind. Irenaeus took up the story and made it structural: Simon was the source from which every later heresy flowed, the first in a genealogy of error that ran through his disciple Menander down to the great Gnostic teachers. Helena, on this telling, was the divine Thought fallen into matter, mother of the angels who made the world, bound and reborn through successive female bodies — Helen of Troy among them — until Simon descended to redeem her, and through her, the souls who knew him. Hippolytus preserved a Simonian treatise, the Great Declaration, with its cosmology of fire and its triple formula of the power that has stood, stands, and will stand; Epiphanius placed Simon at the head of his catalog of sects. By the time the catalogs were complete, the magician of eight verses had been made the first heretic and the wellspring of Gnosticism itself — the disreputable root the orthodox party needed to give a diffuse and threatening phenomenon a single, namable origin.

A second Simon, more legendary still, grows out of the apocryphal Acts of Peter and the Pseudo-Clementine literature. There he becomes Peter’s recurring antagonist, a sorcerer who animates statues and raises the appearance of the dead, and who at last attempts to fly above the Roman Forum before the apostle’s prayer brings him crashing to earth, broken in three places. The contest between true and false wonder-working proved one of the most durable stories the early church produced: the pact-bound magician undone by his own ambition is among the threads that later feed the legend of Faust, and Simon is sometimes named as its remote ancestor. How much of all this attaches to a real first-century teacher, and how much was assembled by his opponents, cannot be recovered from sources that are hostile, late, and dependent on one another. What can be said is that a Samaritan teacher of that name and reputation seems to have existed, that a movement bearing his name was known in the second century, and that the Simonian milieu belongs to a wider world of Samaritan and Mesopotamian baptizing sects — the same currents from which the Mandaeans, the last surviving Gnostic baptizers, also draw — in which the boundaries between sacrament, gnosis, and magic were not yet drawn where the church would later draw them. Simon stands at the place where Acts touches the esoteric directly: the point at which the conferring of the Spirit and the purchase of power are set side by side, and the line between them is made the test.

Genre and the shape of the telling

Acts has been read as history, and it carries the furniture of history — named officials, sea-lanes, the titles of provincial governors, the legal machinery of Roman custody, much of it accurate enough to have impressed generations of readers. But it is history written to a shape. The speeches are the writer’s compositions in the manner of ancient historiography; the parallels between Peter and Paul are too neat to be accidental, each healing, each imprisoned, each delivered; and the providential pattern — the gospel always advancing, never finally checked — governs the selection at every turn. Pervo and others have pressed the comparison with the ancient novel: a narrative that uses real persons and places but moves by the conventions of adventure, with storms and prison breaks and trials and recognitions, written less to record than to persuade and delight. Where exactly Acts sits between the historian and the novelist is the question its modern study turns on, and the answer changes what kind of evidence the book is taken to be — for the events it narrates, and for the world of the writer who shaped them.

Reception, text, and scholarship {#research}

Christians have read Acts above all as the record of the church’s birth — the moment the Spirit promised in the Gospels arrives and the community begins. It is read in the liturgy through the weeks after Easter, and the Pentecost account is among the most frequently depicted scenes in Christian art. Its episodes have furnished the tradition with some of its most enduring images: the tongues of fire, the conversion light on the Damascus road, the stoning of Stephen, the shipwreck on Malta. For the historian of religion the book is doubly valuable — as the earliest narrative of Christian origins and, in its hostile glance at Simon, as one of the doorways through which the later study of Gnosticism enters. The first martyr-account it preserves, in Stephen, also gave the church the form its martyrologies would take; the deaths it records, and the persecutions that scatter its believers, are read in the tradition as the soil in which the movement grew rather than the frost that killed it.

The Greek text is established through the standard critical editions of the New Testament — the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece and the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament — and Acts presents a textual problem peculiarly its own: it survives in two distinct forms, the shorter “Alexandrian” text and a longer “Western” text, the latter best known from Codex Bezae, which is nearly a tenth fuller and rewrites many scenes. Which is closer to the original, or whether both descend from a single author’s hand, remains unresolved. The fullest recent critical commentary is Richard Pervo’s Acts: A Commentary in the Hermeneia series (Fortress, 2009), which replaced Hans Conzelmann’s volume and argues for the late dating and the novelistic reading; Pervo set out the dating case separately in Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Polebridge, 2006). Earlier landmark treatments include Ernst Haenchen’s commentary and the five-volume Beginnings of Christianity edited by Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake.

For the Simonian afterlife, the primary sources are the heresiologists themselves. Irenaeus’s account stands at Against Heresies I.23, where Simon and Helena are first set out as a system; Justin’s notice is at First Apology 26, and Hippolytus preserves the Great Declaration in Book VI of the Refutation of All Heresies. The most influential modern attempt to read Simon sympathetically, against the grain of his accusers, is G. R. S. Mead’s Simon Magus: An Essay (1892), a Theosophical reconstruction that treats the sources as the distorted remains of a genuine teacher — a frame current scholarship regards as more generous than the evidence allows, but which preserves and translates the ancient testimony in one place. The critical reassessment of the whole “first heretic” construction belongs to Stephen Haar’s Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (de Gruyter, 2003) and Alberto Ferreiro’s study of his medieval and legendary afterlives.

The book ends, as it began, in motion: Paul in Rome, teaching, the journey unfinished on the page.

→ In the library: Mead — Simon Magus: An Essay (1892)

→ Related: Pentecost · Gnosis · Psalms · Reformed Christianity · New Testament · Paul The Apostle · Christianity · Simon Magus · Gnosticism · Irenaeus · Justin Martyr · Hippolytus · Mandaeism