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, 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, and 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. 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.

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, who are said to speak in tongues understood by pilgrims from many nations. The second half follows Paul: his conversion on the road to Damascus, his journeys through Asia Minor and Greece, his arrest, and his arrival in Rome, where the book stops without recording his fate. Along the way it records the early community’s shared possessions, its first martyr in Stephen, and the council at Jerusalem where the question of whether gentile converts must keep the Jewish law was put and answered.

For the Western esoteric tradition, one episode has carried disproportionate weight: the meeting in Samaria with Simon, a magician whom the people called “the power of God that is called Great,” and who is said to have offered the apostles money for the gift of conferring the Spirit — the act from which the word simony descends. The few verses Acts gives him became the seed of a vast later literature. To the heresiologists he was the first heretic, the fountain of Gnosticism; in the apocryphal Acts of Peter he is Peter’s flying rival, brought down in mid-air. How much of this attaches to a real first-century teacher, and how much was assembled by his opponents, remains an open and much -debated question.

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. 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