THE Acts of the Apostles is essential reading for anyone wanting to be instructed in the Christian faith. As well as bringing many other spiritual benefits, Acts provides vital background to the New Testament Epistles.
After the memorial service to Charlie Kirk in September, TCW editor Kathy Gyngell issued a powerful challenge to British Christians: ‘What touched me most about the memorial to Charlie Kirk held in Arizona on Sunday . . . was the way speakers spoke so openly, eloquently and unaffectedly about their deep Christian faith.
‘This is something British people of faith find difficult, preferring to keep their faith, and maybe their doubt, private. Or perhaps they are simply not sufficiently versed in it.
‘Listening to the speakers, their confidence about and knowledge of their faith was palpable. Speaker after speaker showed how well they knew the Bible, Old Testament and New (story by story, passage by passage and by heart) in a way that few Brits are ever taught it – that is to say, meaningfully.’
The church leaders who finalised the order of the 27 books of the New Testament for the Latin Bible in the late 4th Century AD made a very wise choice in placing Acts after the four Gospels as a bridge to the New Testament Epistles. To become instructed in Christianity, it makes absolute sense to read the four Gospels followed by Acts and then to dig into the Epistles.
The 1990 Bible Speaks Today commentary by the late Dr John Stott (1921-2011) is an excellent aid to reading Acts. Stott’s commentary, which includes the text of Acts in the New International Version, is broken up into manageable sections for a busy person using it as part of their daily devotions.
Stott was the scholar-pastor Rector of All Souls Langham Place in central London. His commentary provides a useful chronological table dating the key events in the Acts narrative alongside the relevant happenings in the Roman Empire.
Acts was written by the same author as Luke’s Gospel. Though he is not named in either work, early church tradition identified him as the ‘beloved physician’ whom the Apostle Paul named as Luke in his letter to the Colossians. The author was one of Paul’s fellow missionaries and travelling companions, as evidenced by the ‘we’ sections in the Acts narrative.
Stott engages lucidly with critical scholars inclined to discredit Luke as a reliable historian. His comments on the passages featuring Roman officials and the application of Roman law helpfully draw out Luke’s expertise in such technical details.
For example, commenting on Paul’s arrest in Philippi in Acts 16 after the apostle had expelled an evil spirit from a slave girl who was making money for her owners by fortune-telling, Stott writes: ‘Luke’s account of what happened in Philippi accurately reflects the situation in a Roman colony. The slave owners dragged Paul and Silas into the agora, which was not only the market-place but the centre of a city’s public life. They then brought them before the strategoi, that is the two praetors who acted as magistrates in a Roman colony.’
Luke addressed both works to the ‘most excellent Theophilus’ (loved by God), very probably a high-ranking Roman who had converted to Christianity. Luke opens Acts thus: ‘In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.’
Stott writes: ‘Here Luke tells us how he thinks of his two-volume work on the origins of Christianity, which constitutes approximately one quarter of the New Testament. He does not regard volume one as the story of Jesus Christ from his birth through his sufferings and death to his triumphant resurrection and ascension, and volume two as the story of the church of Jesus Christ from its birth in Jerusalem through its sufferings by persecution to its triumphant conquest of Rome some thirty years later.
‘For the contrasting parallel he draws between the two volumes was not between Christ and his church, but between two stages of the ministry of the same Christ. In his former book he has written about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven . . . in this his second book [he implies] he will write about what Jesus continued to do and teach after his ascension, especially through the apostles whose sermons and authenticating “signs and wonders” Luke will faithfully record.’
Kathy’s challenge stands. Surely the best way for us British Christians to address it is to read through the New Testament in the order in which the church fathers so wisely arranged it?
