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The Book of Acts:
The Church Begins
After decades of examining the details mentioned in Acts, Sir
William Ramsay concluded: "Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely
are his statements of fact trustworthy, he is possessed of the true historic sense
. . . In short this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."
by Mario Seiglie
As discussed in recent issues of The
Good News, archaeologists have made many discoveries that verify and illuminate
our understanding of the four Gospels. After the Gospels, the next section in the
New Testament we will survey is the books of the Acts of the Apostles, or simply
Acts.
The book of Acts is simply a continuation of one of the Gospel accounts. Luke compiled his Gospel about Jesus Christ as the first volume of a two-part work. In his first manuscript he covered the life of Jesus; in the second he described the early history of the Church Jesus founded.
The Expositor's Bible Commentary notes: "The Acts of the Apostles is the name given to the second part of a two-volume work traditionally identified as having been written by Luke, a companion of the apostle Paul. Originally the two volumes circulated together as two parts of one complete writing" (Richard Longenecker, 1981, Vol. 9, p. 207).
Luke explains to Theophilus, to whom he dedicated this work, the purpose of his first tome: "The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, until the day in which He was taken up ..." (Acts 1:1-2). The phrase former account in this first verse is proton logos in Greek. It refers to the first papyrus roll of a larger work, called in Greek tomos, from which we get our English word tome.
In the second scroll Luke relates events that took place after Jesus "was parted from them (the disciples) and carried up into heaven" (Luke 24:51). It covers about the first 30 years of Church history.
A scholar attacks Acts
About a century ago British scholar William Ramsay focused on the book of Acts to try to show it was rife with geographical and archaeological errors. After all, many scholars of his day, equipped with the tools of textual criticism and archaeology, had exposed many errors in other classic writings. This eminent humanity professor diligently prepared himself by studying archaeology and geography before departing for the Middle East and Asia Minor in his quest to prove Luke's history of the early Church was mostly myth.
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