Prolegomenon: Initial Considerations for Reading This Commentary

Prolegomenon: Initial Considerations for Reading This Commentary

Initial Considerations for Reading This Commentary

I offer some introductory words about the commentary here. Because the eighteen chapters that follow compose this commentary’s introduction to Acts, and because the introductory words here are too extensive for a preface (this chapter’s original title), I have simply called this introduction to the commentary a “prolegomenon.”

Most readers, and especially most users of reference works, give little attention to the prolegomena. For such readers, I simply note that this commentary is primarily academic, with a heavy emphasis on social and historical context (in addition to the necessary attention to Acts itself, of course). Such observations would be obvious, in any case.

Those who wish a more detailed description will find it following, primarily along these lines: the commentary’s academic and social-historical emphasis; its explicit limitations; the legitimacy of a particularly social-historical approach; the legitimacy and methodology of investigating questions concerning historical understanding and reliability; my approach to the sources used in this commentary; the commentary’s genre; and my use of nomenclature in this work.

A reader who scans this commentary will quickly perceive that it is more an academic than a popular commentary, although I have tried to make it accessible (e.g., using English rather than Greek where feasible) for less academic readers who are at least proficient enough to know what material to skip or skim. An academic reader would also note that it is, in a less thoroughgoing way, more consistently social-historical than literary (in terms of modern literary approaches), although I do regularly (and must inevitably) emphasize literary connections within Luke-Acts.

I offer this observation to define the primary character of this commentary, not to diminish the importance of other audiences or approaches. I have written commentaries and other works on a less detailed level, and because of space constraints, a greater proportion of their content was literary-theological than here. Because of my years of research on the environment of Luke-Acts—information to which most readers would otherwise not have ready access without duplicating that effort—I have invested more space in conveying this knowledge than in insights that many other readers would arrive at without this commentary.

Frequent readers of book reviews recognize that some reviewers critique commentaries for not adhering to the reviewer’s primary interest (e.g., literary, historical, social-historical) or ideology (e.g., conservative, critical, sacramental, antisacramental), even when commentators specify the limitations of their works. Especially for large publications, some reviewers address only a work’s introduction, which can be helpful when an introduction sets a work’s tone but less helpful when (as often in a commentary) the introduction must devote much space to disposing of topics that cannot be treated in detail with each recurrence in the commentary.

Nevertheless, I hope that this commentary will prove useful even to those who would have preferred a different focus or different conclusions on various matters. Whatever their particular focus, most scholars recognize the relevance of how Acts would have sounded to its first audiences (insofar as we can reconstruct this meaning to a sufficiently useful degree of accuracy). Grappling with ancient sources, I endeavor, where possible, to offer fresh literary insight on texts (such as on the mission sign function of tongues and the inverted charges in the narrative of Stephen’s martyrdom) and their social-historical setting (such as the meaning of Asiarchs as Paul’s patronal “friends” in Acts 19:31 or ancient understanding of the fever in 28:8 or the forensic strategies in Paul’s defense speeches); and I highlight patterns in Acts (such as commenting on the apologetic inversion of the charges that Paul disturbed the peace and periodically citing philosophic parallels to Paul to develop Luke’s implicit comparison of Paul with Stoic philosophers beyond the often-noted case in 17:16–34). Likewise, in the abundant cases where my contributions accord more closely with past research, I hope that scholars will find valuable the frequently new supporting documentation (e.g., for figurative voting in 26:10).

This commentary’s primary focus is what the text meant to its first audience. Its primary contributions lie in often providing further documentation for, and sometimes further elaboration of, the social and historical framework in which Acts was first written, read, and heard. Many of the sources I cite inevitably overlap with previous discussions, but (as the indexes should attest) much of the primary material referenced here has not been applied to Acts before. Biblical readers and expositors, and the scholars who serve them, may observe some basic literary themes with or without detailed aids (although often through methodological advances and observations pioneered by literary critics). Most modern students are not, however, as conversant in the contexts of the ancient sources, which help us better resonate with how an ancient audience would have heard the text. Hence I have focused special attention on this task.

Still, because Acts is a literary text, it is impossible to properly expound it without attention to literary questions, besides those related to its social context. Ancient readers themselves understood implicit rules of genre, such as using the entire narrative of a historical work to provide meaning for the ideas in such a work. Moreover, because the implicit genre of Acts appears to be some form of ancient historical monograph, its literary function within its Greco-Roman context invites not only more direct questions of “theological” application but also discussions about questions of historical accuracy and verisimilitude (by the broader standards of ancient, as opposed to modern, historiography). For modern interests, such questions include examining where in the range of historical monographs Acts lies in accomplishing the purposes for which most historians composed such monographs. Thus, even while engaging contemporary discussions of the broader social context that Luke-Acts first addressed, I must broach some current discussions of literary and historical issues.

My minimal employment of some methods is not intended as disrespect for those methods but merely reflects my own limitations and specialized focus, especially in view of the danger of making this work even larger than it already is. While seeking to provide a commentary of some general value, I have concentrated on areas where I believe my own research’s contributions will be the most useful. One must circumscribe the task in order to keep a work’s size under control—a constraint that has limited even the detail I can devote to the primary questions to which I address this commentary. As the Greek historian Polybius pleaded with his critics long ago, “A good critic should not judge authors by what they omit, but by what they relate.”

As noted above, whereas I have sometimes drawn on the insights of technical literary approaches that are not my focus, my use of them (apart from a holistic approach to Luke-Acts) has been restrained. Had I focused on them, I could afford less attention to other aspects of Acts study. (This does not mean that I have ignored literary dimensions of the text itself; without attention to these, even historical “context” would be meaningless, since a commentator would not know which elements of the vast ancient context were relevant.) The following are valuable areas of research to which I give much less detailed attention than I could.

First, this commentary is social-historical and, in some sections, rhetorical in its focus and does not focus as much attention on lexical or grammatical details (a matter treated adequately by a number of other works). Particularly because, after this commentary’s completion, my publisher graciously titled it “exegetical” (not my original title), I must qualify what sort of “exegesis” my commentary actually involves. (The English term can involve simply “explanation” or “interpretation,” though some employ it more narrowly.) A social-historical commentary on a relatively large narrative text such as Acts cannot pause to discuss the full semantic range of particular words except where those meanings are necessary for understanding the flow of thought in the passage (e.g., σωφροσύνη, for 26:25). A few reviewers disapproved of the lack of extensive treatment of grammatical and lexical details in my thousand-page commentary on Matthew, though generally appreciating the social and historical background less available elsewhere.

Such basic lexical information is, however, readily available on a basic level through computer searches that put at the reader’s fingertips not only the LXX and NT grammar but the vocabulary of nearly all extant Greek literature and papyri. To duplicate such information here would easily more than double the size (and, unfortunately, therefore increase the publishing cost) of this commentary. I would be depending on the same excellent resources (especially the most thorough of them all, the Thesaurus linguae graecae and Duke University’s papyrology database) as anyone else working through the Greek text. Most exegesis students already have available electronic parsing, the repetition of which here seems tedious. Of course, many useful sources do offer important help choosing among lexical options and unraveling many of Luke’s sentences, but there are also some commentaries that, despite liberal appearances of Greek words, offer no information that a student could not have acquired from standard reference works.

While valuing all of these important works, I have chosen instead to focus more often (though not exclusively) on conceptual parallels to provide the reader what she or he would find elsewhere only with greater difficulty (i.e., by working through the various ancient sources for many years). Even here I have often simply listed in footnotes a variety of ancient texts, though originally collected laboriously in their contexts by reading through ancient literature, instead of commenting extensively on each of these sources; the latter approach, though of interest to specialists, would have required me to write books on chapters in Acts rather than a commentary on the whole.

In some cases I have elaborated points more extensively. Some of these were points where modern interest in the question invited exploration (such as the nature of the experiences often discussed in other disciplines with respect to Acts 2:4 and Acts 2:17–18). More frequently, where my own reading of ancient literature yielded particularly abundant material differing from modern cultural practices, organizing and deploying this material invited more detailed treatment, sometimes in excursuses (e.g., at Acts 3:2; 8:27; 12:13; 17:18; 18:3; and hospitality in 16:15).

Second, although I do not neglect textual questions at necessary points, I have provided far less attention to text-critical details than would be possible (or desirable) for a commentary the focus of which was text-critical. The disparity between commentaries focused and those not focused on textual issues may prove especially evident in commentaries on Acts, a book whose textual problems appear particularly problematic. (The Western text is a significant problem, since it constitutes virtually a distinct recension; see the discussion below.)

Ancient critics, like modern ones, asked text-critical questions. Ancient commentators debated the wording of some lines in earlier texts (e.g., Aul. Gel. 1.21). Some ancient teachers edited their versions of Homer, thinking to correct them (Plut. Alc. 7.1). Polybius, for example, allowed a conjectural emendation of “twice” for the text’s “thrice” in Hom. Od. 12.105 to conform the text to the geography of his day (Polyb. 34.3.11). In one possibly apocryphal account from about the third century B.C.E., when Aratus asked Timon how to find the reliable text of Homer, Timon instructed him to find an ancient copy without all the modern “corrections” (Diog. Laert. 9.12.113). Likewise Virgil was found in different forms; Aulus Gellius (Aul. Gel. 6.20) claims that Virgil changed an earlier reading to the later one and explains the reason. Amoraim claimed (long after the temple’s destruction) that scrolls could be corrected by being checked against the scroll in the temple (y. Sanh. 2:6, §3). Some ancient (e.g., Origen), medieval (e.g., Bede), and Renaissance humanist (e.g., Erasmus) Christian scholars engaged in text criticism.

Still, because the focus of this commentary is not on lexical or syntactical details but on the larger level of broader cultural connections to the ideas or customs alluded to in the text (and to a lesser extent the macrolevel of literary patterns in Luke-Acts), minor textual variants will prove less important here than in some other commentaries (especially those with a heavier lexical focus). Although my primary focus in the commentary is not text-critical, however, I must provide some general comments about the text here. The book of Acts provides perhaps the thorniest text-critical situation in the NT; indeed, some scholars contend that “from the earliest times several, or at least two, editions of the book were in currency.” This state of affairs may stem from perhaps the publication of Acts by someone other than the author (due to the author’s death, imprisonment, or other reasons), or from revisions by the author’s circle, or simply from a wide perception that the book was unfinished and (for that reason or because it was not primarily about Jesus) safer to expand than a Gospel. Most works unfinished at an author’s death simply did not survive (as Pliny notes in Ep. 5.8.7), but some unfinished works circulated (see Quint. Inst. 1.pref. 7–8), and an important work might be published with only minor editing in its unfinished form, inviting some further attempts by others to complete elements that were perceived as missing (Suet. Vergil 41).

C. K. Barrett suggests that scribes may have exercised this textual freedom longer in Acts than in most narrative books ultimately accepted in the NT because it took longer for this book to be treated as canonical. The second-century church’s frequent ambivalence about Acts might reflect the genre confusion that persists to this day: neither gospel nor epistle, Acts did not fit expectations for the conventional “canonical” genres.

Some scholars also suggest that Acts is cited only rarely before John Chrysostom because Luke’s interests were rarely those of early patristic theologians and the controversies they faced; it may well have been such “relative obscurity” that “allowed a major second-century revision of Acts, namely, the Western text, to develop unchecked and without correction.” This so-called Western text consists primarily of expansive additions (and a few omissions) and diverges frequently from the likely earliest sources.

Despite the misnomer, the Western text does not appear geographically only in the west; further, it may be attested as early as Irenaeus, although this suggestion is disputed. F. F. Bruce points out that readings of the Western text appear “in versions as apparently independent of each other as the Old Latin and the Old Syriac, both of which go back to the later decades of the second century,” and argues that “it appears in patristic citations” even earlier than the Alexandrian text does. Nevertheless, he concludes on the basis of internal evidence that the Alexandrian text remains more reliable on the whole. Where it is longer than the Alexandrian text, the added material is usually secondary, often reflecting the sort of expansions characteristic of later lectionaries or obvious glosses. In effect, the Western text may constitute the oldest extant commentary on Acts.

Our text of the book of Acts has roughly 5 percent fewer words and 10 percent fewer lines than the Gospel of Luke, which it closely parallels; although this is well within symmetrical range, one could argue that Acts should contain a slightly more expansive text, that is, something like the Western text. (Then again, later “western” editors might have expanded the text of Acts to fill as much of a standard-length scroll as the Gospel does.) Complicating the problem further, its expansions and paraphrases often reflect a Lukan style; one could contend that this stylistic assimilation suggests a later revision by the author himself. While such a position is not impossible, however, in the final analysis arguments for Lukan style in the Western text are not compelling evidence for Lukan authorship. The interpretive editors or copyist(s) may have simply employed a style they had learned by immersing themselves in Acts.

Barrett and Bruce prefer an eclectic method: the accurate text tradition, standing to some degree behind both the Western and Alexandrian traditions, may sometimes turn up in either of these traditions. Still, despite significant dissent, a fairly broad consensus exists among a majority of scholars that the Western text is usually later. Although in some cases the Western reading may preserve the original wording or, much more frequently, reflect at least accurate tradition, most studies suggest that it is mainly secondary. Scholars often argue that the Western variants frequently betray theological bias, especially in an anti-Judaic direction. Many have also noted an antifeminine bias that is perhaps uncomfortable with Luke’s more positive vision: the Western text tradition sometimes moves Aquila’s name before Priscilla’s; in contrast to the Alexandrian text, it applies nobility to both genders in Acts 17:12; and it omits Damaris in 17:34. Some other expansions may reflect early second-century “harmonizing details and ‘gossip’” meant to attract the sort of audience that soon after came to show interest in apocryphal gospels and acts. That the Western text appealed to many church fathers does not guarantee its antiquity. The “fuller” version of any work typically prevailed (hence the preference for Matthew over Mark and the preservation of the longer text of Ignatius); it would not be surprising if the same proved true for the longer recension of Acts.

Critics of the Western text’s priority note four groups of stylistic peculiarities: (1) anti-Jewish elements, (2) a more universalist emphasis, (3) an augmentation of Luke’s emphasis on the Spirit, and (4) honorary expansions of Christ’s name. In the case of inadvertent changes, either text tradition might reflect the earlier readings (although the Western text’s expansive tendencies may make it less careful even in such cases); deliberate changes characteristic of the Western text, however, probably simply underline that tradition’s peculiarities.

Yet even when Western readings are historically speculative (in contrast to when they reflect demonstrable bias, e.g., anti-Judaism), they may often prove helpful. It is likely that they sometimes reflect surmises that are more historically plausible than our own would be, because they stem from the author’s ancient Mediterranean context. It is possible that some of the “gossip” even reflects genuine traditions from members of ancient Mediterranean churches who heard Luke or his colleagues elaborate his stories orally. Oral retellings may use different language to recount the same substance, possibly even of written texts. In a few cases, then, I provide comments on these traditions (e.g., at 19:9). There is, however, no need to duplicate here what has been done better by others. Thus, as in some other standard commentaries, I will not give Western variants the laudable attention they receive in Barrett and elsewhere, although I mention them periodically.

The recognition that the later Byzantine text merits even less attention does not require much argument. First attested in the fourth century and not identifiable in the first few centuries of patristic literature, the Byzantine text represents a revision combining elements of earlier text traditions. Although even the Byzantine text may reflect the earliest form of the text on some occasions, these cases prove the rare exception rather than anything close to the rule.

Third, my contextual approach is primarily social-historical rather than social-scientific, although I have sometimes drawn on insights of social-scientific commentators on Acts. (Where available and where I believe relevant, however, I have drawn on insights from traditional non-Western societies that offer a different approach to the text.) Social-scientific approaches are especially helpful when, lacking concrete ancient data, we must extrapolate by analogy or at least ask questions beyond those assumed by our traditional cultural perspectives, but they are best employed heuristically. As one scholar points out, these methods “provide an alternative lens. . . .  But they certainly do not serve as substitutes for evidence.” A wide range of scholars have offered similar warnings, concerned that models from some kinds of societies not be imposed on quite different ancient cultures. Some have employed particular modern approaches as a grid without cultural sensitivity. I have thus tried to focus on as wide a range as possible of hard data from antiquity.

I believe that the evidence often points to some general patterns in ancient Mediterranean culture, especially urban Mediterranean culture during the empire. Honor-and-shame issues are much closer to those found in modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies than in, for example, dominant forms of British and North American culture. Nevertheless, extrapolations from modern Mediterranean societies and, still more, from modern societies in other locations must be employed with much more caution than evidence closer in time and geography to the subject itself.

I have tried to make special use of contemporary parallels for phenomena where analogies are abundant in many cultures, including frequently researched anthropological topics such as kinship, spirit possession, and, to a lesser extent, healing and health practices. (I find such studies, drawn from a wide variety of cultures, more helpful than the particular parallels some have offered to Melanesian cargo cults.) Developing the approach of some other scholars, I will also (esp. in below) attempt to compare modern “divine healing” claims with those in Acts, partly as a control on modern speculations about what ancient witnesses “could” have claimed. It seems inconsistent to treat as symbols or old legends healing reports in Acts (concerning signs workers who, for the most part, would have understood literally prior biblical traditions about signs) while at the same time treating in a radically different way (whether as charlatans, therapeutically helpful people of faith, gullible persons, or a combination of such) all signs workers today with analogous biblical understandings. (I hope that readers who often first peruse bibliographies of works, as I often do, will recognize that I cite popular sources at many of these points because I am making comparisons with popular religion; scholars of religious history, of popular religion, and of global religion regularly treat such works as primary sources attesting popular beliefs.)

Because of space constraints and to limit the potential excesses of “comparative religions” approaches that neglect a movement’s distinctiveness, I have limited much of the focus regarding miracle claims (albeit not regarding spirit possession, given the much wider range of anthropological literature available on that topic) to monotheistic movements, especially to those sharing the widest possible range of premises (such as biblical authority) with our subjects in Acts. Even so, using these phenomena to help us understand the motives, intentions, and ideals of people two millennia ago, much less to interpret the content of the phenomena, is precarious, and they must be employed only cautiously, as heuristic tools. I address these questions most frequently in below, where the texture diverges from that of this commentary elsewhere due to the different character of the questions addressed. (I address these questions most fully in my book on miracle narratives.)

Fourth, my goal is not primarily to survey modern opinion on a passage or subject. Although I have cited more secondary sources than many Acts commentaries do, summarizing secondary literature is not my object, and I make no claim to be exhaustive. Researchers seeking fuller bibliographic information have access to databases of journal abstracts (which I have used, though mostly in hard copy over the years), dissertation abstracts, the standard bibliographic tools for Acts study, and a variety of other resources; on these I do not hope to improve. Mattill and Mattill, Bibliography, alone contains 6,646 entries; were my intention to be bibliographically expansive, I could expand my bibliography by simply reproducing their citations at numerous relevant points; but given that work’s date, the reader should note that my bibliography overlaps only fairly rarely in proportion to the number of our respective sources. Thus there is yet more available for an interested researcher in these other resources, and the bibliography in a work such as this one could easily have been doubled.

Conversely, I have made abundant use of New Testament Abstracts in endeavoring to survey contemporary research and opinion for my notes. I have drawn from such resources because I want to be as fair as possible by including as many scholars as possible who have published on these subjects, although detailed interaction would have been more helpful in these many cases had I had further time and space. Given the increasing access to data, those focusing on particular passages can work through much of this information in greater detail. Though giving preference to technical sources, I (like New Testament Abstracts and other resources) have often cited less technical ones, since scholars have sometimes offered their arguments in both forms.

Providing secondary literature is not my primary agenda, however. Anyone can access these sources specifically on Acts, supplementing what this and other commentaries have done. By contrast, most scholars and students researching passages in Acts will not have time to read through a wide range of ancient primary sources, and I have therefore focused especially on providing this information. Even in my use of secondary sources, I have tried to move often beyond what researchers would uncover were they searching only publications on Acts itself, in order to make available additional material that would be more difficult for most students of Acts to acquire without digressing from their focus.

With the rarest exceptions (nearly all as additions to existing footnotes), I can interact little with sources published after the completion of my pre-edited work (mid-2007) and should pause to note here some particularly unfortunate omissions necessitated by the publication dates of other works. I am unable to interact fully, or as fully as deserved, with several excellent commentaries on Acts because they were published too far along in the publication process of my own or because they remain forthcoming at the time of this commentary’s publication.

Among the commentaries reported to be forthcoming of which I am aware is Steve Walton’s commentary for the Word series; among other strengths, this work will surely interact thoroughly with the secondary literature. Among the most thorough narrative analyses will undoubtedly be Joel Green’s commentary for the New International Commentary on the New Testament series, which will undoubtedly offer many insights from which the reader will profit. As in my work here, we should expect special sensitivity to the Greco-Roman context in the commentaries of both Loveday Alexander (Black’s New Testament Commentaries) and Stanley Porter (New International Greek Testament Commentaries); Porter also will attend to lexical and syntactical details far more than is possible in a commentary such as mine. Although undoubtedly none of us would agree with every other commentator on all points (despite concurring on many other points), I write with appreciation for their work. Undoubtedly, many other works will emerge from which I would have profited but that I inadvertently failed to find or that were published too late for my use.

Finally, I will not attend in nearly as much detail to the valuable ancient and medieval interpretations of Acts, although the index will reveal that I do include a range of samples from these writings. This relative omission does not imply a thoroughgoing or necessary preference for dominant modern critical readings against the longer history of interpretation that preceded them (modern views, too, reflect the influence of their own historically conditioned philosophic context). I simply had to limit the scope of my inquiry. My primary purpose is not engagement with secondary scholarship—ancient or modern—and so I have not pursued bibliographic questions in the same detail one would expect from scholars whose focus is the compilation of resources regarding scholarship on Acts.

But to the extent that I have engaged other commentators, I have given much greater attention to modern scholarship. This is primarily because most modern scholars expect commentaries to respond to critical questions debated today, even if these have not always been the most relevant questions for readers over a wider range of history. Modern, like ancient, commentators write for specific contexts, and modern academic commentators are expected to write especially for a modern academic context. Similarly, the careful Catholic scholar Joseph Fitzmyer, confronted with space limitations, complained that he could interact with few sources before 1900.

This limitation is not intended to minimize the value of such earlier voices; it would seem curious to exclude patristic commentators from the conversation about the text yet include modern commentators, whose language and culture are further removed from Luke’s. I have therefore surveyed John Chrysostom’s homilies on Acts and some other patristic sources and made use of Francis Martin’s helpful collection of relevant patristic comments.

To welcome earlier interpretive voices is not, however, to accord them “canonical” status in evaluating how Luke’s first audience would have heard him (the goal emphasized in this commentary). I note this caution for the sake of both those who would have preferred more patristic comments and those who would have preferred fewer. A small but vocal circle of scholars appears to want to use the views of patristic commentators to serve as an essential criterion for evaluating interpretations of earlier biblical texts (although most who value patristic sources employ them more critically). The diversity of views within the patristic corpus itself precludes their supplying a monolithic interpretive grid, in any case.

The greater proximity of the church fathers to Luke in language and culture is valuable, but does not always cause them to yield answers to our modern exegetical and historical questions. Many of them were homileticians more than exegetes, emphasizing contemporary rhetorical strategies. And the extant range of their opinions sometimes differed from ideas suggested by our extant sources for the first century. Factors of historical distance that sometimes could have led patristic writers to interpret first-century Christian texts in a manner different from their earliest settings may include, among others, the prior rise of the Second Sophistic, with its atticizing rhetorical tastes; the increasing dominance of Middle Platonism as over against the Stoicism more dominant in the first century; many of the Fathers’ more elite backgrounds compared with NT writers; the greater anti-Jewish and androcentric bias of their era; decreased sensitivity to the ancient Jewish context of earliest Christianity; the increasing valuing of sexual asceticism in late antiquity; new challenges such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism; new charges against Christians; and the evolution of later church offices and customs to meet new circumstances. That is, extant reception history is itself historically conditioned; though a welcome and valuable conversation partner (including in this commentary), it is not designed to substitute for careful exploration of the first-century setting of our documents.

I offer these caveats not to diminish the value of earlier voices but merely to insist that they, too, had a historical context that was not identical with Luke’s own. Nevertheless, in general, the church fathers were closer to the culture and certainly the language of Luke than are modern commentators, and they do constitute an invaluable source of wisdom on our earliest Christian texts for those who explore them.

In choosing not to focus on the matters noted above (or on some literary approaches noted below), I am not demeaning their importance but limiting this work to the issues where I believe it can advance the greatest contributions. Although I have not neglected all of these matters altogether, some colleagues will inevitably disagree with my decisions on what to include and what to omit. In such cases, I can only request their indulgence, especially in view of the already massive size of this work, hoping that they will find profitable much of what I have included.

Although it may surprise readers in some circles, in the wake of deconstruction not all readers today accept the value (or sometimes even the legitimacy) of social-historical questions. More commonly, scholars may accept the legitimacy of questions concerning how Acts’ earliest audiences would have understood the work, but they may consider those audiences’ understandings simply one set of possible contexts among a potentially infinite array. That is, they accept as legitimate yet ultimately of relatively marginal importance the question of the earliest audiences’ understanding.

But while chronological priority need not dictate theological priority, the very use of an ancient Mediterranean text, composed in Greek and presupposing particular cultural assumptions, invites our attention to the text in the contexts that generated both it and the signs it employs (insofar as these contexts can be reconstructed from the interplay between the text and what we know of Greco-Roman antiquity). Understanding the text in its earliest general cultural context is fundamental in some sense for those subsequent readings for which a major objective remains hearing the text (again, as a collection of signs generated and most directly intelligible in a particular milieu). This approach contrasts with that of some scholars who (at the extreme) are not interested in the basic text of Luke-Acts as it stands (written in Greek and presupposing an ancient context), who simply wish to exploit “canonical” texts to attach canonical status to their own readings or those of their interpretive community. Such readers do not, apart from that conferred status, in fact need these particular texts to communicate the different ideas they prefer to emphasize.

By contrast, the history of subsequent readings from various social locations is a useful historical and sociological study in its own right and, at the same time, useful for critiquing interpreters’ various inherited biases. It also offers clues for translating and recontextualizing the text’s message to various modern audiences (especially for those whose interpretive communities find some authority in these subsequent readings). By evoking analogous responses, such approaches sometimes help readers to appreciate the significance such texts held in their earliest interpretive communities.

Even this useful enterprise differs, however, from our chosen task here, namely, reconstructing (to the fullest extent we are able) how the text would have functioned as a communication between the first author(s) and the historically likeliest sort of audiences for which the author(s) published works. Although I highly value and in my other work regularly emphasize learning from the perspectives of readers in a variety of cultures, our common basis for discussion across cultures is the text and (as best we can reconstruct it) how this text would have been heard by the audience for which its author(s) constructed it with ancient vocabulary, idioms, and cultural assumptions.

Our goal in interpretation shapes the approach we will take to it. To those for whom the earliest text is foundational (or even canonical), the production of readings (however recontextualized) somehow analogous to those most plausible to the text’s ideal audience or at least general first-century culture will be vital and so demand careful attention to the earliest contexts. For others, antiquity remains at least the generative context for the text’s signs, and hence is a necessary context for understanding the text. For yet others, the sense of the work in its earliest, generative context remains at least one historic reading of the text.

Although contemporary literary criticism and historical criticism were once often at odds (primarily because the former was responding to a traditional overemphasis on the latter), most scholars now accept the value of both. The most common approach today is to focus on literary questions in Luke-Acts as a whole, without excluding historical questions. Sharing literary criticism’s contemporary dissatisfaction with hypothetical source reconstructions, I follow this emphasis on reading any part of Luke-Acts in light of other parts despite the limitations of my primary focus.

Many observers think of critical scholarship until the mid-twentieth century as primarily historically oriented, followed by a shift toward interest in rhetorical (persuasive) techniques in the texts. Yet this contrast may be overblown at times: even earlier approaches to Acts scholarship often attended to Luke’s distinctive perspective and approach, and historical interests remain alive and well today. Although this commentary addresses historical questions in the traditional historical-critical sense, its focus is on reconstructing how an ideally informed first-century audience would have heard the book’s message. This is a historical question, but one that is both inseparable from literary questions and distinct from the question of “historical reliability.”

One fruitful blending of historical and literary approaches reads “texts using many of the reading and listening conventions in vogue at the time of composition.” Use of ancient rhetorical principles is therefore one means that contemporary scholars often emphasize and to which we give attention as a literary approach sensitive to Luke’s milieu. Some methods today that emphasize first-time hearers can be supplemented by taking into consideration written works that would have been read on multiple occasions. Although few members of Luke’s ideal audience would have had access to (or competence to handle) personal copies of Luke-Acts, the work may have been read repeatedly in house churches, thus allowing its ideal hearers to pick up nuances and repeated themes not available to first-time hearers. (Ancient readers recognized the value of rereading a document as often as necessary to catch the main themes and subtleties.)

Questions from the broader historical context are inescapable if we concern ourselves with how ancient audiences, whose language and culture the text plainly presupposes, would have heard various passages. For example, Luke does not explicitly mention that Tarsus is in Cilicia until Acts 21:39, but this does not mean that his ideal audience (which did not necessarily include every individual first-century hearer) would have missed the connection with Saul’s homeland in 6:9 (in light of 9:11) or 15:23. His ideal audience would recognize that Tarsus was in Cilicia, because this was common knowledge among even moderately culturally literate urban hearers in the eastern Mediterranean world. Insofar as modern literary theory focuses on communication (a primary purpose of texts), it indicates that “texts display not only internal reference (in relation to structures within the text itself), but also external reference (in relation to circumstances outside the text); they tacitly presuppose the entire cultural knowledge of the period.”

Although some current theories of literary interpretation reject the priority of the author’s historical intention as the “intentional fallacy,” most do not rule out the validity of this historical question, recognizing the author’s intention as at least one level of meaning, especially for readers with historical interest. The modern objection that the author’s intention is unrecoverable, though strictly speaking true with regard to attaining sophisticated levels of certainty, raises the bar too high for historical inquiry. All historical endeavor is necessarily conditioned by probability, and scholars often make probable inferences about the implied author from the text’s literary strategies in their originating context. (Even Wimsatt and Beardsley, in their widely cited seminal work against authorial intention, applied their critique only to aesthetic, poetic texts; they viewed communication as successful only insofar as readers accurately inferred authorial intention.)

Writers such as Luke sought “to communicate with intended readers,” and this purpose helped shape the text as we have it, regardless of how we utilize the text for subsequent purposes foreign to these authors. How one defines “meaning” depends mainly on one’s goal in interpretation, but its originating historical level, in which a writer sought to communicate content in a socially shared system of signs, cannot be ruled out as a valid inquiry.

For those with historical interest, the question is not anachronistic: contrary to some modern suppositions, ancient writers were not shy about debating intention, whether regarding the actions of someone on trial or the purpose of legislators. Indeed, many current literary approaches resemble ancient antecedents, although not all correspond as closely to their alleged ancient analogues as is sometimes supposed. Contrary to what some modern writers have opined, historical interests are not a purely modern concern limited to an Enlightenment mentality; just as the Renaissance emphasized classical learning, the Enlightenment emphasis on historical context harks back to classical models. Readers approach texts for various purposes, but at least one goal with which many readers approach ancient texts is to reconstruct how these texts were heard by their first audience in their ancient setting.

Ancient writers, like modern ones, could assume a degree of shared knowledge on the part of their readers. The readers could examine a writer’s meaning in a text based on that writer’s usage elsewhere. They could also take into account an earlier writer’s historical context; thus, for example, when Dionysius of Halicarnassus practices rhetorical criticism on Thucydides, he complains that the latter employs a style not used even in his own time (Thuc. 29). Ancient writers might likewise note that older texts have grown less intelligible because words and customs have changed, and urge reading these texts in light of the original wording and customs (Aul. Gel. 20.1.6, on Rome’s early laws).

Writers regularly alluded to situations that they did not need to state explicitly because their ideal audiences shared this knowledge; being outside these ideal audiences, we sometimes find ourselves in the dark as to the precise referent of the allusion (e.g., Luke 13:1–4; 2 Thess 2:5). Writers sometimes respond to interlocutors clearly enough that we understand the question (e.g., Sen. Y. Ep. Lucil. 68.1; 74.1; 75.1); at other times, however, we cannot reconstruct the question (e.g., 72.1).

Although most scholars today accept a range of both historical- and literary-critical approaches, as already noted, some do not. For example, Charles Talbert, then editor of the Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series, observed that others had criticized him for not using the form of literary criticism in vogue when he was writing. Talbert responded that his research was directed toward a particular goal that the dominant approaches did not address. He elsewhere points out that the society’s Luke-Acts Group and Luke-Acts Seminar have often focused on setting Acts in its broad Mediterranean context. Following one line of literary criticism, he is concerned with “the authorial audience,” as reconstructed not only from the text but from the cultural world “in which the text was produced.”

Other scholars, interested in addressing the needs of philologists, have developed the text-analytical approach to specific intertextuality, which allows for authorial intention in deliberate associations between texts and their pre-texts. As Andreas Bendlin points out, “The intention of the author and the unity of the transmitted text have not lost their appeal for classical philologists. Here, intertextuality, mostly in its restricted text-analytical form, is employed in analyzing the use of Greek precursors and models in Latin literature.”

Those who reject the value of trying to reconstruct how Luke’s first audience may have heard his text, how the ideal author sought to communicate through this text, or the use of social history in trying to better answer these questions ignore the implicit genre of the text as it would have been understood in the first-century Mediterranean world, which was the setting in which Luke’s Greek vocabulary, syntax, and so forth made the most sense (and for which they were designed). William Kurz, citing speech-act theories, notes that narratives normally occur

in a context of communication. The writer of Luke and Acts was not merely amusing himself by doodling on papyrus or parchment but was attempting to communicate with intended readers through his written text. The key participants and factors of this act of communication are objective (extramental) realities, not figments of readers’ imaginations, as some might deduce from certain forms of literary criticism. Thus the writer of Luke existed as a historical individual, whether or not we can identify him today. If there had been no writer, there would be no text.

Explaining sociostylistic interpretation, Todd Klutz notes that, “like rhetorical criticism, . . .  this type of stylistics assumes that the communicative force of a text’s style usually has something to do with the goals of the text’s producer, whose conformity to expectations of relevance normally entails that the assumed audience and situation are implied in the text itself.” In contrast to formalism’s focus on aesthetic “properties of texts,” “sociostylistics and related linguistic methods pay just as much attention to the extratextual conditions, causes, motives and effects of texts as they do to the aesthetic qualities of the texts themselves.”

To read the text as a whole, we must read it in light of not only the intrinsic data throughout the text but also the extrinsic data that the original communication presupposes. At a minimum, this includes the language in which the text was written (without which the extant alphabetic characters become nothing more than random marks) and the cultural, theological, and literary assumptions that are shared by author and audience without needing to be made explicit. Often the real author and audience also shared knowledge of a more particular situation, although this specific knowledge often eludes us secondary readers (far more than anticipated in the confident assumptions that informed some of an earlier generation’s redaction-critical excesses).

One particularly helpful current approach, grounded in cognitive neuroscience and empirical study of how human communication functions, is relevance theory. This theory observes that a communicator can leave some information implicit because it may be inferred from the social context that the anticipated audience shares with the communicator. Where such information cannot be inferred, the communication fails. Such failure is especially a risk in secondary communication, where we interpret texts not addressed to us, particularly when they were not originally addressed even to our own social or linguistic contexts. Because so much communication depends on inference, Gutt notes that the intended sense “is recoverable not in just any context, but only in a context where the requirements of optimal processing are fulfilled, that is, where there are adequate contextual effects, without unnecessary processing effort.”

I acknowledge the value of many approaches but cannot pursue them all in one commentary. If Luke authored his literary work to communicate a message to an audience, historical information that helps us reconstruct that audience can prove useful in our study of his work and (I believe) foundational to other uses of his work.

In contrast to scholars who avoid extratextual approaches for methodological reasons, some may avoid them because they recognize that they have limited expertise in such areas; such avoidance is, at least, better than pretending expertise they lack. Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, whose expertise in the ancient sources should be self-evident, rightly warn that many NT scholars show little acquaintance with the ancient sources and that their deficiency proves particularly conspicuous in work on Acts that sometimes collapses into “completely uninhibited ahistorical speculation.” Such theories tend to arise in artificial vacuums: scholars too often explain away all the historical evidence that we do have, then create arguments from the silence that remains—“a radical form of criticism” that uncritically ignores the only extant sources we have “in order to make room for its own fantastic constructions.” When scholars offer historical judgments regarding Acts, therefore, it is important that they are well-grounded.

My historical interests overlap with literary ones, for my primary concern is how Luke’s contemporaries would have heard his message. Literary questions about Acts’ themes (hence perhaps Luke’s emphases and interests) are paramount for interpreters, and knowledge of ancient customs helps inform how such themes would have sounded to ancient audiences.

But historical details may also serve supplemental functions much less central to grasping much of Luke’s message. For example, modern readers are often interested in other questions from antiquity, such as how Luke’s first audience, familiar with ancient Mediterranean culture, might have envisioned the scenes that Luke depicts. Such questions are sometimes of interest to illustrators of books, film producers, and other small circles that serve much larger audiences. They are also of interest to many preachers who, desiring to retell biblical stories, are happy to supplement imaginative storytelling with concrete data from antiquity. They may be most widely of interest, however, to many Bible readers simply wondering how to visualize such events more concretely. (The lay reader who would tackle a commentary of this length is admittedly a special one.) A close reading of a story, entering into the narrative world, invites imaginative consideration of details even when we cannot resolve all the questions they raise (and Luke’s first audience, and sometimes Luke itself, may not have resolved them).

Also, those interested in the history of early Christianity depend necessarily and often extensively on Acts, and so this commentary is meant partly to supply much fodder for their research. Traditional questions of historical reliability occupy significant space in this commentary primarily because the secondary literature and the amount of space needed to explore such questions demand extensive discussion if I treat these issues at all. Some recent commentators, such as Richard Pervo, have raised the question of Luke’s reliability in such a way that commentaries published soon afterward, such as this one, must necessarily address it.

Although my interests lie more in Luke’s message than in questions of historical reconstruction, these subjects are not as readily separated as some modern writers assume. In addition to its moralistic or propagandistic value, ancient historiography also made claims about past events that differentiated it from other genres that communicated ideas differently (see our discussion of genre in this introduction, –, especially below).

Reliability questions are thus of interest not only because of modern attention to Christian origins but because the work’s genre would invite such questions from an ancient audience: given the genre of Acts as a historical monograph (specifically of a probably apologetic and perhaps ethnographic variety), sympathetic readers would assume some degree of correspondence between Luke’s reports and the events they depict. By contrast, a significant lack of such correspondence might militate against a “sympathetic” reading and hence would affect how an ancient audience (in this case more informed than he would wish) would read Luke’s work. Historical claims were part of Luke’s explicit agenda (Luke 1:1–4)—a central feature of his “message” (cf. Acts 1:21–22). I will return to these questions regarding historical reliability in a special section further below.

Exploring questions of historical reliability (which are not always easily settled, especially at a remove of two millennia), however, does not exhaust the relevance of Luke’s employment of a historical genre. The historical questions in fact invite precisely literary ones, if only (for a “pure” historian) the question, noted above, of how the first audience most likely construed the work. Although many readers today find history uninteresting and irrelevant, ancient historians sought to teach moral, apologetic, and political values through the ways they reported history. Their own agendas thus bring us back to many of the questions that literary critics ask when they approach these texts.

This commentary employs an approach most conveniently designated as sociorhetorical (represented in Acts studies, e.g., by Ben Witherington’s commentary and earlier introduced in Gospels studies especially by Vernon K. Robbins).

As noted above, this approach is not precisely sociological; although it sometimes includes, where relevant, extrapolations from sociological models (e.g., in noting patterns characteristic of urbanization or population movements), these extrapolations are best grounded in solid historical data wherever these are available. As one scholar warns, “Just as modern sociological studies test their hypotheses with field trials, so too New Testament sociological studies must assemble all the available extant data that literary and nonliterary sources yield, along with archaeological evidence.” My method is thus primarily social-historical rather than social-scientific, as valuable as the latter methods are (especially for filling lacunae in our knowledge and organizing data).

Rhetorical approaches likewise supplement social-historical ones. Except when addressing speeches (especially those later in Acts), more of my space is devoted to social-historical observations than to rhetorical ones in the narrowest sense, but the latter are quite valuable in a general sense. Rhetorical handbooks do not provide much information on historical writing per se; at the same time, they often do address narrative composition techniques.

Although rhetoric focused on orality, many ancient historical works were written by rhetoricians or their imitators. Rhetorical training provided the primary disciplinary influence that shaped how elite historians composed their narratives, and it could not but influence even popular literary works composed in an urban milieu. Educated audiences—the sort of people with most ready access to texts the length of Luke-Acts—expected rhetorical conventions with which they were familiar, especially in speeches, which were pervasive in such histories. Written works were not speeches, and literature differed from rhetoric. But Greco-Roman advanced education usually focused on rhetoric (or, less often, on philosophy), not on purely “literary” techniques. Ancient literary texts thus typically betray a variety of rhetorical techniques (varying according to genre and the respective skills of their authors). Later historians sometimes critiqued earlier historians not only with respect to correspondence to truth (as in Polybius’s assaults on Timaeus) but also for their rhetorical style (according to the standards in vogue with the critic, as is evident in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s critiques of Thucydides and others). In the most general sense, rhetorical examination involves recognizing Luke’s persuasive narrative strategies, an approach helpful for discerning the message he endeavored to communicate.

What consequences should such a recognition have for a social-historical commentary’s use of literary approaches? A variety of literary approaches exist, the full spectrum of which would also extend the scope of this commentary beyond its proper proportions. I have focused on those that relate to my primary concern for social and historical context, and I made some use, though less explicit, of others that are nevertheless necessary to elucidate the text. Although I have not highlighted some other literary approaches, I have emphasized ancient ones; in particular, where possible, I make explicit comparisons with ancient rhetorical techniques. In so doing, I do not assume that Luke knew the terms for such techniques (which sometimes varied even among ancient rhetoricians) but only that observing techniques prominent in the literature of his era is apt to bring us closer to his approach more often than a purely ahistorical method would.

My primary interest is the meaning of the text for the likeliest general first-century audience we can reconstruct for Luke. Yet this question cannot be completely divorced from the question of historical representation, since Luke’s genre would invite his audience to consider claims of historical facticity. By their very controversial character, such questions will require in this commentary a proportion of space I might consider inordinate were it not required by the voluminous secondary literature on the subject. Those who consider such questions uninteresting (of whom I am not one) may feel free to simply ignore them.

As noted above, this work also addresses historical questions about early Christianity. Although such questions remain secondary to the question of the text’s meaning, they are not entirely removed from it. Because Acts fits an ancient historical genre (see –, esp. below), the task of exploring its meaning also invites consideration of how accurately Luke fulfills the general promise of historical writing implicit in Acts’ genre. (At the least it invites a consideration of what kind of history Luke’s audience would have inferred from his narratives; each succeeding narrative could negotiate and nuance the reader’s expectations further.) My doctoral work at Duke University was in NT and Christian origins (i.e., in ancient Christian history as well as ancient Christian literature), and I share historians’ interest in the historical questions.

Commentators on ancient historians such as Thucydides, Tacitus, and less reliable authors such as Livy and Valerius Maximus regularly compare the texts of their authors with other ancient sources, and it is reasonable to expect some commentaries on Acts to do the same. For historians interested in earliest Christianity after Jesus, Acts is the only concrete extended source we have and, to the extent that it provides accurate information, sometimes offers the only concrete contemporary framework for other first-century Christian evidence that allows us to connect Jesus with the second-century church. In contrast to a fairly small minority of commentators who regularly put Luke’s historical and moral reliability in the worst light possible (frequently substituting suspicion for evidence, often even with a touch of sarcasm), I believe that we should grapple as thoroughly as possible with whatever hard data Luke provides, to see what sense is best made of them before proceeding to conclusions. If nothing else, this approach has heuristic value in disciplining us to examine the story in its ancient setting as carefully as possible. It also reduces speculatively second-guessing a source that almost certainly had access to more information than we do.

Not all scholars agree on the extent of Luke’s reliability, and even if such unanimity existed, Luke’s purpose was not to chronicle the entire history of early Christianity but to focus on its expansion in a way that grounded the church of his day (including its Gentile members) in the story of Jesus and the history of Israel. Luke’s own narrower purpose thus limits the work’s value for modern historians’ broader interests, as do other historical works with similarly limited scope or perspective. But because Acts is the best source we have, historians of early Christianity cannot avoid using it, although we must also supplement it and often ask questions that Luke did not design his work to answer. This commentary therefore endeavors to serve the historical quest as well as the literary-theological one, although the latter is more readily available to us, less punctuated with lacunae, and more to the primary point of any commentary on the complete text of Acts (including this one).

When we test Luke’s historical accuracy, it should be admitted at the outset (at least once we have surveyed the range of writings included in the genre of ancient historiography) that Luke and his contemporaries exercised more liberty in details than we would grant modern historians, although we employ (perhaps slightly anachronistically) the same term for both the ancient genre and its modern counterpart. Ancient historians were concerned with producing cohesive and instructive narrative, not simply recitation of available events or discussion of bare information. At times I will wade as imaginatively as possible into Luke’s story world, asking questions that the text does not answer but to which his ideal audience, sharing his biblically informed, culturally informed eastern Mediterranean milieu, might have accepted a particular range of potential answers. I do this both to hear his text from a literary standpoint available to, as closely as I can approximate, the text’s ideal audience and to raise historical questions where appropriate.

When we probe the text, Luke’s presentation will normally reflect his general environment, which helps us hear what the earliest audience may have heard and envision the images that Luke’s narration may have triggered. We can better evaluate the character of Luke’s historiography when, in our general probing, we also find points where Luke’s presentation resembles, or diverges from, not merely the general milieu but the specific settings about which he writes. Ancient historians without specific information often settled for verisimilitude in elements of their narration, and a popular ancient historian with specific information could still choose to recount it in ways most culturally intelligible to his audience (e.g., the roof tiles in Luke 5:19; contrast Mark 2:4). But comparing the reports in Luke’s narrative with contemporary information can give us a basic approximation of the kind of historian he endeavored to be. (In anticipation of my argument, I can note my high respect for his historiographic interest and skill.)

In offering historical reconstructions, a historian can offer only probabilities. Much historical reconstruction is speculative, and improbabilities grow cumulatively as one speculation is built upon another. At the same time, this commentary follows the principle that an educated guess is better than an uneducated one—that is, if some speculation is inevitable in historical reconstruction, the informed historian is responsible for providing criteria to help readers evaluate which speculations among their contemporaries are more plausible than others.

Throughout the commentary (and especially in the Pauline chapters, where we have the greatest ability to check Luke against primary ancient reports of the same events), I try to provide some means of controlling speculation by evaluating the probabilities involved in such reconstructions. One would wish that the English language (or at least historians’ specialist language) provided a better way of grading probabilities than the somewhat ambiguous expressions I have chosen, such as (in descending order of likelihood) “very probable,” “probable,” “more probable than not,” “plausible,” “improbable,” “quite improbable,” and “implausible.” But to provide, for example, concrete percentages of probabilities would require a sort of precision even more difficult to achieve, and so I have tried to content myself with offering such vague evaluations of my and other scholars’ reconstructions. Nevertheless, I am well aware of the limitations of such categories and understand that, in many cases, the discovery or application of some data I have missed would shift probabilities.

Historical questions overlap with theological questions far more than some scholars (such as mid-twentieth-century existential critics) allowed; nevertheless, they are not the same. Many of us appreciate the biblical theology movement’s quest for God’s acts in history in biblical texts; but the biblical text is not solely a narration of such acts, nor does it purport to be a complete recitation of all such acts.

Even further from pure questions of contemporary theology is the sort of historical methodology that historical scholars of varying religious persuasions can use as a minimal common ground and language for dialogue. Some who write for audiences sharing their assumptions do not feel the need to limit themselves to the assumptions entailed in such broadly accepted academic methodology. Whatever our respective theological commitments, however, historical scholarship and interdisciplinary dialogue cannot proceed across theological and philosophic lines without initially appealing to such a minimal common ground; we scholars differ among ourselves in our philosophies of history; philosophies of science, nature, and religion; and so forth.

Few who offer arguments from this minimalist common ground thereby claim that nothing other than this common ground may be affirmed (still less, that nothing other than this common ground historically happened). But sufficient agreement exists on basic rules of evidence to allow (at least in principle, leaving aside human egos and attachment to traditions, whether ecclesiastical or academic) open discussion and consequent shifting of opinion in academic circles.

Having worked through Acts from basic and accepted criteria for historical reconstruction, I believe that I can affirm that Luke was an acceptable and responsible historian by the standards of his contemporaries, although he wrote for a more popular audience than some of his more elite colleagues would have appreciated. (This introduction will discuss more fully this question of historical “subgenre” adjusted for audience; see – below.) That he had agendas does not distinguish him from his contemporaries; his belief in miraculous or divine activity also appears commonly enough in ancient historians (although Luke betrays greater interest in them than most because they are more central to his subject). Where extant evidence from other ancient sources is available, I believe that it supports, rather than casts doubt on, Luke’s basic portrayal of events in the large majority of cases (see the survey in – below) and rarely proves strongly compelling against his portrayals.

At the same time, the ancient historical genre differs in some respects from the usual modern approaches to history, and we should not read modern expectations into Luke-Acts, which was meant to address questions often different from those that modern historians ask. (For example, we are more inclined to focus on different kinds of events and require either summaries of speeches or verbatim reports rather than summaries or reconstructions worded from a narrative standpoint as if they were quotations.) When we ask modern questions, therefore, we must acknowledge that this approach differs from merely asking Luke’s meaning in its historical setting. Luke’s historical reliability is a question raised by his work’s genre, but it is not the only issue with which Luke was concerned. Thus I count exploration of Luke’s historical claims as a separate and subsidiary (though important) purpose of this commentary, even though by its nature it demands a larger proportion of the space than it might otherwise receive.

Although a biblical commentary of limited size cannot comment on the relative value, or explain the full context, of each ancient extrabiblical reference cited, I am fully cognizant of the debates concerning such sources and have read the sources in their own contexts. But scholars examining social and historical questions often differ as to which sources to employ, and so I must comment briefly on my eclectic approach in this commentary.

New Testament scholars probably have engaged the debate about sources most often in terms of early Jewish ones. There are problems with various bodies of writings on which we draw for our information. Josephus, one of our most useful historical sources, has biases shaped in part by his elite Hellenistic-Roman audience (see the discussion of Josephus in and below). Philo is essentially a Jewish philosopher, using Middle Platonism (sometimes mixed with Stoic and other thought) in the service of his hermeneutics and apologetics; he moves at a philosophic level generally foreign to Luke (though cf. Acts 17:22–31). Most scholars date the Qumran scrolls to the relevant period, but the Scrolls reflect a particular sectarian understanding of Judaism. And rabbinic literature often reflects a particular side of Judaism and is later than the NT period.

Likewise, various Diaspora Jewish sources are incomplete (inscriptions, for example, are often difficult to date and, like most sources, usually reflect only one side of ancient life). Although some documents in the amorphous collection called the Pseudepigrapha are clearly pre- and non-Christian (such as Jubilees and most of 1 Enoch), some sources are debated (e.g., the Similitudes of Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Testament of Abraham). Some are clearly later, and some either are Christian works or at least have significant Christian interpolations. Gentile philosophers and historians are usually easier to date, though even there each reflects only a portion of the relevant data (e.g., Roman politics or a particularly sectarian perspective in a wider range of ideas).

Most material that is relevant to the eastern Mediterranean Jewish Diaspora and that overlaps with Acts is later than Acts, but historians of the ancient world must reconstruct history with whatever clues we have available, even when the sources are chronologically or geographically removed. (Naturally, nearer sources are preferable, but they are not always available.) Thus, if our only available source relevant to a passage in Acts is later, then (as Irina Levinskaya observes) we should accept Acts as an earlier attestation of the same idea or custom, “in accordance with the routine practice of ancient historians.” This practice is of course precarious when Christian influence on the document is evident (as in many gnostic sources), but otherwise seems generally increasingly safe where evidence supporting a distinctive custom appears quite similar in independent sources.

How do we evaluate whether a particular source probably reflects broader thought rather than simply an idiosyncratic reading? In reconstructing which Jewish ideas in the first century were sufficiently widely known to have informed Luke’s ideal audience, T. L. Donaldson’s typology is helpful: one can use “a kind of ‘criterion of multiple attestation,’” testing whether an idea appears “in more than one sociological strand of Judaism” and in periods both before and after that which one is examining. For this reason, I depend on a range of sources, not simply on the “critical minimum” of sources that are completely secure chronologically and geographically (though naturally preferring more widely circulated and pre-Christian sources). The latter standard is almost impossible to meet at the remove of two millennia, when the extant evidence is necessarily sporadic and illustrative rather than comprehensive.

I have followed the same general procedure for non-Jewish Greco-Roman sources. Instead of supposing a single hypotext, I have drawn from as wide a range of ancient sources as possible to illumine Luke’s larger social world. Among ancient rhetoricians, I have noted classical Athenian orators and earlier Hellenistic handbooks (e.g., Rhetorica ad Alexandrum) as well as Roman sources (e.g., Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s rhetorical essays, and Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory), earlier atticizing writers (e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus), and later works reflecting the influence of the Second Sophistic (e.g., Hermogenes and Menander Rhetor).

I have not done so in ignorance of the limitations of these various kinds of sources but in recognition of the small amount of evidence that would remain if we compared Luke only to first-century Aegean writers producing popular historiography in Greek. When a rhetorical custom is attested both before and after Luke’s time, in both Greek and Roman sources, I regard it as probably widespread. When it is more narrowly attested yet remains consistent with larger patterns, I regard it as at least illustrative of the sort of thinking available to rhetorically astute people in Luke’s world. Of course, where a source appears unique and not consistent with larger patterns of thought, it is reasonable to suggest that it may be idiosyncratic, in which case a single parallel with Luke may represent coincidence rather than even a broad way of thinking in the milieu.

Although Luke writes in Greek and (probably, in my view) for an audience in the Greek East, his interest in colonies suggests (again in my view) that residents of Roman colonies belong to his ideal audience (see the discussion of Luke’s audience in below). If this observation is correct, Roman background, as well as Greek, will be of value, although the linguistic milieu of Luke’s audience is undoubtedly primarily Greek. In Corinth, for example, many people, including much of the Corinthian church, spoke especially Greek even though the colony’s official language was Latin (see the discussion at Acts 18:1–3, 12). But even resident Jews and Greeks in the city cannot have been oblivious to Roman culture, and Roman and Greek culture affected each other extensively in such locations. Although resident aliens from the East such as Lydia were primarily Greek-speaking, Philippi (which we shall suggest must be close to the heart of Luke’s ideal audience) was also a thoroughly romanized city.

Archaeology is, in some ways, more concrete than extant manuscripts copied and recopied from ancient originals; it provides physical evidence and sometimes (especially through burial inscriptions) the “underside” of society less apt to be preserved in literary sources. Nevertheless, it too has its limitations, not least the “muteness” of stones apart from interpretive grids often provided, at least in part, by literary sources. We further possess only a sample of even the possible physical remains, merely a portion of which have been excavated and only some of the excavations published; thus we sometimes have chance finds confirming literary records that previously were unconfirmed by such data. Some of the archaeological data and the interpretations of them for particular sites noted in this commentary will therefore undoubtedly require revision because archaeological information is always partial and open to reinterpretation when new evidence is found. I nevertheless prefer to include, where possible, current information in the hope that enough will prove representative of the surviving material.

I must offer a brief word concerning references to secondary sources. I often cite other commentators even for matters that could be deemed common sense, although some readers would undoubtedly prefer less cluttered pages and less documentation for matters of reasoning that should be common property. I do this for two reasons. First, what often seems common sense to many is nevertheless often contravened by others (or will be), and it is helpful to summarize at least a sample of scholarly opinions. Second, I would rather acknowledge too many debts than risk failing to acknowledge enough. In numerous cases, I came to conclusions independently but nevertheless cite other scholars whose conclusions I find to be similar, for the sake of propriety.

In the end, however, the vastness of contemporary scholarship precludes full discovery and citation of all possible sources; even where one has come up with what one thinks a new idea, almost invariably someone has proposed something like it before, yet it is not possible to survey everything written on the subject in the past two millennia. I apologize profusely in advance to scholars whose works I have failed to find; my honest desire has been to recognize everyone who has written on the subject, understanding that it is disappointing when one’s labors do not prove useful to other scholars. But I must frankly confess that I have not been able to read anything close to everything ever written on the subject, and my criteria for where to look first have often left out valuable sources (as I often realize when I discover additional works). I nevertheless believe that this commentary’s contribution will be valuable even to those whose works I unintentionally failed to discover.

As noted above, this commentary, like my commentary on the Fourth Gospel, will be especially valuable for scholars, professors, advanced students, and other academic audiences. Nevertheless, I have tried to keep it more readable than my earlier academic works so that other readers may find it useful. As in earlier works, I depend on the Greek text for my own analysis but, where possible, offer my own English translations in the text for the sake of these other readers. Less academic readers with the time and interest to use a commentary like this one should employ their discretion to screen out material less relevant to their interests.

Scholars write commentaries for different audiences, and readers should take these genre differences into account. Some reviewers critique heavily documented academic commentaries for being too inaccessible to nonscholars. Others fault popular-level commentaries for not including fuller documentation, as if to begrudge nonscholars the utility of an accessible work or to imply that those who accommodate such audiences are inventing what they write.

Because the markets for such diverse kinds of commentaries often differ, they each serve important purposes. Lest it be assumed that I disrespect other forms of commentary writing, it should be noted that elsewhere I have written in both academic and popular commentary genres and have also offered several in between. Some readers may wonder why I expend space to point out what to them appears obvious. My reason is that some reviewers have critiqued academic commentaries, including my own, for excessive documentation and popular commentaries, including one of my own, for minimal documentation. (Happily, others have affirmed the same choices in these cases.) It is thus important to reiterate this commentary’s primary purpose.

As I have noted, my focus here is on reading Acts in its first-century Greco-Roman setting, and as in other works of this nature, I endeavor to provide, where possible, fresh insights into this way of reading the text (in addition, of course, to building on what others have done). As will become quickly evident to one surveying commentaries, they frequently recycle the primary sources used by earlier commentators (some references appear regularly in many contemporary Acts commentaries; some of these same references also appear in nineteenth-century commentators). Many commentators (whether because of the target audience, space limitations, time limitations, or other reasons) cannot afford to infuse a large amount of “new” data into discussions (although scholars often do so in journals and monographs).

Whenever more academic commentaries infuse new data into the discussion, the process often starts over again, with select new references proliferated in a new generation of commentaries and with a few reviewers (despite most commentaries’ use of indexes) apparently oblivious to the difference between those attempting to introduce much new information and those attempting to interpret it for target audiences (an important but different task). (As I have already noted, some even critique these more detailed commentaries for excessive documentation or size when the commentators explicitly define the scope of their work.)

New major commentaries ignore previous scholarship only at their own peril; they, too, must be indebted to previous research. But I believe that it is valuable for at least some major scholarly commentaries periodically to offer an infusion of “new” data—or at least data not yet widely incorporated into standard commentaries. These works provide ready fodder for future commentators to mine. They also provide numerous references the expansion of which space and cost prohibit but that offer fodder for students and researchers to develop.

Although I have thus followed other scholars at many points (and cited them accordingly), I have focused more on ancient sources than on modern ones (and, among the latter, often on those focused on ancient sources). Except where otherwise noted, the vast majority of the ancient references derive from my reading through the ancient sources in their own literary context. I trust that scholars studying particular passages will be able to make good use of the new data (the majority of my primary data) where I have provided it. I offer this hope recognizing that, given average human longevity, this work is likely to constitute my largest and most detailed commentary.

Some commentaries focus on applying the principles suggested in or behind the text. Affirmations about the natural world in ancient texts are dated, but many readers interested in history or philosophy may learn ethical principles or discover early predecessors of modern concepts from ancient philosophers and rabbis.

Christian readers for whom works such as Luke-Acts are canonical have an even greater desire to learn from these texts, whether as a matter of heritage, because of their belief that God has spoken in them, or both. As Margaret Mitchell has pointed out regarding a different matter of historical research, “It is simply a fact (whether allowed, welcomed, discouraged, or encouraged) that a major audience of this scholarship . . .  is Christian believers seeking to understand their present in relation to their (reconstructed) past, and their sacred texts which mirror, embody, and sometimes challenge the cultural norms and expectations of their day” (emphasis hers).

I have written other books with this kind of focus, and other scholars have produced such works specifically on Acts, emphasizing application or contextualization for various cultural settings today. This commentary does seek to identify Luke’s message and on occasion provide generally brief sample hermeneutical comments on how modern readers might recontextualize this message (bridging the horizons) for their own audiences. But because application is culture-, group-, and even person-specific (as well as temporally limited) and because those who know their receiving culture and how to contextualize are usually able to make the appropriate connections if they have access to the ancient contexts of the text, the focus of this commentary is the text in its ancient cultural setting. Nevertheless, I focus on the ancient meaning with both the expectation and the hope that some readers will use this research to make such connections; I do so myself in my preaching and seminary teaching far more than this commentary, with its specialized focus, can reveal. Users of the commentary for historical purposes, however, will find more immediate relevance to their interests here.

The notes often mention additional resources that interested students and scholars working on a passage can develop more fully. These include especially primary sources but often also secondary sources, which themselves cite many further works that I have not; for example, each article in the Oxford Classical Dictionary concludes with a bibliography, often offering students entire books on matters I have mentioned merely in passing in a footnote. As noted above, exploring the thousands of sources in bibliographies on Acts (e.g., Mattill and Mattill, Bibliography) could expand the range of conversation partners further. With other important resources such as the Thesaurus linguae graecae, students can delve much further into the lexicography and background of texts. Even such work is, however, more time consuming and tedious than might at first appear.

A team of scholars could thus easily multiply the documentation in this commentary by simply following up the bibliographies of the reference articles cited, documenting far more articles (even though I have made abundant use of New Testament Abstracts, I have been selective, especially for earlier years) and word studies based on the Thesaurus linguae graecae (or even the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament). This work is not, then, comprehensive; it is, in a sense, merely scratching the surface of what could be done. I have tried to think innovatively, offering a fresh reading through hundreds of ancient writings and also from some recent scholarly approaches, both to establish new lines of inquiry and to develop some current ones. Whereas databases can provide lexical parallels (a necessary task), conceptual parallels still require reading through ancient literature, and this is the service that I (like some others) have sought to provide. Again, any new work will inevitably confirm and build on much of what has come before, but it can also supplement and offer further directions.

I collected research for this commentary both after and concurrent with my other research over more than two decades (some of it as a student), and the writing consumed most of seven years, not including subsequent work checking editing or indexing. Unless my editors work much faster than I can, it will be difficult for the commentary to prove up-to-date on all new publications. Nevertheless, I trust that it will prove valuable to subsequent researchers.

Because nomenclature shifts and sometimes affords a cause for anachronistically criticizing earlier works, I offer a few comments here for those who might desire them. The use of nomenclature in this work reflects what appear to be current, conventional designations within the range of disciplines with which I am working. Such language is often in flux, quickly dating the terminology of reference works. For example, a range of works conflate “patronage” (when used strictly, a Roman custom) with Greek benefaction and even reciprocity; does one follow here technical ancient usage or academic convention (and common English usage)? I thus want to acknowledge some variations in usage. The reasons for most of my terminological choices are based on what I understand continues to be common usage, and I do not invest such choices with political significance. Were I writing a decade from now, my nomenclature would undoubtedly differ at points, reflecting the usage conventional at that time.

Although I use expressions such as “Christianity” and “Judaism” because they are most intelligible to the widest range of commentary users, such expressions are generally anachronistic for the NT period. I certainly do not intend them as mutually exclusive categories. Members of the Jesus movement were labeled “Christians” by some outsiders (see comment on Acts 11:26), but it is not certain that the former had widely owned the label for themselves even by Luke’s day. And—more important—modern notions of distinct religions should not be read into a first-century setting; many of Jesus’s followers, even Gentile converts, probably viewed themselves as a sect (albeit the right one) within Judaism until long after Luke’s day. (Except when context dictates otherwise, most references to “Jewish” and “Judaism” in this commentary also refer to ancient Jewish thought and practice, not the views and practices these elements have developed into two millennia later. Although readers will mostly take it for granted, I use “Greek” and “Roman” for peoples and especially cultures in antiquity rather than today.) Even “church” carries too much traditional baggage for the average user of the term, but I have retained it for convention’s sake (rather than sought some less standard designation such as “God’s community,” which highlights the original theological claim).

I have never accepted the labels “Old Testament” and “New Testament” as accurate designations, since in neither body of texts are the covenants simply identified with the body of texts that report them. Yet apart from “Tanakh” and some cumbersome designation such as “early Christian Scripture written after Jesus’s coming,” I have no better way to describe them, and thus I retain the traditional designations. Language communicates through accepted social convention; although we regularly adapt such convention, I have tried to balance the interests of usage and accuracy for the sake of communication.

Likewise, I do not attach to the terms “pagan” or “pagans” the pejorative connotations that ultimately developed, but employ the sense later used by some of the Roman Empire’s polytheists. Essentially, it is used here as shorthand for those who were not religiously monotheistic (at that time, mostly Jewish or Christian) and lacked a religious heritage in Israel. Given current sensitivities, the usage may well (and probably should) shift, but in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this title remains the most common description (no other designation yet having become standard and widely intelligible).

This commentary uses the term “Palestine” in the same way as standard reference works on the Levant in this era. Neither with this title nor with “Israel” (for the people, historically) do I make a political statement. (Lest anyone think me overly cautious in explicitly offering such a caveat, note a reviewer of one of my earlier works: “One wonders whether, by using this anachronistic terminology [of ‘Palestine’], Keener is attempting to exercise some kind of political influence.”)

One can define in various ways the cultural spheres on which the book of Acts touches directly. If we think of continents in the traditional Western sense of this designation (categories originally devised by the Greeks to distinguish themselves from peoples to their east and south), Luke’s narrative begins in Asia, with an Asian religious movement; its first Gentile convert is from Africa (see discussion at Acts 8:27); and its mission reaches Europe. That is, it touches all three “continents” known to Luke’s world.

But Luke’s goal for the mission is Rome not because of continental divisions, which are not even explicit in his narrative, but because Rome is the heart of the empire of which Judea is a part. Although Luke might at least once imply traditional Greek continental divisions (possibly portraying an “Asian” missions movement invading Europe in a reversal of Western [Roman] colonialism, to use modern postcolonial language; see comment on Acts 16:8–10), the primary spheres in Luke’s concern are Jewish/Gentile in every geographic location.

Some widely spread cultural traits in the later Mediterranean world, a portion perhaps due to Roman influence, also invite many scholars to speak of a “Mediterranean” culture. Past generations of Western interpreters appropriated the Greco-Roman mantle for European civilization (although it was a geographically Mediterranean culture with only limited influence from northern Europe), but now other interpreters are appropriating the Greco-Roman heritage differently. “Greco-Roman,” currently the most common designation for the culture in literature from our discipline, aptly defines most of the larger cultural sphere in which Luke’s narrative moves in Acts, but the Greco-Roman world encompassed various local cultures, sometimes as an urban veneer over local rural traditions. Judean culture blended the heritage of ancient Israel, the larger traditional Middle Eastern culture, and Hellenistic culture; it also reflected significant influences from farther east, from Parthian Jewry and the royal house of Adiabene, along with other Diaspora influences (including from Asian and Egyptian Jewish communities).

Because language is socially defined, nomenclature changes as the needs of its users do. I am simply employing the language currently conventional in my discipline, not endorsing a permanent vocabulary. I recognize that those explaining the same historical information in different cultural contexts may prefer different nomenclature. To stray too far from conventional language is to risk unintelligibility; to adopt conventional language without qualification is to risk miscommunication (hence the qualifications here). As with the valuable rise of inclusive language in the past generation, greater accuracy in language need not invite anachronistic prejudice against earlier writers who employed the only (or at least overwhelmingly dominant but not necessarily pejorative) language conventions at their disposal.

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