Conclusions on the Rest of Acts
Conclusions on the Rest of Acts
Though we do not have Lightfoot’s exegesis of Acts 24–28 we do know a good deal of what he would say about this material in the light of the fact that (1) he believes Acts was written by Luke, a sometime companion of Paul, including on his third missionary journey; (2) he thinks the record of Paul’s journey to Rome and shipwreck is accurately told (and he relies on that nineteenth-century staple that indicates the account is accurate in detail—Smith’s The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul); (3) he tends to think that Paul was exonerated when he got to Rome, and went on to do further ministry; and (4) he does not see the ending of Acts 28 as abrupt.
Perhaps equally importantly, Lightfoot sees Acts as integrating well with the Pauline chronology, including the chronology of his letters, and he would not agree with the notion that the Paul of Acts is somehow a different or even divergent Paul from the one we recognize in the Pauline corpus. He believes Acts is a historically serious work like other ancient historical monographs (e.g. those by Thucydides), though he also is firmly committed to the idea that Luke relied on and edited sources in ways that accorded with his own style and purposes. The fact that he would defend at length a speech from Acts, namely the Stephen speech, tells us that he thinks that the speeches, no less than the narrative, are historically substantive, though of course they are not mere verbatim transcripts of all a person said on the occasion. (BW3)