Acts of the Apostles Through the Centuries

In one of his Easter homilies on Acts delivered in 401 C.E., John Chrysostom called Acts a “strange and new dish” and complained that “there are many to whom this book is not even known, and many again think it so plain that they slight it. Thus to some their ignorance, to others their knowledge is the cause of the neglect” (I. iii.54). By the twentieth century, however, W.C. van Unnik could famously refer to the Lukan writings as “a storm center in contemporary scholarship.” This proposed BBC commentary on Acts aims to chart the reception of the book of Acts from its relative obscurity in the early church to its recent focus of attention.

In this commentary, we propose to examine not only the formal exegetical tradition, but also the influence of Acts on art, music, and literature, as part of the Nachleben, the “afterlife” of these stories as they are reconfigured for a different time and place. Sources will be chosen because they typify the traditional rendering of the text or conversely, because they represent some kind of innovation in the tradition. In short, we propose to adopt a “Noah’s Ark Principle,” in which we include as many “species” of interpretations from as wide a chronological span, geographical distribution, and theological spectrum as possible while seeking to describe a coherent “plot” to the interpretive history of Acts.