The Acts And The Acts — Some Notes On The Book Of Acts In The Second Century -- By: A. F. Walls

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 12:1 (Apr 1963)
Article: The Acts And The Acts — Some Notes On The Book Of Acts In The Second Century
Author: A. F. Walls


The Acts And The Acts — Some Notes On The Book Of Acts In The Second Century

A. F. Walls

‘THE FORMER TREATISE I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began to do and to teach.’ It is a copy-book example of a μέν clause: the difficulty is, as the world knows, that Luke has declined to put in the corresponding δέ clause, and thus denies us any statement of what he is setting out to do. And so begins the long, long trail in quest of the purpose of Acts.

One thing has clearly emerged from it so far: that the book of Acts is like nothing else on earth. We can find parallels between parts of it and a dozen different types of pagan literature—was not form criticism sent on its way rejoicing when Norden pointed out the parallels between the escape stories therein and some in secular literature?—but it is hard to point to any precise formal parallel, Christian or pagan. There are, indeed, some indications that second century Christians were fully as mystified as Foakes Jackson, and far more mystified than Dibelius, when faced with the question of the purpose of Acts.

It need hardly be mentioned that we do not know whether Luke himself ever called his book Πράξεις Ἀποστόλων. There are second century authorities—the anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke, for instance, and the Muratorian Fragment—which use the title. Now at least two other types of literature called Πράξεις or Acta were circulating in the second century. They dealt with similar material, and from some points of view one might describe them as pagan and Christian versions of the same literary type!1

The Christian version is the martyrology. The earliest clear example, so far as I know, is still the Martyrium Polycarpi: basically a mid-second century document, even if von Campenhausen is right in detecting much more substantial elaborations than were formerly allowed for. It is written in the name of a church, and addressed to churches; it describes the progress of an anti-Christian pogrom arising from an excited crowd with the blood-lust up, the witch-hunt for Polycarp, his initial flight, and then his surrender,

arrest, confrontation with the proconsul, and, in detail, his martyrdom. If the admitted accretions are removed, the story is marked by a moving simplicity and a certain restraint. Not dissimilar in this is the letter of the Gallican churches a couple of decades later: again a letter from a church to a church, describing in detail an anti-Christian outburst ...

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