Let me state at the outset that I am a firm believer that no work of history (or literature) is politically neutral, and that everyone who creates a work does so with a very specific worldview and perspective and agenda that will greatly determine what aspects of life and history are important enough to mention, especially at length. Simply because I believe all works have bias, because any perspective is a bias, does not mean I believe that works are without value. Rather, I recognize that understanding the perspective of the author of a work is vital in understanding the work to begin with. Perspective is one of the important aspects of context that allow a work to be understood by an audience, and not sharing perspective hinders understanding, or leads us to think that we understand something when it turns out that we actually do not.

I say this as a general statement at the outset because I would like to spend some time and a series of posts examining the political worldview of the biblical book of Acts. As the Book of Acts is a part of scripture I teach to my students at Legacy Institute, it is an area of the Bible that I have had the cause to read and reread, and as a student of political history, I have found that the Book of Acts greatly repays a study from a political perspective, even though this is not the usual way that most people tend to examine books of the Bible. As in so many areas of the Bible, it is all too easy to read our own beliefs and worldviews into scripture and to think that we have understood it accurately, rather than seeking to read what the scripture says with subtlety. And, of course, like usual I would like to comment that a belief that Acts has a definite political agenda does not in any way negate its other meanings and layers of interpretation which may be more important and more congenial to other readers.

That said, I would like to examine several aspects of the political worldview of the Book of Acts. To start with, I would like to examine some of the questions of the structure of the Book of Acts, including its intended audience. That will take the remainder of this post. Then, I would like to examine the way that Luke examines the politics of the Jewish and the Greco-Roman world (which I expect to take another couple of entries, at least), including questions of anti-Semitism, the parallels between Athens and Jerusalem, the relationship of the mob and cultured audiences, and Luke’s clever argument for the legality of Christianity within the Roman religious order.

In examining the book of Acts we have to look at its structure. The Book of Acts is the second book in a series written by the author Luke. Like the book of Luke, it is dedicated to a man who is given the (presumably pseudonymous) dedication of Theophillus (God-lover) as the patron of the work, making him a person of considerable wealth and influence, to support the work of Luke like that. Acts 1:1-3 reads: “The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, until the day in which He was taken up, after He through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles whom He had chosen, to whom He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” This is the sort of prologue that an especially important patron would receive, someone who had the resources to support research and the need for biblical instruction at the same time.

Some authors have spent a considerable time speculating on the Book of Acts, stating that it was written in the Flavian period, where Christianity was under attack as an illegal religion where merely belonging to a Christian congregation was a crime apart from any illegal conduct, or speculating that there were originally three volumes planned by Luke, but that they were not able to be completed for whatever reason [1]. It is not the purpose of this essay to speculate on the reason why Acts looks so incomplete, but at the same time we must spend some time on its incompleteness.

Why does the book of Acts end the way it does? The incompleteness of Acts seems very obvious and striking. Acts ends as follows, in Acts 28:30-31: “Then Paul dwelt two whole years in his own rented house, and received all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, no one forbidding him.” And that is that. There is no statement as to the verdict of Paul’s case in Rome, or about any of his travels after his release (to Crete, for example, as talked about in Titus). Did he ever make it to Spain? We do not know, because the Bible does not say. It is not merely that the Book of Acts ends without an ‘amen,’ but that it ends without a resolution to Paul’s trial or with a definitive statement as to Paul’s effectiveness as a minister in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire and the later home of the great apostate church.

Whatever the reason for the curious ending of Acts, it is not a coincidence that the Book of Acts begins with a dedication to a Roman of elite status and ends with Paul in Rome. Indeed, one of the most political aspects of Acts, and the cause of its selectivity in the incidents and people on whom the Book of Acts focuses, is the fact that the Book of Acts is explicitly written with an interest in the spread of Christianity within the Roman Empire and with the place of Christianity within the legal and religious order of the Roman Empire. Only those aspects of the spread of Christianity that furthered the spread of Christianity within the Roman Empire are noted by Luke, not any of the other fascinating questions we have about the spread of the Gospel to Africa or Parthia or Armenia or India or points beyond.

Each spread of Christianity beyond Jerusalem that furthers its interest to the Roman Empire is highlighted by Luke among the great mass of facts that could have been discussed in a much longer book had time and resources permitted. We start with Jerusalem, expand to the Samaritans and to an Ethiopian convert who serves another royal family, and then we move to a God-fearing Roman centurion (consistently described positively in the Bible [2]), and then rapidly move to cities like Antioch, Philippi, Corinth, and Ephesus, before showing how a problem in Jerusalem led to Paul’s travels to Rome itself, to firmly establish Christianity where it had been for more than a decade before Paul’s journey there in chains.

The agenda of the book of Acts greatly influences its focus. Peter and John (especially Peter) are prominent at the beginning of the Book of Acts, though other leaders (like Philip and Barnabas) are shown insofar as they have a greater focus in preaching beyond the Jews that the original apostles seemed to lack. Once Paul is firmly introduced as a major leader within Christianity, the Roman citizen with a clear goal of preaching Christianity within the confines of the empire takes center stage as the main focus of the book, even though by this time, as the Jerusalem Conference approached, the apostles seem to have understood the need to preach beyond the Jews alone.

Having introduced at least a little bit of information on how the political agenda of the book of Acts influences its structure, we will continue this series with a couple of longer posts on the specific way in which the Greco-Roman and Jewish political order is portrayed in ways that affirm certain groups of people and subtly (or openly) criticize other aspects of the contemporary Roman political system in a way that is designed as an explicit Christian apologetic. The fact that Acts is far from a ‘neutral’ text does not in any way negate its importance, but rather gives us a firm understanding of why Acts was written in the way it was, which ought to give us even greater appreciation of Luke as both a Christian apologist and a historian of the highest order.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/book-review-st-paul-the-traveller-and-the-roman-citizen/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/the-savior-and-the-centurions-civil-military-relations-in-the-renewed-covenant-scriptures/