Acts 2:38-42
Peter said, “Change your life. Turn to God and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, so your sins are forgiven. Receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is targeted to you and your children, but also to all who are far away—whomever, in fact, our God invites.” He went on in this vein for a long time, urging them over and over, “Get out while you can; get out of this sick and stupid culture!”
That day about three thousand took him at his word, and were baptized. They committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers.
Last week in ‘in-person’ church we talked about where we wanted to go now that we had finished our “special” series. The decision was to return to the lectionary and go from there – and that was my plan...until I realized that we really only have five or six weeks [!] before Advent begins and a new cycle starts.
At the same time, I’ve been thinking that we almost never really read into the Book of Acts because almost every year we begin a “Summer Special Series” immediately after Pentecost.
So – this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to read in Acts. There are 28 chapters and we have six weeks—maybe—so this will have to be a somewhat abbreviated journey—but my intention is to help us understand just how much this is a story about people doing things that had not been done in this time and this place before—some actually extraordinary things.
First, we’re going to do a quick survey of the chronology of Acts and just where it fits in with the other books of the New Testament, and after we’ve done that we’ll read as many of the stories as we can fit into our time.
I’ve talked before about the fact that this book—although it wasn’t written down until much later--relates a time in which there where not yet any written stories about Jesus or the things he had taught and done—no letters, no gospel accounts (at least as far as we know.) Not a single piece of the writings we have today that make up the New Testament existed at the time the Book of Acts tells about.
Yet, this first batch of faithful Jesus followers set out to tell the world about Jesus. How did they do it, and even more importantly, why did they do it?
The earliest written document in the New Testament is St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Thessalonians, written twenty years, give or take a couple, after the death of Jesus. That’s the first piece of written history of Jesus’s life and teachings that we have (although there is some disagreement on this.) At any rate, that is twenty years of Christian communities being formed and spreading outward across Europe—with no written canon to hold them together.
We tend to lean heavily on the four gospels for most of our information about the who and why of Jesus, and yet, the first of the gospels to be written is Mark’s, which was written around 70 AD, approximately 40 years after Jesus’ life. The second was Matthew, written in the 80’s or early 90’s. The third to be written was John’s, written around 90 AD, followed by Luke, possibly written as late as the first decade of the second century. And, since Luke’s Gospel account and Acts were both written by the same author–actually written as one long piece and then divided into two separate scrolls—that means that Acts was written possibly 70 years after the life of Jesus. Seventy years after the birth of the new Christian faith.
Here’s a little side tidbit you might find interesting: All these items would have been written in the form of scrolls, and scrolls had a maximum length or weight because if a scroll got too long or too heavy it would have been hard to handle and easily damaged or torn, so Luke’s long opus was divided into two scrolls—Luke’s Gospel and Acts.
The Gospel of Luke ends with the Ascension of Jesus ,and Acts opens with a slightly longer version of the Ascension. Then there is a bit of in-house business concerning the choosing of Matthias to take the place of Judas in the Twelve, and then the day of Pentecost, described in chapter 2.
Chapters 3-8 give us individual stories describing some of what happens in the earliest years, but by chapter 9 Acts becomes largely a recital of Paul’s activities, ending in chapter 28 just prior to Paul’s death in Rome.
It’s a lot of anecdotes—but we have to remember, it was all written long after the fact and most likely heavily sanitized by the time it reached us.
New Testament scholar and historian John Dominic Crossan once wrote, “how does it happen that the early years of Christianity are so shrouded in silence?” He points out that we have next to nothing in contemporary writing from those first 20 or 30 years, but by the 50’s we have an absolute deluge of writings. Why?
I’m hoping we can pin down at least some small answers to this question over the next few weeks.
At the same time, I’ve been thinking that we almost never really read into the Book of Acts because almost every year we begin a “Summer Special Series” immediately after Pentecost.
So – this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to read in Acts. There are 28 chapters and we have six weeks—maybe—so this will have to be a somewhat abbreviated journey—but my intention is to help us understand just how much this is a story about people doing things that had not been done in this time and this place before—some actually extraordinary things.
First, we’re going to do a quick survey of the chronology of Acts and just where it fits in with the other books of the New Testament, and after we’ve done that we’ll read as many of the stories as we can fit into our time.
I’ve talked before about the fact that this book—although it wasn’t written down until much later--relates a time in which there where not yet any written stories about Jesus or the things he had taught and done—no letters, no gospel accounts (at least as far as we know.) Not a single piece of the writings we have today that make up the New Testament existed at the time the Book of Acts tells about.
Yet, this first batch of faithful Jesus followers set out to tell the world about Jesus. How did they do it, and even more importantly, why did they do it?
The earliest written document in the New Testament is St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Thessalonians, written twenty years, give or take a couple, after the death of Jesus. That’s the first piece of written history of Jesus’s life and teachings that we have (although there is some disagreement on this.) At any rate, that is twenty years of Christian communities being formed and spreading outward across Europe—with no written canon to hold them together.
We tend to lean heavily on the four gospels for most of our information about the who and why of Jesus, and yet, the first of the gospels to be written is Mark’s, which was written around 70 AD, approximately 40 years after Jesus’ life. The second was Matthew, written in the 80’s or early 90’s. The third to be written was John’s, written around 90 AD, followed by Luke, possibly written as late as the first decade of the second century. And, since Luke’s Gospel account and Acts were both written by the same author–actually written as one long piece and then divided into two separate scrolls—that means that Acts was written possibly 70 years after the life of Jesus. Seventy years after the birth of the new Christian faith.
Here’s a little side tidbit you might find interesting: All these items would have been written in the form of scrolls, and scrolls had a maximum length or weight because if a scroll got too long or too heavy it would have been hard to handle and easily damaged or torn, so Luke’s long opus was divided into two scrolls—Luke’s Gospel and Acts.
The Gospel of Luke ends with the Ascension of Jesus ,and Acts opens with a slightly longer version of the Ascension. Then there is a bit of in-house business concerning the choosing of Matthias to take the place of Judas in the Twelve, and then the day of Pentecost, described in chapter 2.
Chapters 3-8 give us individual stories describing some of what happens in the earliest years, but by chapter 9 Acts becomes largely a recital of Paul’s activities, ending in chapter 28 just prior to Paul’s death in Rome.
It’s a lot of anecdotes—but we have to remember, it was all written long after the fact and most likely heavily sanitized by the time it reached us.
New Testament scholar and historian John Dominic Crossan once wrote, “how does it happen that the early years of Christianity are so shrouded in silence?” He points out that we have next to nothing in contemporary writing from those first 20 or 30 years, but by the 50’s we have an absolute deluge of writings. Why?
I’m hoping we can pin down at least some small answers to this question over the next few weeks.
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