of Conversations the West: Antiquity and the Enlightenment 11:00-12:15 October 10, 2005 TA Menachem : Session 18 The Acts of the Apostles
This book, which is supposedly written by Luke, is what I think is the worst written book from the Bible read thus far. It is supposedly written by Luke from the evidence of the first few verses. The person it is written to is Theophilus, who was also the receiver of Luke's Gospel. The Acts of the Apostles starts out with "In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven..." (185). This shows that it was probably Luke's second book he wrote and I didn't enjoy the "sequel" to his first book. I enjoyed the Gospels of Luke more than I did this book. The first book was about the life of Jesus and his teachings. This second book talks about how Jesus spoke to his apostles through the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit helped the apostles spread the word of Christ. I think that the main theme behind most of the book was the Holy Spirit. It a is continuation of Jesus as the Savior to the people from Luke's first book, the Gospel. Jesus isn't in a human form anymore but in spirit. There weren't as many miracles performed by the Holy Spirit like Jesus carried out in the Gospels. This made the Acts of the Apostles less enjoyable for me. Not only were there as many miracles, but the miracles performed were not great ones. Some were just like helping a man be able to walk on his feet, or help a sick person become healthy. The miracles of Jesus in the
Gospel on the other hand, was like the resurrection of Christ or Jesus helping feed a lot of people with a very little amount of food. Not any of the miracles in the Apostles was as memorable. The Acts of the Apostles was not as good as Luke's first book, the Gospels of Luke. I prefer Luke's Gospel because he talked about Jesus' life and the Apostles just talked about his apostles and his spirit helping spread the word about Him. Even if both the writings weren't first hand accounts, the first book, the Gospel was much better because it was a second hand account of Jesus.