One anonymous author wrote over a quarter of the New Testament
The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are two halves of one work, and together they make up 27.5 per cent of the New Testament, more than any other single writer. The author never gives a name. Tradition says Luke, a doctor who travelled with Paul, but scholars remain split.
Acts picks up where the gospel stops, with Jesus ascending to heaven, then follows the new movement outward from Jerusalem. Its 28 chapters move on two tracks: geographically from Jerusalem, heart of the Jewish covenant people, toward Rome, capital of the Gentile world; and from Peter, face of the Jewish Christian church, to Paul, apostle to the Gentiles. Early scenes include Pentecost and the founding of the church at Antioch, and the book closes with Paul held in Rome awaiting trial.
The title was not the author's. Irenaeus first used it late in the 2nd century, and the Greek word for acts appears only once in the text, describing deeds confessed by believers rather than feats of apostles. The writer called his project an orderly account and addressed it to a patron named Theophilus. Most scholars date it to 80 to 90 AD, because it draws on Mark, looks back on the fall of Jerusalem and seems unaware of Paul's letters, though some argue for the early 2nd century.
Who wrote it is a lively debate. Twentieth-century scholars stressed clashes with Paul's own letters, but more recent work sees the two as theologically closer. Stretches where the narrator suddenly switches to we are still widely read as signs of an eyewitness. The picture that emerges is of an educated, fairly wealthy, probably urban man who respected manual labour, unusual among writers of his era, who tended to sneer at the artisans filling Paul's churches.
Its genre is contested too. English-speaking scholars mostly treat it as credible history, German critics and the Westar Institute saw ideologically driven devotional writing, and Richard Pervo called it novelistic fiction. Most place it within ancient history-writing, comparable to Josephus or Dionysius of Halicarnassus. A central aim was explaining how a Jewish Messiah came to lead a largely non-Jewish church.
Source: Acts of the Apostles
