Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- 1 Reading Acts in the second century: reflections on method, history, and desire
- 2 Jerusalem destroyed: the setting of Acts
- 3 Acts and the apostles: issues of leadership in the second century
- 4 Spec(tac)ular sights: mirroring in/of Acts
- 5 Acts of ascension: history, exaltation, and ideological legitimation
- 6 Time and space travel in Luke-Acts
- 7 The complexity of pairing: reading Acts 16 with Plutarch's Parallel Lives
- 8 Constructing Paul as a Christian in the Acts of the Apostles
- 9 Bold speech, opposition, and philosophical imagery in Acts
- 10 Among the apologists? Reading Acts with Justin Martyr
- 11 The Second Sophistic and the cultural idealization of Paul in Acts
- 12 Reading Luke-Acts in second-century Alexandria: from Clement to the Shadow of Apollos
- Bibliography
- Index of primary sources
- Index of authors
- Subject index
8 - Constructing Paul as a Christian in the Acts of the Apostles
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- 1 Reading Acts in the second century: reflections on method, history, and desire
- 2 Jerusalem destroyed: the setting of Acts
- 3 Acts and the apostles: issues of leadership in the second century
- 4 Spec(tac)ular sights: mirroring in/of Acts
- 5 Acts of ascension: history, exaltation, and ideological legitimation
- 6 Time and space travel in Luke-Acts
- 7 The complexity of pairing: reading Acts 16 with Plutarch's Parallel Lives
- 8 Constructing Paul as a Christian in the Acts of the Apostles
- 9 Bold speech, opposition, and philosophical imagery in Acts
- 10 Among the apologists? Reading Acts with Justin Martyr
- 11 The Second Sophistic and the cultural idealization of Paul in Acts
- 12 Reading Luke-Acts in second-century Alexandria: from Clement to the Shadow of Apollos
- Bibliography
- Index of primary sources
- Index of authors
- Subject index
Summary
The Acts of the Apostles is a text of church politics. As part of a canonical collection of Gospels and Pauline letters, the separately titled second volume of Luke-Acts defined an apostolic orthodoxy for certain Christian leaders at the end of the second century CE. The Acts of the Apostles stamped a politics of ecclesiastical unity on the New Testament: Jesus and the Twelve led by Peter of the canonical Gospels alongside the Paul of the letters. Or, as Irenaeus put it at the end of the second century, Peter and Paul preaching the gospel at Rome and establishing the authority of a succession of bishops in that city, the only city for which Irenaeus bothers to give a detailed succession list:
Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolic tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere.
(Adv. haer. 3.2; Roberts & Donaldson 1994: I, 415)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Engaging Early Christian HistoryReading Acts in the Second Century, pp. 141 - 152Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013