ACT-01 The Background of Acts

Why focus on Luke as the author of Acts?

Student: Dr. Bayer, since the book of Acts was inspired by God, why do we spend so much time on a lesson talking about the human author, Luke? What is the benefit of dedicating so much time looking into him?

Dr. Bayer: Larry, that’s a very good question. I would like to begin with just focusing on the fact that this is inspired by God, the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, and we could spend a lot of time seeing that what Luke reports particularly in the Gospel of Luke is apostolic eyewitness. And it goes back to the systematic instruction and teaching of Jesus, shaping the understanding and the memory of the disciples as they live with Jesus and learn from him, so that what we have as inspiration is also very much going back to Jesus himself. But your question particularly focuses in the human authorship, and I just want to say that the understanding of inspiration is not that the individuality and the person is sidelined, but that God speaks through his prophets in the Old Testament and here, in this case, through this eyewitness or this man who has access to eyewitness accounts, and he does not sideline the particular personality, the particular historical context, the cultural understanding, and that is a wonderful testimony to the fact that God speaks into our space and time. I think also it becomes apparent when you compare the Gospel of Luke with Matthew, Mark, or John, that there is a particular perspective, a particular point of view that does not detract from the truth, but it is a particular focus. And we know that Luke focused on the marginalized, on women, on the poor, and that is a particular testimony focus point in Luke, and we see that borne out also in the book of Acts.

Student: So you are saying that in some sense, God is using the personalities, the experiences, the language, the vocabulary, all of that, the writing style of the inspired writer in order to create the product that we have that we think of as the book of Acts, so that as we try to read and understand and interpret that, we kind of need to know where it’s coming from so that we understand what he means when he uses certain words and why he is talking about certain things? Is that sort of what you are saying?