Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, the authorship of which is ascribed by tradition to the Evangelist Luke. It is in form substantially a continuation of the Gospel of St Luke. Beginning with the ascension of Christ, it gives an account of the spread of the Christian Church; the first part of the book deals largely with the work of St Peter, and the planting of the church in Jerusalem and Judea. The second part (chap. xiii. to the end) may be said to be wholly occupied with the history of Paul and his companions, and the extension of the church amongst the Gentile nations. In the second part, the narrative is frequently given in the first person plural. It has been pointed out that there are traces of the use of earlier documents in the Acts. The difficulty of reconciling some of the statements in the Acts with Paul's epistles, notably the account of the council of Jerusalem in Acts xv. as compared with Gal. ii. 9, taken along with the parallelism between Paul and Peter apparently carried out in the Acts, plays an important part in the 'tendency theory' of the new Tübingen school. Baur (q.v.) and his disciples held that the early Christian Church consisted of two widely divergent and warring sects, the Jewish-Christian or Petrine, and the more liberal Pauline party; that some of the books of the New Testament, and very especially the Acts, were written not in a purely historical spirit, but with the view of minimising the differences that had existed between the two hostile sections of the church, at a time when the Pauline spirit had been on the whole triumphant. The later followers of Baur are less extreme than the earlier ones (as Zeller) in their differences from the orthodox view, in which the historical accuracy of the book and the harmony of the teaching of the apostles is maintained.
See De Wette's Erklärung (4th ed. by Overbeck, 1870); Zeller, Acts of the Apostles Critically Examined (trans. 1876); Van Manen, De Handelingen van den Aposteln (Leyden, 1890); Lechler, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times (trans. 1886); Hausrath, History of New Testament Times (trans. 1880); Weiss, Die Apostelgeschichte (1894), and Blass thereon in Studien u. Kritiken; Lechler and Gerok, Commentary on the Acts (trans. 1864), and commentaries by Glog (1870) and Stokes (2 vols. 1891-92); also the articles BIBLE, CHRISTIANITY, LUKE, PAUL, PETER.