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The Acts of the Apostles--or more in keeping with the author's intent, the Acts of the Ascended Lord--is part two of Luke's story of "all that Jesus began to do and teach." In it he recounts the expansion of the church as its witness spread from Jerusalem to all of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.
While at least forty early church authors commented on Acts, the works of only three survive in their entirety--John Chrysostom's Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Bede the Venerable's Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles and a long Latin epic poem by Arator. In this Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volume, substantial selections from the first two of these appear with occasional excerpts from Arator alongside many excerpts from the fragments preserved in J. A. Cramer's Catena in Acta SS. Apostolorum. Among the latter we find selections from Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, Didymus the Blind, Athanasius, Jerome, John Cassian, Augustine, Ambrose, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Theodoret of Cyr, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, Cassiodorus, and Hilary of Poitiers, some of which are here translated into English for the first time.
As readers, we find these early authors transmit life to us because their faith brought them into living and experiential contact with the realities spoken of in the sacred text.
Francis Martin
Francis Martin (1930-2017; SSD, Pontifical Biblical Institute) was a beloved priest and scholar who served in many academic and pastoral settings. He founded Father Francis Martin Ministries and taught at the Dominican House of Studies. He was also a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, and served as chaplain of the Mother of God Community in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Thomas C. Oden
Thomas C. Oden, the retired Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics, is an ancient ecumenical evangelical with a passion for orthodoxy. For over thirty years he taught at Drew University and came under the influence of his “irascible, endearing Jewish mentor” Will Herberg. Herberg bluntly told Oden that he would remain “densely uneducated” unless he “read deeply in patristic writers.” This focus on patristics (the early church fathers) helped professor Oden to realize that modernity is over. As he probed the early church writers for several decades, he incorporated and rechanneled his activism and idealism for the modernist social gospel into a recovery of the classic religious tradition. Scripture found new life in him, which means he repented an enthrallment with progressive social causes in favor of a stable two-thousand year memory, which he defines as orthodoxy.
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