Introduction

The Book and Its Place

The Acts of the Apostles is the sequel Luke the Evangelist wrote to his Gospel, carrying the story forward from the Lord’s ascension to the imprisonment of Paul in Rome roughly thirty years later. Its subject is the birth and spread of the Church: the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the first preaching in Jerusalem, the stoning of Stephen and the scattering of the believers that followed it, the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus, and the opening of the Gospel to the Gentiles. Roughly the first half follows Peter and the church in Jerusalem and Judea; the second half follows Paul, from his first missionary journeys through his arrest in Jerusalem to his voyage, shipwreck, and arrival in Rome, where the book ends. No other book of the New Testament gives so continuous a narrative of the apostolic age, and none is so often read simply as history—an account of how the message first entrusted to a handful of Galileans reached the capital of the empire within a single generation.

Theophylact’s Commentary: An Honest Debt

Here more than almost anywhere else in his New Testament work, Theophylact’s commentary is a compilation rather than a fresh exposition, and it is worth saying so plainly. Chrysostom had preached fifty-five homilies on Acts, and by Theophylact’s day a catena—a chain of patristic comment strung together verse by verse—had already gathered the substance of those homilies together with fragments of other, now largely lost, expositors of the book. Theophylact draws on that inherited material heavily, and an earlier commentator, Oecumenius, had already worked the same vein a century or so before him. What Theophylact adds is not a new reading of Acts so much as a clarified one: he prunes Chrysostom’s often expansive homiletic style down to a lean, continuous exposition that a reader can follow verse by verse without losing the thread of the narrative, and he resolves, in his own plain voice, the historical and verbal difficulties the text raises along the way.

This dependence should not be mistaken for mere copying. Chrysostom’s homilies on Acts, delivered to a Constantinopolitan congregation that (by his own frequent complaint) found the book less immediately edifying than the Gospels, are long, digressive, and rich with moral exhortation loosely tied to the verse at hand. Theophylact reorganizes this material around the sense of the text itself, cuts the digressions, and restores a shape closer to a line-by-line commentary than to a sermon. The result served Greek readers for centuries as the standard accessible guide to Acts, in a way that Chrysostom’s own homilies, valuable as they are, were not suited to be.

Argument and Recurring Concerns

Two concerns recur throughout the commentary. The first is continuity: Theophylact is at pains to show that the apostolic Church, for all the novelty of Pentecost and the admission of the Gentiles, is the fulfillment rather than the abandonment of the promises given to Israel, and he traces this continuity carefully through the sermons of Peter, Stephen, and Paul, each of which he treats almost as its own small commentary within the larger one, drawing out the argument point by point. The second is the working of divine providence through very human events—persecution that scatters the believers and so spreads the Gospel further, imprisonment that becomes an occasion for preaching before governors and kings, a shipwreck that lands Paul exactly where he needed to go. Nothing in Theophylact’s Acts happens by accident.

Certain episodes draw a fuller stop from Theophylact than the pace of the narrative elsewhere would suggest. The tongues of fire and the sudden gift of speech at Pentecost he treats at length as the promised sending of the Holy Spirit and the true beginning of the Church’s public life. The vision that leads Peter to the household of Cornelius the centurion, and the debate in Jerusalem that follows it over whether Gentile converts must first become Jews, he reads as the hinge on which the Gospel opens definitively beyond Israel—a decision he traces carefully through James’s judgment at the council and the letter that records it. And Paul’s address to the philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens, reasoning from the altar “To an Unknown God” to the God who made the world, draws from Theophylact some of his closest attention to how an apostle might speak to hearers who share none of Israel’s Scriptures—a question with obvious bearing well beyond the first century.

How to Read This Commentary

Acts moves quickly between speeches and narrative, and between Jerusalem, Antioch, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, so it helps to keep a sense of the larger geography and chronology in view as the commentary works through the text scene by scene. Because so much of the exposition here carries forward the mind of Chrysostom, a reader already familiar with his homilies on the Gospels or on Paul’s epistles will recognize the tone; a reader coming to Chrysostom for the first time through this volume will meet him at his most concise. Above all, the book asks to be read as Theophylact plainly intends it: not as an antiquarian record of a vanished age, but as the pattern—in the boldness of the apostles’ preaching, in the endurance of their sufferings, and in the quiet workings of providence behind both—for the Church in every age since.