ACTS: THE QUESTION OF HISTORICAL PRECEDENT
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
- Hellenistic historiography was written to encourage and/or entertain, as well as to inform, moralize, or offer an apologetic.
- The key to understanding the book of Acts i the Gentile mission.
- Luke's model in Acts is Gospel proclamation.
- Unless scripture explicitly tells us we must do something, what is only narrated or described does not function as a normative way- unless it can be demonstrated on other grounds that the author intended it to function this way.
- God's word is to be found in the intent of Scripture is a general maxim of hermeneutics for historical narratives in Acts.
- There is a full justification for the later church's repeating of biblical patterns; but it is moot to argue that all Christians everywhere and always must repeat the patter or they are disobedient to God's Word.
- Restoration Mentality: looking back to the church and Christian experience in the first century as the norm to be restored; looking back to the church and Christian experience in the first century as the ideal to be approximated.
- Hellenistic historiography: a kind of history writing that had it's roots in Thucydides and flourished during the Hellenistic period.
- Key divisions of Acts 1:1-6:7, 6:8-9:31, 9:32-12:24, 12:25-16:5, 16:6-19:20, 19:21-28:30
- Categories of Christian doctrinal statements derived from Scripture: theology, ethics, experience, practice.