On the Acts of the Apostles

The book of Acts is a narrative. While this style is not unheard of in the New Testament, Acts feels more like a story than most of the other New Testament books.

Is this a good narrative, and, if so, what makes it one? There are many aspects to analyzing narratives. I realize this could potentially be a very long monotonous article, so I'll try to keep it extremely brief. Here we will discuss how to analyze narratives, and how that applies to Acts.

We first determine what type of narrative it is. There are three types of narratives: mythical, historical, and legal/political. Acts is a historical narrative because it tells a true story. For the most part Acts is also written in the direct declarative mode.

Now that we determined its type, we look at the details -- what are the things all good narratives have? All good narratives have 6 things: action, agent, time, place, manner, and cause.

At this time we would go through each of the sentences seeing each of those six things (what is being done, who is doing it, when it's being done, etc.), as well as analyzing its purpose, particulars, order and movement (examining transitions, how quickly the action moves, why this style was used, etc.). This helps our understanding of the way the text works - which is actually a worthwhile thing to do if ever you have a spare weekend on your hands and wish to spend it dissecting a pre-translated book of Acts.

Good narratives also have three things -- brevity, clarity, and credibility. All three of these are present here. The details given are all necessary and the point of the stories is clear.

Acts is not only an excellent book because it is in the Canon; it is also excellent as a story. I struggled with what to write for this update in part because it is so well written and easy to read. It doesn't need much explanation. It's understandable and enjoyable by us average people, without a large need for studying what external sources have to say about it. Although it is still profitable for us to dissect, it is not essential - after all, it was written for us, not for experts.