Who has the leading role in Acts of the Apostles?

Answer 1

A:Who was intended to be the main character in Acts of the Apostles comes down to what the author's intention was in writing the book.

In support of Acts as a book of history, Sir William Ramsay stated "Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy...this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians." This is now strongly disputed. Uta Ranke-Heinemann (Putting Away Childish Things) says that anyone familiar with recent scholarship would laugh at Ramsay's claim, and says that the whole book is a work of Propaganda aimed at Gentile Christians and Gentiles who have not yet become Christians. Hans Joachim Schoeps writes that Actshas been believed much too readily, saying that Acts is only a retrospective view of Christian origins written by one party - the winners. The book of Acts is not a history and was written for a purpose.

The two main characters in Acts of the Apostles are Peter and Paul, and it would seem that the book is really about Paul. George Wells (Evidence for the Historical Jesus) quotes A. J. Mattill as saying that the dominant view of Acts' presentation of Paul is that in Acts and the epistles there are two Pauls, the historical Paul of the authentic epistles and the legendary Paul of Acts.

In my view the purpose of Acts was to compare Peter and Paul, in order to show Peter to be the greater apostle. In every subtly comparison between the two apostles, Peter always comes out ahead. In his own epistles, Paul says that he was chosen by God to preach to the gentiles, but Acts says that his first attempts at preaching were to the Jews of Damascus and that it was Peter who decided that the Church should preach to the gentiles, after Peter had been told this by an angel. According to Acts, Paul's first miraculous cure was improbably similar to Peter's first cure. In both cases, a man who had been lame since birth was immediately cured by being commanded to stand and walk. Peter's first miracle cure was performed in the name of Jesus, at the Temple, where the faithful saw the healed beggar praising God, and was the opportunity for some outstanding proselytising. Paul's first cure was clumsy and without apparent purpose, given that Paul did not tell the man about Jesus and he was even mistaken for a pagan god. Everything we seen in Acts portrays Paul as a lesser apostle.