Bock - Acts

Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament

ROBERT W. YARBROUGH AND ROBERT H. STEIN, EDITORS

Volumes now available

Luke, Darrell L. Bock

John, Andreas J. Kstenberger

Acts, Darrell L. Bock

Romans, Thomas R. Schreiner

1 Corinthians, David E. Garland

Philippians, Moiss Silva

1 Peter, Karen H. Jobes

Revelation, Grant R. Osborne

2007 by Darrell L. Bock

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-0026-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

To my colleagues at Dallas Theological Seminary,
Talbot Theological Seminary, Tyndale House, Bengelhaus,
and the universities of Aberdeen and Tbingen for their friendship,
fellowship, encouragement, and instruction

And, most especially, to Sally Bock, whose life defines faithfulness

Contents

Series Preface

The chief concern of the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (BECNT) is to provide, within the framework of informed evangelical thought, commentaries that blend scholarly depth with readability, exegetical detail with sensitivity to the whole, and attention to critical problems with theological awareness. We hope thereby to attract the interest of a fairly wide audience, from the scholar who is looking for a thoughtful and independent examination of the text to the motivated lay Christian who craves a solid but accessible exposition.

Nevertheless, a major purpose is to address the needs of pastors and others involved in the preaching and exposition of the Scriptures as the uniquely inspired word of God. This consideration affects directly the parameters of the series. For example, serious biblical expositors cannot afford to depend on a superficial treatment that avoids the difficult questions, but neither are they interested in encyclopedic commentaries that seek to cover every conceivable issue that may arise. Our aim therefore is to focus on problems that have a direct bearing on the meaning of the text (although selected technical details are treated in the additional notes).

Similarly, a special effort is made to avoid treating exegetical questions for their own sake, that is, in relative isolation from the thrust of the argument as a whole. This effort may involve (at the discretion of the individual contributors) abandoning the verse-by-verse approach in favor of an exposition that focuses on the paragraph as the main unit of thought. In all cases, however, the commentaries stress the development of the argument and explicitly relate each passage to what precedes and follows it so as to identify its function in context as clearly as possible.

We believe, moreover, that a responsible exegetical commentary must take fully into account the latest scholarly research, regardless of its source. The attempt to do this in the context of a conservative theological tradition presents certain challenges, and in the past the results have not always been commendable. In some cases, evangelicals appear to make use of critical scholarship not for the purpose of genuine interaction but only to dismiss it. In other cases, the interaction glides over into assimilation, theological distinctives are ignored or suppressed, and the end product cannot be differentiated from works that arise from a fundamentally different starting point.

The contributors to this series attempt to avoid these pitfalls. On one hand, they do not consider traditional opinions to be sacrosanct, and they are certainly committed to doing justice to the biblical text whether or not it supports such opinions. On the other hand, they will not quickly abandon a long-standing view, if there is persuasive evidence to support it, for the sake of fashionable theories. What is more important, the contributors share a belief in the trustworthiness and essential unity of Scripture. They also consider that the historic formulations of Christian doctrine, such as the ecumenical creeds and many of the documents originating in the sixteenth-century Reformation, arose from a legitimate reading of Scripture, thus providing a proper framework for its further interpretation. No doubt, the use of such a starting point sometimes results in the imposition of a foreign construct on the text, but we deny that it must necessarily do so or that the writers who claim to approach the text without prejudices are invulnerable to the same danger.

Accordingly, we do not consider theological assumptionsfrom which, in any case, no commentator is freeto be obstacles to biblical interpretation. On the contrary, an exegete who hopes to understand the apostle Paul in a theological vacuum might just as easily try to interpret Aristotle without regard for the philosophical framework of his whole work or without having recourse to the subsequent philosophical categories that make possible a meaningful contextualization of his thought. It must be emphasized, however, that the contributors to the present series come from a variety of theological traditions and that they do not all have identical views with regard to the proper implementation of these general principles. In the end, all that really matters is whether the series succeeds in representing the original text accurately, clearly, and meaningfully to the contemporary reader.

Shading has been used to assist the reader in locating the introductory comments for each section. Textual variants in the Greek text are signaled in the authors translation by means of half-brackets around the relevant word or phrase (e.g., Gerasenes), thereby alerting the reader to turn to the additional notes at the end of each exegetical unit for a discussion of the textual problem. The documentation uses the author-date method, in which the basic reference consists of authors surname + year + page number(s): Fitzmyer 1992: 58. The only exceptions to this system are well-known reference works (e.g., BDAG, LSJ, TDNT ). Full publication data and a complete set of indexes can be found at the end of the volume.

Robert Yarbrough

Robert H. Stein

Authors Preface

This work represents the completion of a commitment made in the early 1980s to produce a commentary on both Luke and Acts. There were times when I wondered if I was crazy to agree to this. On the one hand, there are many excellent commentaries on both books, although there were fewer when I originally agreed to do both books. Second, the life of Jesus and the issues raised by Acts are two very distinct areas of NT studies, each representing its own specialty and having a unique literature. One could say, like the old chewing-gum commercial, Double your pleasure, double your fun, but I often sensed that I had doubled the bibliography and the issues to tackle. Nonetheless, what I have learned in this study and tried to convey has been richly rewarding. The examples of these first saints have much to teach us today.

I took on this assignment at the time because no one recently had written a major commentary on both works and because Luke-Acts is the product of one author telling one story in two volumes. That Luke-Acts was a single work had been little appreciated in the way commentaries handled both works. Lukes innovation needed a careful treatment, especially from an evangelical perspective. So much skepticism had mounted around both Jesus and the earliest church in twentieth-century NT study that a fresh look at these two works was needed. Since the time of that commitment, two authors, Joseph Fitzmyer and Luke Timothy Johnson, have produced an excellent set of critical commentaries on Luke-Acts. Fitzmyer brings a superb understanding of the first-century context to his work, and Johnson knows the Greco-Roman context and the literary themes that enlighten the work. Still, my sense is that issues of importance about the nature of our text, what it can teach the church today, and certain historical issues still needed work. So I offer this commentary, well aware that there is much more that could be said. There comes a time, however, when a commentator must decide that his labor is sufficient to serve the reader well. That is my prayer, especially for those who preach Luke-Acts, rich as it is with history, theology, and pastoral concern for the identity of Christianity and the Christian message.