History 288 Home | Schedule of Readings and Assignments

Readings:

Bible: Acts 8: 1-8, 26-40; 10: 1-48; 19: 1-40. The Acts of the Apostles (Acts) is the fifth book in the New Testament.

Basic Questions:

1. What passage(s) in the readings did you find particularly interesting? Why? What passage(s) did you not understand?

2. What do the readings reveal about what it meant to be a Christian?

3. What do the readings reveal about the nature of Christianity at the time in which they were produced?

Specific Questions:

In the selected passages from Acts, written between 75 and 95 CE, we encounter several religious people who are neither Jewish or Christian: the Ethiopian eunuch, Cornelius the Roman centurian, magicians in Ephesus, and Demetrius the silversmith.

4. Identify: eunuch, gentile, centurion.

5. How does Luke, the author of Acts and of the Gospel of Luke, portray these people? What can we learn about early Christian attitudes towards those who are not Jews or Christians?

6. The stories about the eunuch and the centurion are conversion stories. How did they become Christians? Pay careful attention to the process of conversion. What do the two conversion stories have in common? How are they different?

Questions assigned in lecture:

What are the synoptic gosples? Why are they called synoptic?

Clarifications:

  • CE = Common Era or Christian Era. It is a newer desination for AD, the abbreviation for Anno Domini, which means "in the year of the Lord [Jesus]."
  • In Acts 8, Philip is one of the seven men commissioned by the apostles in Acts 6: 5-6. He is not the apostle Philip, chosen by Jesus in Matthew 10:2-4; Mark 3:14-19; Luke 6:13-16.
  • In Acts 10, Peter is one of the apostles chosen by Jesus.
  • In Acts 19, Paul, first called Saul, began by persecuting Christians until he became a Christian himself (Acts 9) and arguably the most intrepid of the early Christian missionaries.