Editing Acts of the Apostles (section)

===Genre, sources and historicity of Acts===
The title "Acts of the Apostles" (''Praxeis Apostolon'') would seem to identify it with the genre telling of the deeds and achievements of great men (''praxeis''), but it was not the title given by the author.{{sfn|Matthews|2011|p=12}} The anonymous author aligned Luke–Acts to the 'narratives' ({{lang|grc|διήγησις}} {{tlit|grc|diēgēsis}}) which many others had written, and described his own work as an "orderly account" ({{lang|grc|ἀκριβῶς καθεξῆς}}). It lacks exact analogies in Hellenistic or Jewish literature.{{sfn|Aune|1988|p=77}} The author may have taken as his model the works of [[Dionysius of Halicarnassus]], who wrote a well-known history of Rome, or the Jewish historian [[Josephus]], author of a [[Antiquities of the Jews|history of the Jews]].{{sfn|Balch|2003|p=1104}} Like them, he anchors his history by dating the birth of the founder (Romulus for Dionysius, Moses for Josephus, Jesus for Luke) and like them he tells how the founder is born from God, taught authoritatively, and appeared to witnesses after death before ascending to heaven.{{sfn|Balch|2003|p=1104}} By and large the sources for Acts can only be guessed at,{{sfn|Bruce|1990|p=40}} but the author would have had access to the [[Septuagint]] (a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures), the [[Gospel of Mark]], and either the hypothetical collection of "sayings of Jesus" called the [[Q source]] or the [[Gospel of Matthew]].{{sfn|Boring|2012|p=577}}{{sfn|Powell|2018|p=113}} He transposed a few incidents from Mark's gospel to the time of the Apostles—for example, the material about "clean" and "unclean" foods in Mark 7 is used in Acts 10, and Mark's account of the accusation that Jesus has attacked the Temple (Mark 14:58) is used in a story about Stephen (Acts 6:14).{{sfn|Witherington|1998|p=8}} There are also points of contacts (meaning suggestive parallels but something less than clear evidence) with [[1 Peter]], the [[Letter to the Hebrews]], and 1 Clement.{{sfn|Boring|2012|p=578}}<ref>Pierson Parker. (1965). The "Former Treatise" and the Date of Acts. Journal of Biblical Literature Vol. 84, No. 1 (Mar., 1965), pp. 52–58 (7 pages). "Furthermore, the relative calm of both of Luke's books, and  sparse apocalyptic as compared with Matthew and Mark, sugg the church was out from under duress when Luke wrote. This is cially true of Acts. Some scholars used to put Acts in the second century, but few nowadays would do so. Indeed if Clement of Rom knew the book, as he seems to have done, it will have to be prior to a. d. 96." and "I Clem 2 1 with Acts 20 35; I Clem 5 4 with Acts 12 17; I Clem 18 1 w 13 22; I Clem 41 1 with Acts 23 1; I Clem 42 1–4, 44 2 with Acts 1–8; I Clem with Acts 26 7; I Clem 59 2."</ref> Other sources can only be inferred from internal evidence—the traditional explanation of the three "we" passages, for example, is that they represent eyewitness accounts.{{sfn|Bruce|1990|pp=40–41}} The search for such inferred sources was popular in the 19th century, but by the mid-20th it had largely been abandoned.{{sfn|Boring|2012|p=579}}[[File:ApostleFedorZubov.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|''Ministry of the Apostles'': [[Russian icons|Russian icon]] by [[Fyodor Zubov]], 1660]]Acts was read as a reliable history of the early church well into the post-Reformation era, but by the 17th century biblical scholars began to notice that it was incomplete and tendentious—its picture of a harmonious church is quite at odds with that given by Paul's letters, and it omits important events such as the deaths of both Peter and Paul. The mid-19th-century scholar [[Ferdinand Christian Baur|Ferdinand Baur]] suggested that the author had re-written history to present a united Peter and Paul and advance a single orthodoxy against the [[Marcion]]ites (Marcion was a 2nd-century heretic who wished to cut Christianity off entirely from the Jews); Baur continues to have enormous influence, but today there is less interest in determining the historical accuracy of Acts (although this has never died out) than in understanding the author's theological program.{{sfn|Holladay|2011|p=unpaginated}}