Craig S. Keener - Acts : an exegetical commentary. Volume 2 (3:1-14:28)

In this section the apostolic church grows and even challenges the municipal aristocracy (the local political elite) by an alternative vision of leadership for Israel. This section reports a major public sign and a consequent speech appealing to Israel to turn and submit to its rightful king. It then turns to two escalating confrontations with Jerusalem’s leaders. Sandwiched between the two confrontations are an account of a second community experience of the Spirit (analogous to the Pentecost experience), including positive (Barnabas) and negative (Ananias and Sapphira) examples of sharing possessions, and a summary of continuing apostolic signs.

Luke’s contrast between two kinds of leadership—one institutional and supported by Rome and hereditary wealth, the other charismatic and following Jesus’s example—is graphic. The contrast would be especially striking if, as suggested in the commentary introduction (ch. 10), Luke wrote in a period when Jerusalem and its priestly aristocracy lay in shambles whereas the movement founded by Jesus’s apostles had continued to spread.

Scholars have often noted some parallels between the persecution of the apostles in Acts 4 (Peter and John) and Acts 5 (all the apostles). A century and even half a century ago most scholars viewed the repetition as due to Luke’s including divergent oral accounts of the same event as different events. Today most scholars find instead a deliberate literary pattern, an “echo effect” to reinforce the point.