Analysis Of Steve Walton: The Book Of Acts

Introduction

The author, Steve Walton, defines his thesis in various ways. He argues that countless individuals “…see the New Testament, and the Bible more widely, as a collection of books about God;” however, “Acts has frequently been read as a book about the church, about mission, about the apostles, about Peter and Paul, about Christian-Jewish relations, and so forth. Rarely has it been seen as focused on God.” He concludes, in this section, the book of Acts was written telling the story of God, and how he was working with His people. Walton suggests that Acts has three areas that demonstrate this: “the verb subjects of the book, key verbs which imply divine action, the focus of attention in the speeches, and the development of the Gentile

Burridge’s book, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography, to make his point clear. It is definitely a worthy way in which to view Acts. He states that Richard provides a table in his Appendix that list the main proper nouns in Acts. Of course, Saul/Paul is mentioned numerous times; however, according the Walton, “‘God’ occurs more times, both in general and in the nominative case in particular.” Therefore, as much as readers would like to name Acts as a work following Paul and the Apostles, a large chunk does not even mention them. Nevertheless, God is mention entirely throughout the book. Walton references to the rest of the NT to provide further clarification when he states, “…in the NT generally ‘God’ is the commonest proper noun, forming 4.55% of NT occurrences of nouns, and 4.03% of NT nominative noun occurrences. In Acts the figure for occurrences of ‘God’ is similar to the NT in general (4.02%), but the proportion of nominatives… is significantly higher

First, he claims that God occurs more frequently in Acts than in any other NT books; Second, the actual number of occurrences (65) is more than the four Gospels added together (55); Third, Acts has 20.70% of the normative form of God in the NT; stating that “‘God’ is [used] proportionately higher than any other NT narrative book.” He provides these statistics to make the point that God is used as the subject in the book of Acts over church, miracles, community, etc., and should be read as such. There is something to say about these statistics, if God is the main nominative or subject we should consider reading Acts as a way to see how God uses His people to accomplish His