5 - The composition and editing of Acts

Summary

The composition of books in antiquity

The observations made so far about the Western text of Acts have suggested that the origin of the distinctive stratum of Acts' Western text is to be sought in an extensive and meticulous process of annotation which took place at an early stage in the book's history. This conclusion raises a further question: how could a book such as Acts have acquired this layer of annotations?

Luke, more than any other New Testament author, seems to have been aware of the world of Hellenistic culture and its literary conventions. We might expect him to have followed these conventions, and that what we may discover of the processes by which authors in antiquity brought their works to completion will tell us something of the way in which he is likely to have worked. There were several points in the process of compiling and disseminating a book which would have permitted annotation to have taken place.

Annotation by the author

An author in antiquity would begin work on a serious literary production by compiling notes (ὑπομνέματα or commentarii) which were to serve as its basis. A commentarius might carry the preliminary notes of a scholar. Lucian advised the aspiring historian first to collect such notes, which would give him the information from which to work. It is the historian's art, according to Lucian, to turn these data into a literary product worth calling ‘history’.