8 - Conclusions

Summary

I have completed my detailed exegesis of the relevant texts, both of biblical and post-biblical Jewish narrative texts as well as Acts. It is now the proper time to summarise my results, propose a possible historical scenario for the real readers of Luke–Acts, and sketch the implications of my findings for the historiographic orientation of Acts.

Review and summary

After an introductory chapter which attempted to highlight the need for the current study, I continued by placing the current project in the wider field of research on the speeches in Acts (chapter two). I argued that from the time that the Tübingen school began to make its mark on New Testament studies, the agenda dominating research on the speeches was concerned with their theology and historicity. The tide of scholarship slowly began to move in a different direction with the monumental essay of Martin Dibelius, ‘The Speeches in Acts and Ancient Historiography’. On the one hand, Dibelius remained moored to contemporary questions by probing Luke's method of speech reporting and by comparing it to the method of the ancient historians. On the other hand, he moved scholarship forward by asking more literarily oriented questions: his task was to determine ‘the meaning to be attributed to the speeches in the work as a whole’.