In broad terms, there were two major kinds of Christology in the early church.  One of them could be called an "incarnation" Christology, since it maintains that Christ was a pre-existent divine being who became a human, as explicitly stated in John 1:1-18 and Philippians 2:6-11.  That's the view, of course, that most Christians have always held, and is often referred to as a "high" Christology, where Christ starts out up above, with God, as divine himself. The other could be called an “exaltation” Christology , sometimes called a “low” Christology or a Christology from below, where Jesus started out as a human, nothing more, but came to be exalted by God to become his Son, the Lord (at some point of his existence.)  As I tried to show in my book How Jesus Became God, this was the oldest view among the Christians, and can be found in fragments of creeds and confessions that were later quoted by authors of the New Testament, so that in terms of raw chronology, they were formulated well *before* the [...]

Now that I have discussed the major themes and emphases of the Acts of the Apostles, I can summarize what (I think) we can know about its author, when he wrote, and why. As I’ve indicated, Acts is the second volume of a two-volume work by the anonynmous author of the Gospel of Luke.  In my discussion of the Gospel I’ve show why the traditional view that the author was Luke the gentile physician, a traveling companion of Paul, is probably not right.  In case you want to read/reread the post, it is here:  https://ehrmanblog.org/the-gospel-of-luke-who-wrote-it-when-and-why/ There I point out what I’ve repeatedly argued on the blog, that in virtually every instance in which the book of Acts can be compared with Paul’s letters in terms of biographical detail, differences emerge.  Some of these differences are minor – the kinds of things a friend might just get wrong; others are major and show that the author misunderstands or at least mischaracterizes Paul on significant issues, in ways hard to explain if he was closely associated with [...]

Acts in a Nutshell The book of Acts is a truly important book for anyone interested in knowing how Christianity began:  it is our only narrative of the spread of the faith in its first thirty years. Acts is a relatively long book – about the size of its companion volume the Gospel of Luke – and there is a lot going on in it.  Have you ever read it all the way through?  Do you know much about it?  If not, this is the post for you.  If so, then try to summarize the major themes and emphases of Acts in one sentence, of fifty words or less. Here’s how I would do it (today!): A companion volume to the Gospel of Luke, Acts narrates the miraculous spread of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome, from Jew to gentile, through the miraculous deeds and inspired preaching of Jesus’ original apostles and the convert Paul, all empowered by the Spirit and in complete harmony with one another. In this post I’ll unpack this statement and in [...]