Andy Peck interviews Tom Wright, senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. He’s the author of over 80 books and one of the best-known New Testament scholars in the UK. His latest book is The Challenge of Acts: a crash course on the book of Acts and its relevance for Christianity and culture today.
AP If people want more of a commentary on Acts, of course, they can go to your two-volume Acts for Everyone. This book gives an overview. What do you hope the book will do?
TW I think this book is an attempt to say, that although Acts is full of splendid little nuggets: a verse here, a short passage there, which one could you preach on, which one could you do a Bible study on? But if you go up to 35,000 feet and look at the whole Acts landscape, then certain things stand out which you might not see if you’re simply looking at this paragraph for a sermon here or that verse for a sermon there.
I believe the book as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve broken down the text into sections of four chapters each, with the exception of chapter seventeen, which is so dense and which Luke seems to want to go into much more detail with.
I don’t think I’ve ever read Acts like this before. So if I haven’t, then it’s quite likely that a lot of other people won’t have done either.
AP Luke gives us a description of what he’s doing in the early verses, of course. You’ve identified some themes in the book that a preacher would need to spot. And particularly, I was fascinated by a look at the clear temple theme early on. TW It occurred to me some while ago that it’s important to understand how the temple in the ancient Jewish world worked, and in fact temples in the wider world as a whole. A temple in the ancient world is a place where heaven and earth come together.
