Relationship to Luke’s Gospel

Both Acts and Luke are addressed to “Theophilus” (Acts 1:1; Luke 1:3). Moreover, Acts 1:1 refers to the author’s “former account” about Jesus, understood to mean the Gospel of Luke. In 1925, Cadbury first attempted to link Luke’s Gospel and Acts together with precision, referring to them as one work, “Luke-Acts” (Cadbury, Making of Luke-Acts). An example of this link is the manner in which the beginning and ending of Luke’s Gospel connect with the beginning of Acts, almost as if Luke intentionally wrote his Gospel as volume one and Acts as volume two. Furthermore, the open ending of Acts has led to speculation that Luke had planned to write a third volume. This possibility raises the question of whether Luke-Acts was originally one volume (Bruce, Book of Acts, 3) that was separated for some unknown reason by the early church (e.g., during the canonization process).

However, connecting Luke’s Gospel and Acts too closely can raise problems. Alexander argues that the often-cited links could be circumstantial and less concrete than assumed (Alexander, Preface, 145–46). Strange notes a lack of evidence that the two texts ever existed together in any real capacity (Strange, Problem, 181). Most importantly, the reception history of Acts reveals that early Christians did not perceive it as the second part of a whole (Rowe, “Literary Unity,” 450). It is possible that the perceived unity is primarily theological (Marguerat, First Christian Historian, 45) or that it might represent expectations of modern readers (that ancient readers would not have possessed).