the inner life of the community continually resolves the critical issues that threaten its survival, the strife between the establishment and the community increasingly escalates as the narrative progresses’.3 The passage begins and ends with a record of the remarkable growth in the number of believers in Jerusalem, and the point is clearly made that this happened because the ministry of the word continued unhindered (cf. 5:42; 6:7). This is a critical paragraph for Luke’s development of a theology