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The Book Of Acts Essay

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The author of the Book of Acts greatly values historic Israelite religion and views the Judaism of his day as uninformed and impressionable. He portrays Christianity as a branch of Judaism rather than a completely separate religion. Essentially the main purpose of Acts is to support the idea that Gentiles are able to be members of the church without converting to Judaism.
The author of the Book of Acts is the same as the author of Luke as demonstrated in (Luke 1:1, 4) and (Acts 1:1,2); therefore it is not incorrect to refer to the author of the Book of Acts as “Luke”. Luke recognizes the importance of historic Israelite religion by providing examples of key figures in Christianity and their observance of certain Israelite practices and rituals. …show more content…

Luke clarifies that the Jerusalem church was indeed taking radical steps and including Gentiles without making them convert to Judaism, but they were not happy about doing so. Luke uses a comparison to Pentecost to demonstrate that this was not the first time that God was acting in an unexpected way. As previously stated, in the second half of Acts, Paul starts numerous churches that are made up primarily of Gentiles. This greatly affected the movement because previously, it was a movement within Judaism. However in most of these churches there were now more Gentiles than Jews, which led to the Jerusalem Conference. (Acts 15) At the Jerusalem conference, the issue of whether or not Gentiles had to convert to Judaism was debated. The church came to the decision that Gentiles should remain Gentiles after they become a part of the church as long as they adopted the ethics of Judaism, only worshipped the God of Judaism and read only Judaism’s scriptures as authoritative. This stresses Gentile acceptance. By including the reaction of the church, Luke is able to convey his idea that Judaism is impressionable during his time. The Jerusalem Conference demonstrates this idea perfectly because it shows that the church was open to evolving and accepting Gentiles even if they did not convert to

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