Why are there four Gospels, but only one Acts?
First Reading: Acts 2:1-21
For Sunday, June 12 , 2011: Year A - Day of Pentecost
The church is born fifty days after the resurrection, (pentecost means “fifty”), which is also the gestation period of crocodiles, goats and green beans. I don’t think too much significance should be drawn from that, but there might be something there.
Fifty Day Gestation?
More likely the fifty days echo the fifty days after the exodus the God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. The Hebrews unanimously ratify this covenant with God and Israel is born.
The church is born in Acts when a sound comes from heaven like a violent wind and tongues of fire descend on the disciples, filling them with the Holy Spirit and giving them the ability to speak so all could understand them in their native language.
Reversing Babel?
This text is sometimes read as the inverse of the tower of Babel story. In the Genesis story the people are one and speak one language. They put this unity to work to build a tower that will reach up to the heavens.
God doesn’t think this unity is such a good thing so God confounds their language and scatters them over the earth. This produces many peoples with many different ways of talking about who God is and what it means to be human.
One Voice?
Our holy book contains different interpretations of the same stories from creation to the resurrection. There are four gospel voices but only one Acts of the Apostles in the cannon.
The author of the Gospel of Luke writes the book of Acts, telling the story of the early growth and goings-on of the church. It is a story that starts in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, it largely tells Paul’s story. Why does only Luke get a part two? I would really be interested in reading John’s part two or Matthew’s. Mark’s Acts of the Apostles would be really interesting. Maybe these other stories end up in places other than Rome. India? North America? More voices, more stories are better than less voices and less stories.
A Puzzling Monoculture
If The Omnivore’s Dilemma has taught us anything, it is that while monocultures are really good a producing a crop consistent in quality and yield, of let’s say green beans, it only takes one strain specific enemy level the field.
When it comes to the church, we clearly have many different strains and stories, that diversity is what keeps it healthy, what keeps it alive. The narrowing of the story of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ from four voices to one seems puzzling, not to mention, at odds with the movement or our current historical location.
The Hardest Question
Why are there four Gospels, several historical traditions in the Hebrew Bible, but only one Acts?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
