Acts.

Religious Fiction.

        Christian leaders of the second and third centuries, whether they held the standard or the schismatic type of belief, were alive to the values of fiction in religion. Not only was fiction useful in propagating their views of truth but it was valuable as a substitute for the romances current among Greeks and Romans. It is sometimes supposed that these romances were characterized by what we should call pornography, but generally speaking they were rather edifying narratives of love and adventure. The emphasis put on sex in their Christian counterparts is rather more impressive, in spite of— and partly because of — the enthusiasm of the heroes and heroines for asceticism. Many of the motifs of the Hellenistic romance recur in the Christian apocryphal acts.

        If the Four Gospels seemed to their early readers to leave gaps in the life of Jesus which might be edifyingly filled, and so pointed toward further gospel writing, the Book of Acts left a mass of loose ends that invited literary effort. By the middle of the second century authentic memories of the apostles had largely disappeared, and the Gnostic sects were constantly appealing to apostolic authority for their special views-as was the church as a whole. What became of the apostles? What did they accomplish? What special teaching did they set forth? In the absence of authentic memories, imagination took the lead, and a group of religious novels resulted.

        When the two-volume work of Luke, the Gospel and the Acts, was divided, and the gospel volume was taken out of it to form part of the collection of the Four Gospels, the second volume was left to go its own way. How soon it came to be called the Acts of the Apostles we do not know; we find it first called by that name in the Muratorian canon fragment about A.D. 200 — the “Acts of All the Apostles.” But it must have come by the name much earlier than that, for it bears a similar title in the writings. of Clement of Alexandria, and it undoubtedly suggested the creation of the apocryphal Acts literature and gave it its name.