Acts

The Acts of the Apostles—or more in keeping with the author's
intent, the Acts of the Ascended Lord—is part two of Luke's story of
"all that Jesus began to do and teach." In it he recounts the
expansion of the church as its witness spread from Jerusalem to all of
Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

While at least
forty early church authors commented on Acts, the works of only three
survive in their entirety—John Chrysostom's Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Bede the Venerable's Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles
and a long Latin epic poem by Arator. In this Ancient Christian
Commentary on Scripture volume, substantial selections from the first
two of these appear with occasional excerpts from Arator alongside many
excerpts from the fragments preserved in J. A. Cramer's Catena in Acta SS. Apostolorum.
Among the latter we find selections from Basil the Great, Gregory of
Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, Didymus the Blind,
Athanasius, Jerome, John Cassian, Augustine, Ambrose, Justin Martyr,
Irenaeus, Theodoret of Cyr, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of
Alexandria, Cassiodorus, and Hilary of Poitiers, some of which are here
translated into English for the first time.

As readers, we find
these early authors transmit life to us because their faith brought them
into living and experiential contact with the realities spoken of in
the sacred text.