Craig Keener's Acts Commentary

I'm going to be posting some material from Craig Keener's commentary on Acts (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012) over the next several days. James Dunn calls Keener's commentary "unbeatable in today's market" on issues of historicity, Richard Bauckham calls it "magisterial" and refers to Keener's "encyclopedic knowledge of ancient literature", and Daniel Marguerat calls it "the most comprehensive commentary on Acts to date", among other endorsements. Once the forthcoming volumes are published, the commentary is supposed to be about 5000 pages long. I've read the entirety of the introduction, which is about 650 pages, but only a small minority of the remainder. The pages are large, and there are a lot of footnotes with small print, so those 650 pages in the introduction might be something like 1000 pages in the average book. I'll only be citing material from the introduction, but even what I cite there has to be highly selective. I'll quote some of Keener's arguments for his conclusions, but I'll often cite his conclusions without the accompanying argumentation.

I recommend that all of you get the commentary and use it at least as a reference work. It would be good to read large portions of it, like the introduction, as well.

I'll be citing some of Keener's comments on the genre of Acts, its historicity, its authorship, and other issues. Those of you who are familiar with Keener's recent book on miracles may recall that his book began as a footnote in his Acts commentary. Though, as we'd expect, the commentary doesn't address the subject of miracles in nearly as much depth as the book on the topic does, the commentary does have a lot of material on miracles, including some not included in the miracles book. One of my posts will be about that material on miracles.

Though I agree with a lot of what Keener says, my citing him doesn't mean that I agree with all of his conclusions or every comment he makes while arguing for a conclusion I accept. For example, Keener argues that Luke published his work in the early 70s. I think it's likely that Luke published in the early to mid 60s instead. I may write a series of posts on the dating of Luke and Acts at some point. There are some comments Keener makes on the subject that I'd like to argue against.

And where Keener is right, his arguments can often be supplemented. Because of the nature of his commentary, he gives little or no attention to some significant factors, at least in his introduction. An example that comes to mind is what he writes about the speeches in Acts. It's useful to consider, as Keener does at length, how ancient historians tended to compose the speeches they included in their historical works. Keener also gives significant attention to other factors involved in evaluating Acts' speeches. But there are some considerations he neglects. For example, we should take into account the implications Divine inspiration has for Luke's recording of speeches and how the early interpreters of Acts viewed Luke's speeches in particular. I don't think Keener gave as much attention to such factors as he should have in his introduction.

But, overall, it's a monumental commentary. It's a tremendous achievement that probably will ensure that Keener will be remembered, appreciated, consulted, and cited in Acts scholarship (and elsewhere) for generations to come.

After this series of posts is completed, I'll put up an index post that will provide one place to access links to every part in the series. As I write further posts related to Keener's commentary, after finishing the present series, I may add links to that index post.