Steve Stanley’s Reviews > The Acts of the Apostles: Interpretation, History and Theology > Status Update

We are therefore not suggesting that Luke operated in a manner similar to the modern, (supposedly) detached journalist who reports speeches verbatim. The speeches are given in Luke’s own language, and they are molded to address the situation at hand. Nevertheless, their brevity and lack of agonistic character suggest that they are a creative yet faithful gist of what the speakers said.

Luke is a theological historian who presents his account of early Christianity with narrative verve while wishing to be viewed as a serious historian

I would say that it is most comparable to the one evinced in the work of 2 Maccabees. I am not suggesting that Acts is genetically related to this or other Jewish-Hellenistic works. What I am suggesting is that before Luke wrote there were already authors writing history from the Jewish perspective who used the historical monograph as a genre to help them communicate. Luke probably belongs to the same literary soil.

E. D. Hirsch, in his classic work Validity in Interpretation, can make the following statement: ‘All understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound.’ This would imply that if an audience is not competent in the genre in which a message is given, then miscommunication is bound to occur. Genre is thus essential.