Witnesses of the Messiah: On Acts of the Apostles 1-15

This study is truly divine. We just finished this in our Parish's women's bible study and we never have enough time, even with two hours set aside, to discuss everything. The nice thing about the format is that if you want to read the chapters from the bible you can but you do not have to as it has five pages of concise, easy to follow, thought provoking commentary. There are usually five to seven questions at the end of each chapter. The only thing is that you have to really spend some time flipping back and forth in the bible to all of the OT and NT references in the questions in addition to the catechism. It is worth the effort and truly felt like a study instead of reading and then genuflecting. I learned so much about Catholicism, Tradition, Old testament portents to the coming of Christ, The Holy Spirit as a living and breathing being and where our Church roots first began. I am looking forward to continuing the rest of Acts in Witness of the Messiah.

This small Bible study book is a part of the Kingdom Series published by Emmaus Road out of Steubenville, Ohio. This small series of books (4 books total) focus upon the overarching theme of the Davidic Kingdom in the New Testament. This text is fairly short at 141 pages of larger than normal typeface with a couple of pages of reflection questions and blank writing space at the end of each chapter. The writing style is accessible to the average layperson, and the author's conclusions are well thought out. In "Witnesses of the Messiah," Stephen Pimentel consistently shows how Luke wrote his Acts of the Apostles with the Old Testament in mind. Pimentel points out the various literary allusions to the Old Testament and how these allusions (as well as the explicit citations of the Old Testament) can help us understand the narrative better. Sometimes he will even give a transliteration of the Greek to help the average reader understand these allusions. There are three main themes in Acts of the Apostles, which Pimentel explains. First, Luke portrays the time directly after the ascension of Jesus as a time of intercovenantal transition when the Deuteronomic covenant was about to come to its visible end with the destruction of the Temple. The actions of the apostles and the Christian communities display a keen awareness that divine judgment will soon befall Jerusalem (and it did in 70 A.D. with the first Jewish-Roman War and the seige & destruction of Jerusalem). One example is the selling of land and homes in Jerusalem immediately after Pentecost. More than radical charity, this is a pretty good economic choice. Why keep your land and home investments, when they are about to lose cash value due to a national disaster? The second major theme is that of the Davidic Kingdom. Now that Jesus Christ is enthroned as king over his kingdom in the Ascension, he reigns through the Apostles' ministry by means of the Holy Spirit. Through the earthly ministry of his ministers, Jesus reunites the 12 tribes of Israel. Considering the fact that 10 of these 12 tribes were assimilated nearly completely among the Gentiles, the apostolic mission to the Gentiles (those non-Jewish nations or people) is the means by which all of Israel - all 12 tribes - will be restored into the united kingdom under the Son of David: the Church. This leads us into the third and final theme: that of incorporation of the Gentiles into the Church. Pimentel carefully analyzes the events leading up to and including the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, which solved a major problem of evangelizing the Gentiles: whether they should follow the dictates of the Mosaic Law. Since the Law (i.e. the Mosaic Law) was a national law meant for the Deuteronomic Covenant, it is no longer binding upon those who have entered the New Covenant and who have now received the law of this New Covenant: the New Law of the Holy Spirit. This concise and well-written Bible study would do well, I think,

A tenet common to both genuinely Christian exegesis and redaction criticism - critique of biblical texts as compositional works - is that understanding the human author's perspective and intent is central to reliably interpreting his writings. Stephen Pimentel skillfully exemplifies this tenet in his exposition of Acts. In particular, Mr. Pimentel's diligent yet concise exegesis persuasively presents extensive and textually well-grounded evidence that Luke's perspective excluded any dichotomy of biblical theology and historicity, contrary to the presumption widespread in modern biblical criticism. Mr. Pimentel's work is especially pertinent to the corollary of this presumption, which is that New Testament authors typically compromised historicity for the sake of advancing their theological "agenda." As Mr. Pimentel shows, the text of the New Testament, and in particular Acts, strongly indicates that such a compromise would have been unthinkable to the authors of the New Testament. As Mr. Pimentel shows, these men viewed the New Covenant as culminating a theologically significant and historically real development of God's covenantal relationship with Israel.Mr. Pimentel's exposition is thorough enough to gratify the formally trained student of Scripture, while remaining highly readable to non-scholars. This exposition principally consists of surfacing the literal "saturation" of Acts in Old Testament subtexts underlying the direct citations and quotations of Old Testament Scripture. As Mr. Pimentel convincingly shows, these pervasive subtexts clearly indicate Luke's insight into the significance of the New Covenant Church: as the covenant community established and advanced by Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, the Church is the definitive fulfillment of God's covenantal promises to Israel from Abraham to David. This insight has tremendous religious significance, which Mr. Pimentel ably assists the believing or searching reader to grasp through helpful reflections at the end of each concise chapter. Yet Mr. Pimentel's work has a distinct critical value as well, for the New Testament's message cannot be properly understood apart from an intellectually honest accounting for the authors' perspective of that message.