Acts: A Friends Illuminated Commentary

Early Friends understood themselves as restoring the apostolic church — the church of Acts, before it had been buried under centuries of creed, hierarchy, and ceremony. They read Acts not as ancient history but as a living description of what the church was meant to be and could be again: gathered by the Spirit, led by the Spirit, willing to suffer for the Spirit’s sake. The correspondences between the book of Acts and early Quaker history are striking: both movements were driven by itinerant preachers with no institutional authorization, both faced imprisonment and persecution from religious and civil authorities, and both understood their sufferings as participation in the pattern of Christ’s own suffering.

This commentary moves through the Acts of the Apostles drawing on the writings of George Fox, Edward Burrough, James Nayler, and other early Friends who explicitly read their own experience through the lens of this biblical narrative. It explores the Pentecost narrative (and the Quaker claim to its renewal), the economic sharing of the Jerusalem community (and its resonance with Quaker simplicity), the confrontations with the Sanhedrin and Roman officials (and the Quaker tradition of speaking truth to power), and the missionary journeys that took the gospel to the ends of the earth.