Jesus in Acts

"If Luke understands Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel's hope and as inextricably related to both God and the Spirit, Luke also understands Jesus to be present and active in the church's witness. Interpreters of Acts have sometimes emphasized the absence of Jesus in Luke's second volume (Conzelmann 1961, 202-206; Zwiep 1997, 182). In obvious and superficial ways, the narrative itself requires Jesus' absence, since following the ascension Jesus can scarcely be present in the same way as he is in Luke's first volume. Some remarkable strands in the narrative undermine that absence, however. In the first verse of Acts, Luke characterizes his first volume as concerning 'the things Jesus began to do and to teach' (AT, emphasis added). The NRSV obscures this phrase with the translation 'all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning,' probably because the translators assume that Jesus is absent from the story of Acts. The continuity of Jesus' activity may well be what Luke asserts here, however. Prior to his ascension, Jesus instructs the apostles (v. 2) and identifies them as his witnesses, which implies that their own teaching and preaching is, in effect, Jesus' work. Jesus enters the narrative only at Paul's conversion, where he charges Paul with persecuting, not the church, but Jesus himself (9:4). The repetition of this charge in the subsequent reiterations of Paul's conversion (22:7; 26:14) gives it greater force. Two further texts reinforce the presence of Jesus. In Acts 9:34, when Peter goes to the ailing Aeneas, he does not cure him in Jesus' name, but announces: 'Jesus Christ heals you.' And in 26:23, at his climactic defense speech, Paul asserts to Agrippa that Jesus is the one proclaiming light to Israel and the Gentiles. These statements scarcely reflect an understanding of Jesus' absence."

Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. Acts. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003), 34-35.