The Acts of the Apostles

The penultimate episode of National Review's Great Books podcast is The Acts of the Apostles. I don't expect to learn much in the way of new things about the Bible at this point, but go to it, discuss it, and think about it in order to more fully embed and understand the teachings I already know. There were some interesting new things in this one. 

That the Athenians had an altar an Unknown God was not just hedging their bets in general, as I had always supposed. . There had been a plague 6th C BC and they had sacrificed to hundreds, even thousands of other gods, not only the large ones with great temples, but the tiny household gods. Epimenides thought there must be some unknown god who was unappeased; he had a dream and followed a flock of sheep. Where they stopped he sacrificed one - and that is where the altar was built.  It's an intriguing similarity, perhaps a prefiguring, of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. The Athenians would have known the story, though what they individually and collectively would have thought about it 600 years later is harder to discern. It is likely that Paul asked about the story and made the connection, rather than preaching a generic sermon about unknown gods. He is telling them "You were on to something with that one.  Let me tell you more about it."  He is building on what they know, not dismissing it.

The Acts of Caesar Augustus, who was the adopted son of the self-declared god Julius Caesar, was written to extol him, and the title of the book in the Bible echoes it and seeks to contrast Jesus and the apostles to it, which was rather controversial and dangerous.

Pentecost was a festival of first fruits and spring harvest, but it was also a remembrance of the giving of the law on Sinai, amidst fire and wind. The giving of the new law written on the heart on that date was a deliberate echo - just one of those levels God always seems to build on centuries later to deepen the lesson.