The Strange Ending of the Book of Acts
Luke doesn’t give us a neat conclusion to the Book of Acts, but rather this open-ended final paragraph:
30 For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. 31 He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ—with all boldness and without hindrance! [Acts 28:30-31]
What are we supposed to make of this? I think Ben Witherington’s case is persuasive:
[T]he book’s ending makes much better sense if Acts is some sort of historical work, meant to chronicle not the life and death of Paul but the rise and spread of the gospel and of the social and religious movement to which the gospel gave birth. In particular, it is meant to chronicle the spread of the good news from Jerusalem to Rome, from the edge of the Empire to its very heart. Rome was not seen in Luke’s day as the ends of the earth, so the reader would know very well that the mission and task of spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8) were still ongoing in his own day, but it was critical for that further spread of the gospel that the message reach the heart and hub of the Empire, from which it could indeed spread to the ends of the earth.
The open-mindedness that the modern reader senses in the ending of Acts is intentional. Luke is chronicling not the life and times of Paul (or any other early Christian leader), which would have a definite terminus, but rather a phenomenon and movement that was continuing and alive and well in his own day….
However things ultimately turned out for Paul (and it is my view that he was released from house arrest but was later taken captive again and executed during the reign of Nero, probably during the Neronian crackdown following the fire in AD 64), Luke’s main concern is to leave the reader a reminder about the unstoppable word of God, which no obstacle—not shipwreck, not poisonous snakes, not Roman authorities—could hinder from reaching the heart of the Empire, and the hearts of those who dwelled there.”
Acts doesn’t come to a neat end because the story is still going, and you and I are a part of it.
“From Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth”.
Amen