Library › Latin: Early Christian Writings › Acts
The Acts of the Apostles, written in Greek as a sequel to the Gospel of Luke, narrates the growth of the earliest Christian community from the Ascension and Pentecost in Jerusalem to Paul’s arrival as a prisoner in Rome. Its twenty-eight chapters follow Peter and the Jerusalem church, the martyrdom of Stephen, the conversion of Paul, and Paul’s missionary journeys around the eastern Mediterranean. The Latin text is the Vulgate, a revision of the Old Latin version made in the late fourth century.
Acts is the only narrative history of the first Christian generation and the main source for the career of Paul outside his own letters. Its speeches, shipwreck and courtroom scenes made it one of the most vivid books of the New Testament, and it supplied later Christians with their picture of the apostolic church. Arator in the sixth century turned it into a Latin epic, and the Vulgate text was read and expounded throughout the Middle Ages.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from the Lasciva Roma collection of additional Latin texts (edition: Jerome's 405 a.d., Latin Vulgate These files were produced following modern scholarship of the available Vulgate mss. The apocryphal books are prefixed with…), licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.