“The first account.” Prōton logon — literally “the first word.” Luke opens by pointing back over his shoulder at his own Gospel, addressed to the same Theophilus (Luke 1:3), and that seam is why Luke and Acts are read as one two-volume work by one hand — together the largest single block of the New Testament by any author, more text than Paul. KJV “The former treatise have I made”; ASV the same; NWT “The first account, O Theophilus, I composed.” ⚠ Prōtos strictly means “first,” and Greek has a perfectly good word for “the former of two” (proteros); a few readers have argued the wording leaves room for a third volume Luke never wrote. Most take it as ordinary Koine, in which the strict distinction had already worn away. Worth knowing the argument exists; not worth building anything on it.

⚠ “All that Jesus BEGAN to do and to teach.” Ērxato — began. Read one way, this is the sentence the whole book hangs from: the Gospel was what Jesus began, and Acts is the same work continued — which is why the risen Jesus keeps acting in this book, stopping Saul on a road, standing up at Stephen’s death. Read the other way, “began to do” is simply Semitic idiom: Hebrew and Aramaic use “began” as a colourless auxiliary, and Luke writes that way elsewhere. Both readings are old and both are defensible. The elegant one may well be true; it should not be leaned on as though the grammar had settled it.

⚠ “By many conclusive proofs.” Tekmērion is a technical term, and it appears nowhere else in the New Testament. In Greek logic and medicine a tekmērion is not a hint but a demonstrative proof: Aristotle separates it from sēmeion, an ordinary sign that can mislead, and defines it as the sign that cannot be refuted (Rhetoric 1357b). It is courtroom and diagnosis vocabulary — exactly the register an educated reader wants at this point. KJV “many infallible proofs” carries the force better than most moderns do; ASV drops it to “many proofs”; NIV and NWT both read “many convincing proofs”; TLB paraphrases it out of existence (“proved to them in many ways”). We keep conclusive.

Forty days, and a rare verb for them. Optanomenos — “letting himself be seen” — is another word found only here in the New Testament, and it is iterative: not one appearance but a series, over and over across the span. And forty is the Bible’s number for a formation — forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain with Moses, forty days of Elijah’s walk to Horeb, forty days of Jesus’ own testing. The disciples get the same measure, and what fills it is teaching “the things concerning the kingdom of God” — the very subject they are about to ask the wrong question about.

⚠ “While eating with them.” Synalizomenos is a real crux and one of the more entertaining ones. Parsed one way it is syn + halizomai, from hals, SALT: to take salt with someone, that is, to share a meal — and in the ancient Near East to eat a man’s salt was to be bound to him. Parsed the other way it is syn + alizō, “to gather,” giving “while assembling with them.” The shelf splits down the middle: the Vulgate chose the meal (convescens), so Douay reads “eating together with them,” and NIV agrees, “while he was eating with them”; KJV and ASV read “being assembled together with them”; NWT “while he was meeting with them.” We take the meal, on the strength of Luke’s own habits rather than the etymology: his risen Jesus asks for food and eats broiled fish (Luke 24:41–43), is recognised in the breaking of bread at Emmaus, and Peter will later define the witnesses as those “who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:41). The grammar does not decide it. Luke’s table does.

Water and Spirit — and the Greek marks the difference. “John baptized with water” is a bare dative; “you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit” adds the preposition en. The verb itself, baptizō, means to dip or immerse — English never translated it, it transliterated it, which is how “baptize” came to sound like a religious term rather than a description of getting wet. ⚠ The Greek here has no article before “holy spirit” (en pneumati hagiō), which is why NWT prints “in holy spirit”; but Greek routinely drops the article after a preposition, so the bare form settles considerably less than either side of that old argument tends to claim. KJV “baptized with the Holy Ghost.”

“Not many days from now.” Literally “not after many, these days” — an understatement for what turns out to be ten. Luke never gives the number; the reader works it out from Pentecost, the fiftieth day, and finds the wait was a week and a half.

⚠ “Are you restoring the kingdom to Israel?” Apokathistaneis — to restore, to put a thing back as it was. Readers are often told this question is a crude nationalist blunder that the risen Christ corrects. He does not, in fact, correct it. He does not say no and he does not say never; he says the timing is not theirs to know — and the same verb turns up two chapters later on Peter’s own lips, positively, for “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21). What is refused is the calendar, not the hope. Translations that soften the question into a vaguer one tend to make the refusal sound bigger than it is.

Times or seasons — two words, kept apart. Chronos is duration, clock-time, the stuff a calendar measures; kairos is the decisive moment, the right time, the opening. The pair is old and formal — it stands together in the Greek of Daniel 2:21 and 7:12, and Paul reuses it at 1 Thessalonians 5:1 — and flattening both into “times” loses the point, which is that the Father holds the long duration and the exact hour “within his own authority.” KJV “the times or the seasons”; ASV the same; NWT “the times or seasons.”

⚠ Verse 8 is the outline of the book you are holding. “In Jerusalem” — chapters 1–7. “In all Judea and Samaria” — chapters 8–12. “To the end of the earth” — chapters 13–28, which end with Paul preaching in Rome. Luke writes his contents page into the last sentence Jesus speaks. And the phrase is singular in Greek, heōs eschatou tēs gēs, lifted straight out of the Greek of Isaiah 49:6 — the servant given “as a light to the nations, that you may be salvation to the end of the earth” — which Paul will quote at Antioch (Acts 13:47) as his warrant for turning to the Gentiles. Geneva “vnto the vttermost part of the earth,” which KJV inherited word for word; NIV pluralises it, “to the ends of the earth.” We keep the singular, because it is the quotation.

“You will be my witnesses.” Martys — a witness in the legal sense, one who testifies to what he has seen. The word is chosen because the entire apostolic claim is evidentiary, and verse 22 will define an apostle as a witness of the resurrection and nothing else. It is also the word that became martyr, and the road between the two meanings runs through this very book: Stephen dies for the testimony, and by Acts 22:20 Paul can pray “the blood of your martys Stephen” with both senses alive in one word.

The cloud is not weather. Nephelē hypelaben auton — “a cloud took him up from underneath.” The cloud is the standing biblical sign of the presence of God: it fills the tabernacle, settles on Sinai, overshadows the mountain of the transfiguration. Daniel had watched “one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven” be brought to the Ancient of Days and given a kingdom (Daniel 7:13–14) — and these men had just asked about a kingdom. What they are watching is not a departure into thin air. It is an enthronement, told from below, by people who can only see the first few seconds of it.

“Taken up.” Analambanō — the same verb in verse 2, again in verse 11, again in verse 22 where Peter uses it to date the apostolate. It is the verb the Greek Old Testament uses of Elijah, taken up in the whirlwind while Elisha watched, cried out, and then received a double portion of his spirit (2 Kings 2:9–11). Luke’s second volume opens with that pattern deliberately in the frame: the master goes up, and the successors get the Spirit.

Two men in white. Luke does not call them angels — not here, and not at the empty tomb, where “two men in dazzling clothing” stand beside the women (Luke 24:4). He reports what an eye would have seen and leaves the inference to the reader, which is the same restraint he keeps at the transfiguration. The verb for the disciples’ stare, atenizō, “to gaze fixedly,” is almost a private possession of Luke’s: ten of its fourteen New Testament occurrences are in his two books.

⚠ “Why do you stand looking into heaven?” The first words spoken to the church are a rebuke of stargazing. The men in white do not deny the return — they announce it, “will come in the same way as you saw him going” — and then send everybody back down the hill. Acts is a book about people who were told to stop looking up and start walking to the end of the earth. ⚠ A translator’s difficulty rides along with it: ouranos means both “sky” and “heaven,” and verse 11 uses the word four times in one breath without ever choosing between them. English has to choose, and every choice loses half.

A sabbath day’s journey. The only occurrence of the phrase in the Bible. Rabbinic law fixed the distance a person might travel on the sabbath at two thousand cubits — roughly two-thirds of a mile, about 1.1 km — reasoning from “let no one go out of his place on the seventh day” (Exodus 16:29) together with the two-thousand-cubit pasture measured around each Levitical town (Numbers 35:5). Luke, writing for Greeks, gives the distance in the local unit and lets it stand: Olivet is close enough to Jerusalem to be reached on the strictest day of the week.

“The mount called Olivet.” Elaiōn means an olive-grove, and Luke uses it here as a place-name rather than the usual “mount of the olives.” KJV and ASV keep the name, “the mount called Olivet”; NWT expands it to “the mountain called the Mount of Olives”; NIV “the hill called the Mount of Olives.”

The upper room, and eleven names. Hyperōon — the room upstairs, the ordinary place in a Jerusalem house for a guest or a gathering. The list of the Eleven matches Luke’s Gospel (6:14–16) in a slightly different order, with the gap where Judas was. It repays reading slowly: a fisherman, a tax-collector who had worked for Rome, and a zealot — a man from the party that made a point of killing tax-collectors who worked for Rome — are standing in one small room, waiting for the same thing. Note also that there are two Judases in the room, which is why the next paragraph has to specify which one.

⚠ Mary’s last appearance. “With women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” This is the final mention of Mary in the New Testament, and it is a very quiet one: she is in the room, praying, listed among others, with no office and no last word. His brothers are there too — the brothers of whom one Gospel says flatly that they “did not believe in him” (John 7:5). Something happened between that sentence and this room. Luke does not say what, and neither does anybody else.

“With one accord.” Homothymadon — of one mind, with one impulse; ten of its eleven New Testament occurrences are in Acts, which makes it something like Luke’s signature word for the church when it is working. KJV and ASV “with one accord”; NWT “with one purpose”; NIV “joined together constantly.” The participle in front of it, proskarterountes, means persisting doggedly at something. What the church does between the ascension and Pentecost is, strictly speaking, nothing: it waits, together, and keeps praying.

“A crowd of NAMES.” Luke really does write “names” — a Semitic way of counting persons. The Greek Old Testament musters Israel that way (“by the number of names,” Numbers 1:2), and Revelation 3:4 keeps it too (“a few names in Sardis”). KJV preserves it: “the number of names together were about an hundred and twenty.” NIV and NWT translate it into “believers” and “persons.” We keep names — partly because it is what he wrote, and partly because this is a chapter that ends by adding one.

A hundred and twenty. Twelve tens: the figure reads like a deliberate multiple of the Twelve, given what the meeting is about to do. It is also, in a rule preserved in the Mishnah, the minimum population for a town to have its own council of twenty-three (Sanhedrin 1:6). Whether Luke intends either is unprovable. That a hundred and twenty people were about to choose a twelfth man is simply what happened.

“Men, brothers.” Andres adelphoi — an odd double vocative in Greek and plain Hebrew showing through; it means “brothers,” and this translation keeps the shape because it is how the speech sounded in the room. Peter also states his premise before his proposal: the scripture “had to” be fulfilled — edei, Luke’s small relentless verb of divine necessity, the same “must” that governs his Gospel from beginning to end. And notice what Peter does not say about Judas: no curse, no epithet, just “he was counted among us,” which is worse.

These two verses are not Peter speaking. “In THEIR own language” gives it away: a man addressing a Jerusalem congregation in Aramaic does not pause to explain to them that Aramaic is what Jerusalem speaks. Verses 18–19 are Luke’s aside to his Greek reader, dropped into the middle of the speech — which is why this translation brackets them.

⚠ Judas’ death, and the honest problem. Matthew says Judas threw the silver into the sanctuary, went away, and hanged himself, and that the priests used the money to buy the potter’s field, which was called Field of Blood (Matthew 27:3–10). Acts says Judas himself acquired a field with the wages of his wickedness and, falling headlong, burst open. The two differ on who bought the field and on how the man died. The harmonisations are old and are worth stating fairly: that the priests bought it with money that was still legally his, so that he “acquired” it through them; that he hanged himself and the rope or the branch gave way, so that the body fell and split — a reading as old as Augustine; that the corpse simply lay there and did what corpses do. Against them stands the plainer possibility that two traditions grew up around one remembered fact — a plot of ground outside Jerusalem, bought with betrayal money, that people called the Field of Blood — and that they account for the name differently. ⚠ There is a translation question inside the problem, too: prēnēs genomenos is normally “falling headlong,” but some have derived prēnēs from prēthō, to swell, giving “having swollen up, he burst” — which would take the fall out of the sentence altogether. Both readings are in the literature. We render the majority sense and flag the other; readings differ, and this site does not vote.

Akeldama. Hakeldamach transliterates the Aramaic ḥăqēl dəmā, “field of blood.” Luke translates it for his readers, as he translates Aramaic elsewhere — and the small fact that it needed translating is itself evidence about who he was writing for. Douay, following the Vulgate’s spelling, has “Haceldama”; TLB renders the whole aside as reportage, “the news of his death spread rapidly among all the people of Jerusalem.”

The quotations are Psalm 69:25 and Psalm 109:8, both in their Greek form. ⚠ And Peter changes the first one. The psalm curses enemies in the plural — “let their encampment be desolate, let there be no one dwelling in their tents” — and here it is singular, aimed at one man. That is not a slip. It is how the first Christians read the psalms of David’s sufferings: as a pattern that fits again. It is better seen plainly than smoothed over, because the way the New Testament handles the Old is one of the genuinely interesting things about it.

“His office of oversight.” Episkopē — an overseer’s post; the same root as episkopos, “overseer,” which travelled through Latin into Old English and came out the other end as bishop. KJV says it out loud — “his bishoprick let another take” — which is a fair translation of the word and, at the same time, an anachronism, because there is no such office anywhere in that room. ASV retreats to “office”; NWT reads “his office of oversight”; NIV paraphrases, “may another take his place of leadership.” We keep the oversight visible without importing the later job title.

“Homestead.” Epaulis is a farmstead or a walled sheep-fold — a place where people and animals settle for the night. KJV “habitation”; Douay “habitation”; the word is homelier than either, and the curse lands harder for it.

“Went in and went out among us.” A Hebrew idiom for the whole of a public life. It is how Israel asks for a leader who will “go out before them and come in before them” (Numbers 27:17), how Moses says he can no longer “go out and come in” (Deuteronomy 31:2), how David’s conduct is summed up in Saul’s service (1 Samuel 18:13). Keeping it literal keeps the idiom audible, and the shelf mostly agrees: KJV and ASV “went in and out among us,” while NIV flattens it to “was living among us.”

The job description. Two requirements, and no others: he must have been present for the whole span, from John’s baptism to the day of the taking-up, and he must be a witness of the resurrection. That is a closed definition — it can only ever be satisfied by a shrinking pool of men, which is rather the point of a body called the Twelve. ⚠ It also sits awkwardly beside Paul, who called himself an apostle and met neither condition. Paul’s own answer was that he had seen the risen Lord, “last of all, as to one untimely born” (1 Corinthians 15:8). The tension is real, and the New Testament never tidies it up.

Joseph Barsabbas, surnamed Justus. Three names on one man, and a whole social world inside them: a Greek form of a Hebrew name, an Aramaic patronymic (bar Sabba), and a Latin cognomen — a Jerusalem Jew who also had a name a Roman could pronounce. Eusebius passes on a story from Papias that this Justus once drank poison and took no harm. He is otherwise never heard of again, which is the fate of most of the people in this room.

⚠ “Knower of hearts.” Kardiognōsta is a compound so rare that its only two appearances in early literature are both in this book — here, and at Acts 15:8 of the God who gave the Spirit to Gentiles. It may well be a coinage of the first Christians, and it is put to work at precisely the right moment: eleven men who cannot see inside either candidate hand the decision to the one who can. Behind it stands “man looks at the outward appearance, but Jehovah looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). KJV “Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men”; ASV the same with “who knowest.”

⚠ Who is being prayed to? The Greek is kyrie, “Lord,” and the addressee is genuinely disputed. In Luke’s writing “the Lord” is usually God the Father; but this prayer asks him to show “the one you have chosen,” and the same verb of choosing was used four verses into the chapter of Jesus choosing the apostles (verse 2). The ancient Greek commentators split on it and the modern ones still do. ⚠ It is also one of the places where NWT prints the divine name in the New Testament — “You, O Jehovah, who know the hearts of all” — although every Greek manuscript reads kyrie. That is an interpretive decision about who is being addressed, and it deserves to be recognised as one rather than mistaken for a variant reading. This translation keeps “Lord,” because that is what the Greek says, and leaves the question standing where the text leaves it.

⚠ The last lot ever cast. Klēros — a lot, then the share a lot assigns you, then an inheritance. Verse 17 has already used it of Judas’ “share in this ministry,” so the passage opens and closes on one word. Casting lots is the old way of putting a decision beyond human management: Joshua divided the land by it, the sailors found Jonah by it (Jonah 1:7), a priest drew the incense duty by it — as Zechariah had, one Gospel earlier — and soldiers used it on a coat at the foot of a cross. This is the last time in the Bible that anyone does it. Ten days later the Spirit comes, and the church never casts a lot again; from Acts 6 onward it discusses, appoints, argues, and decides. Something changed, and this verse is the hinge. ⚠ Klēros has a long afterlife in English, too: by way of Latin clericus it is the root of clergy — a word for the ordained that began life as a word for a dice-throw. KJV “they gave forth their lots.”

⚠ Was Matthias a mistake? A persistent reading says yes: that the eleven ran ahead of God, that Matthias is never mentioned again, and that the real twelfth apostle was Paul. It is worth setting out what actually supports that — the silence afterwards, and the fact that Peter acts before Pentecost — and what does not: Luke reports the election without a syllable of criticism, immediately calls the group “the twelve” (Acts 6:2), and the qualification he records (companionship from John’s baptism onward) is one Paul could not have met. And nine of the Eleven are never mentioned again either. Readings differ; the text does not adjudicate, and neither will we.

“Counted in with the eleven.” Synkatapsephízomai is another word found nowhere else in the New Testament, and there is a pebble inside it: psēphos, the small stone dropped in an urn to vote. After the lot has fallen, the sentence reaches for the vocabulary of the ballot-box. Whatever the mechanism, the result is a Twelve that is whole again — which is the condition the church has to be in before the next chapter is allowed to happen.