The Beautiful Gate is not named anywhere else in the New Testament, and its exact identity among the temple’s several gates is not certain from the text alone; the strongest ancient candidate is the great bronze Nicanor Gate on the temple’s eastern side, which Josephus rated more valuable than the gold- and silver-plated gates around it.

⚠ V6’s command genuinely divides the manuscripts, not just the translations. The oldest single witness (Westcott-Hort’s base text) reads simply ‘walk’; the Byzantine majority text and the modern critical standard (NA28) both add ‘rise up and’ before it — so this is not a simple old-text-versus-new-text split, but real disagreement among the critical witnesses themselves. KJV and ESV print ‘rise up and walk’; ASV and NIV print the bare ‘walk.’ RV60 and NVI both keep ‘levántate y anda.’ This translation follows NA28.

The healed man clings to Peter and John (v11) rather than simply accompanying them — the Greek pictures a man still gripping on, not yet willing to test his own legs too far from the ones who fixed them. The crowd’s astonishment gathers at Solomon’s Portico, a covered colonnade along the temple’s eastern wall that Jewish tradition traced back to Solomon’s original temple, though the structure standing in this chapter is Herod’s, built a thousand years later on what was believed to be the same footprint. It recurs later in Acts (5:12) and, earlier still, is the place Jesus himself walked and was questioned in winter (John 10:23).

Peter’s first move is a denial of credit: not our own power, not our piety. What follows names Jesus with a Greek word, pais, that carries two entirely different weights in English and Spanish, and translators have never agreed which one it means here.

⚠ KJV renders pais ‘Son’ at both its occurrences in this chapter (v13, v26); ASV, NIV and ESV all render it ‘servant’ at both. The same fork appears in Spanish: RV60 reads ‘Hijo’ both times, NVI reads ‘siervo’ both times. The word itself can mean either a child/son or a servant depending on context; ‘servant’ connects Jesus to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (the Greek Old Testament uses this identical word, pais theou, for Isaiah’s servant figure), while ‘Son’ reads the same Greek through a later, more explicitly filial theology. This translation follows the servant reading, for the connection to Isaiah the Greek itself invites — but the shelf splits cleanly on exactly which reading a single word should carry, and neither side is simply wrong.

‘The Author of life’ (v15, archegos) is a striking title in its own right — a word for a founder, originator, or pioneer, the one who goes first and opens a way others then follow. The same word returns at Hebrews 2:10 and 12:2, of Jesus as the ‘pioneer’ of salvation and of faith.

“Ignorance” (v17, agnoia) is offered almost as mitigation — Peter does not excuse the crowd, but he does not treat their guilt as the last word either; what follows is an invitation, not only a charge.

⚠ “Times of restoration” (v21) translates a single Greek noun, apokatastasis, that occurs nowhere else in the New Testament as a noun and has carried an outsized theological weight ever since — it is the word later taken up by Origen and others to argue for the eventual restoration of all things, including the damned, a doctrine (apocatastasis) the wider church never adopted but never fully stopped arguing about either. KJV stands alone on this shelf with ‘restitution,’ an older and more legal-sounding word; ASV, NIV and ESV all use some form of ‘restore.’ RV60 and NVI both read ‘restauración.’ Whatever precise scope Peter intended, the word itself named something enormous: not a repair, but everything set back the way it was meant to be.

Peter’s citation compresses Deuteronomy 18:15-19, where Moses promises Israel a prophet like himself whom they must heed — a passage Judaism has read messianically at various points and that Peter here applies to Jesus directly, without argument, as though the identification needs no defending to this audience.

The citation of ‘in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed’ (v25) draws on the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 22:18, itself echoing 12:3 and 18:18) — the promise this whole sermon has been building toward, now handed to a Jewish crowd in a Jewish courtyard as a Jewish inheritance, before it is ever offered to anyone else.

⚠ “To you first” (v26) is doing real work: not to you only, but to you first — a sequencing Paul will repeat as a settled pattern (‘to the Jew first, and also to the Greek,’ Romans 1:16), planted here at what may be the earliest recorded apostolic sermon after Pentecost itself.