“You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth (ge). The Greek word ‘ge’ at the end of the verse was traditionally translated as “earth,” with the thought of Paul’s eventual arrival to Rome at the end of Acts. This worldwide reach interpretation, however, has its difficulties,” writes Professor Serge Ruzer, lecturer in Comparative Religious Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in his commentary for the Feast of the Ascension for the Heschel Center of the Catholic University of Lublin.
The beginning of the Book of Acts depicts Jesus ascension to heaven and the promise – by two angelic figures – that he will eventually return. This posits him as a redeemer of the type of the enigmatic son-of-man from Daniel chapter 7, who he is portrayed there as the go-between of God’s future reign on earth. What immediately draws my attention is that Acts also embraces another foundational feature of the tradition in Daniel 7: the God’s kingdom with the son-of-man figure at its helm is also presented there as the kingdom of the saints of God, seemingly pointing to the saints of Israel (Dan 7:18): “But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom forever, for ever and ever.” Acts 1 likewise fluctuates between verse 3 which states that Jesus: “presented himself alive after his passion… appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God” and verse 6: “So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’”. That is how the author understands the initial perception of the apostles: restoration of the kingdom of Israel, which includes the liberation from the Roman yoke, is the intrinsic part of the expected rule of God and his Anointed one.
The author is far from trying to correct the disciples’ belief, his Jesus only states that for that to happen the hearts of the people should be prepared. For that end, the apostles, empowered by the gift of the holy Spirit, the gift of prophecy, should go around preaching the gospel of repentance and redemption. In other words, they are to act as a collective Elijah, of whom the ending of the Hebrew Bible says (Mal 3:23-24): “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.”
Telling also are the geographical limits of the mission indicated in Acts 1:8: “You shall receive power when the holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the ge.” The Greek word ge at the end of the verse was traditionally translated as “earth,” with the thought of Paul’s eventual arrival to Rome in the end of Acts. This worldwide reach interpretation, however, has its difficulties. First, as was aptly showed in a study by Daniel Schwatrz, the provincial sequence of “Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria” hardly leads to Italy or Spain (the end of the world) but rather outlines the borders of the land of Israel. And second, if we accept the global understanding of Jesus’ words here, it is unclear how they can provide a response to the disciples’ specific query about the kingdom of Israel. To sum up, as the Greek ge can also be translated as land, so the phrase ending should be reconstructed as “to the end of the land (of Israel).”
If so, it refers not to the overall trajectory of Acts, but to its first part, where a successful mission to the land of Israel Jews (Samaria included) is described. The author tells about thousands upon thousands who have joined the movement. Even later, when the focus is switched to Paul’s mission in Diaspora, it is predominantly conducted in the synagogues there, where Paul meets gentile godfearers, who had already been attracted to the religion of Israel and regularly visited synagogues on Saturdays. This is how, according to Acts, Paul becomes the apostle to the Gentiles. All this indicates the author of Acts’ indebtedness to the famous Hebrew Bible eschatological vision in Isaiah 2 (and Micah 4), where side by side with the motif of Gentiles’ participation in redemption, the centrality of Israel, its Torah and Jerusalem is upheld.
About Author:
Serge Ruzer obtained his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996, eventually becoming an Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Religion and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Christianity of that University. His research and publications pertain mostly to the Jewish background to nascent Christianity and early Syriac literature.
