We take names for granted. Everybody and everything must have a name so that we can know what or whom we are talking about. But how that name came into being or how it came to be applied is another matter. Ships get named at grand ceremonies. Many of us still get named at a font in the parish church. Newspapers get names for serious and comical reasons.
The naming of books or literary creations is a chancy business. A biography can hardly be better named than to take its subject. But so numerous are the biographies of Napoleon that his name is hardly enough. And when a recent biography of Graham Greene was entitled ‘Russian Roulette’ there must have been some qualms and quaking. Another recent biography comes to mind. Having written a biography of her grandfather, Ursula Buchan was clearly confronted with a choice. One best-seller was for ever linked with him. Everybody had seen one of the film versions and it was sensible to capitalise on that, so the title became ‘Beyond the Thirty-nine Steps’. Clear enough but not too clear to a generation that never grew up with Richard Hannay.
Lytton Strachey included ‘Chinese Gordon’ in his ‘Eminent Victorians’. Here was a book with a cheeky title that made it clear that eminence was no guarantee of moral superiority. We have to open the book to discover who these Victorians were. It’s rather like Achilles and Aeneas, heroes who get long narrative poems (epics) honouring them but only one of them gets his name included in the title.
When we come to the Bible, we find appropriate titles all over. Genesis (beginning), Exodus (outgoing) are straightforward. ‘Joshua’ and ‘Judges’ are similar. ‘Proverbs’ is plain and simple. When we come to the New Testament, things get more interesting. Particularly intriguing is ‘Acts’. The Greek word simply means deeds or actions. The fifth book of the New Testament gets this title, the Acts of the Apostles, that is. Strange to say, the Greek word for ‘deeds’ or ‘actions’ occurs only once in the text and it is on that occasion describing the deeds of those who were not apostles. Curiosity bids us ask where the title comes from. We don’t know. Neither do we know what made Dickens name one of his novels ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’. Life is full of such mysteries.
NEW NAME?
Is it possible – let alone helpful – to find a new name for ‘Acts’? Naming always requires us to launch an inspection. A first step might be to ask what ‘Acts’ is – history, apologetic, manifesto? What makes it coherent? Is there one driving theme? To answer such questions we have to look into the writer’s purpose, into decisions made by apostles and others and into the changing background to the activity of the Christian believers.
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