The Speeches in the Acts of the Apostles

The Tyndale New Testament Lecture for 1942, delivered on 19 December 1942 at a conference of graduate and theological student members of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford, and published by the Tyndale Press in 1943 as a 27-page booklet. Bruce surveys the chief Christian speeches reported in Acts and sorts them into four groups, evangelistic, deliberative, apologetic and hortatory, the evangelistic speeches divided again by audience, Jewish or Gentile. He weighs how far the speeches preserve the substance of what was said, engaging C. H. Dodd's work on the apostolic kerygma in The Apostolic Preaching and its Developments (1936) and W. M. Ramsay's defence of Luke's accuracy. It is one of his earliest publications and anticipates his two commentaries on Acts, and he returned to the subject in an essay, 'The Speeches in Acts: Thirty Years After' (1974).