Bible Quiz: Book of Acts

Common Questions About the Book of Acts

What is the Book of Acts about?

Acts is the fifth book of the New Testament and the only one that tells what happened after Jesus left. It picks up exactly where the Gospel of Luke stops — same author, written to the same man, Theophilus — and follows a group of about a hundred and twenty people in one room in Jerusalem as they become a movement that reaches Rome within roughly thirty years. The first half mostly follows Peter: Pentecost, the lame man at the temple gate, arrests and beatings, the first deaths, and the moment the message opens to non-Jews in the house of a Roman officer named Cornelius. The second half follows Paul, from his turnaround on the road to Damascus through three long journeys around the Mediterranean, a string of trials in front of governors and a king, and a shipwreck. Its traditional title is the Acts of the Apostles, though plenty of readers point out it is really about what the Holy Spirit did through them.

What are the most-asked questions about the Book of Acts?

A handful come up again and again. Where were the disciples first called Christians? Antioch, in chapter eleven. What happened at Pentecost? A sound from heaven “as of a rushing mighty wind,” tongues like fire, the apostles heard in every visitor’s own language, and about three thousand people added that same day. Who was the first follower of Jesus killed for it? Stephen, in chapter seven. Why did Saul become Paul? He didn’t swap names so much as start using his other one — chapter thirteen introduces him as “Saul, (who also is called Paul,)” and Acts calls him Paul from then on, much as people then often carried a Jewish name and a Roman one. And how does it end? Not with Paul’s death, but with Paul under guard in Rome for two whole years in his own rented house, “preaching the kingdom of God… no man forbidding him.” The quiz above goes a long way past those.

Who wrote the Book of Acts, and when?

The book never names its author, but it opens by calling itself a second volume — “the former treatise” — addressed to the same Theophilus as the Gospel of Luke, and the style, vocabulary and interests of the two books match closely. Since the second century the author has been identified as Luke, the man Paul calls “the beloved physician” in Colossians. Acts drops a quiet hint of its own: partway through chapter sixteen, at Troas, the narration switches from “they” to “we,” as if the writer had just joined Paul’s company, and those “we” passages run on through the voyage and the shipwreck. On dating, many scholars place it in the early 60s, because it ends with Paul still alive and waiting in Rome; others argue for a date a couple of decades later. Either way, it is the closest thing the early church has to a written history of its first thirty years.

Is this Acts quiz good practice for Bible Quizzing?

It was built with that in mind. It runs in study mode, so every answer shows the exact chapter and verse behind it, and a miss sends you back to the text instead of just moving on. Acts turns up regularly in the rotation of books that Bible Quizzing programmes assign, and it is a heavy one — twenty-eight chapters, dozens of towns, and a long cast of governors, centurions and deputies whose names start to blur together. The bank holds ninety-two questions spread across all twenty-eight chapters, and each round serves fifteen at random, with related questions kept apart so one answer never gives away the next. A few are verse-completion questions, where you pick the missing word from a well-known line, which is closer to how real quiz practice works. It runs on a phone, with no account, no download and nothing to sign up for, so a team can pass it around at practice.

How much of the Book of Acts do most people really know?

Usually the big moments, and very little of what connects them. Most people know about Pentecost and the road to Damascus. Far fewer can say what the lame man at the temple gate was told — “Silver and gold have I none” — or which town Philip turned up in after the Ethiopian was baptized, or what was written on the altar Paul found in Athens. The last third of the book, with its hearings before Felix, Festus and King Agrippa, is the part even regular readers tend to skim, which is a shame, because it holds some of the most human lines in the New Testament — like a governor who trembles and then says he will hear more “when I have a convenient season.” None of that is a test of anything that matters, and nothing here is recorded or compared with anyone else. The only way to find your own gaps is to play the quiz above and notice which chapters you end up reading afterwards.