Acts 6 is the sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the institution of the first seven deacons,[1] and the work of one of them, Stephen. The book containing this chapter is anonymous but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke composed this book as well as the Gospel of Luke.[2] Joseph T. Lienhard refers to a "Stephen cycle" evident in the deliberate connection between the institution of the seven and the narrative about Stephen in this chapter and chapter 7.[3]
Acts 6
Acts 5:2–9; 6:1-6 on the verso side of Papyrus 8 (4th century).
Book
Category
Christian Bible part
Order in the Christian part
5
The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 15 verses. In terms of the number of verses, this is the shortest chapter in the Acts of the Apostles.
Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:
In this section, Luke provides "a tantalizingly brief glimpse into the inner workings of the church",[5] combined with "two summary verses" (5:42 and 6:7).[5] The candidates to perform the ministerial functions within the growing "company of believers"[6] were marked out as "full of the Spirit" (verses 3, 5). The "transmission of authority from the apostles" is "very deliberately assured through prayer and the laying on of hands" (verse 6).[5]
The distinction made here concerns those Jews joining the community of believers who had been born outside the Holy Land, who spoke the Greek language and had adopted much of the ancient Greek culture, and the native-born Jews who spoke Hebrew and/or Aramaic and lived according to Jewish custom.[8]
All the selected seven men have Greek names (verse 5) suggesting a 'diaspora connection', although many Palestinian Jews at the time also spoke Greek.[5]
One of the seven, Stephen, soon gets into dispute, not with the temple hierarchy, but with members of a group of diaspora synagogues in Jerusalem (6:9).[5]