Revealing the Footsteps of Apostles in the Book of Acts in the New Testament of the Bible*

Abstract

The book of Acts documents the apostles of Christ Jesus being empowered and guided by the Holy Spirit to bear witnesses for Him from Jews to Gentiles first in Jerusalem, then in Judea and Samaria, and finally throughout the Roman Empire. It records the establishment and growth of the early church and the spread of the good news of salvation through Jesus in spite of strong oppositions. Acts serves as a critical link that connects the gospel of Christ as seen in the four Gospels with its applications as presented in the letters of the New Testament, thereby providing a historical framework for the epistles. In this study a sequence of social networks was constructed from the interactions between the characters including Peter, James, John, Paul, Stephen, Philip, and Barnabas and their locations in Acts. A computational approach was applied to discover the community structures in these networks, which sequentially revealed the roles of chief apostles and their locations in each important period of Acts.