Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
What the first church did all day
Acts 2:42-47
42 They continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and prayer. · WEB
The earliest description of Christian life is four practices and a shared purse, and the text presents it as a portrait rather than a constitution.
Four things are named, and the verb governing them means to persist rather than to attend. They continued steadfastly in the apostles' teaching, in fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayer. Teaching comes first, and it is apostolic teaching — the eyewitness content the previous chapter went to such trouble to secure. A movement three thousand converts larger than it was yesterday spends its time being taught by the men who were there.
Fellowship is the second, and the word carries the sense of holding something in common rather than enjoying one another's company. What they held in common is described a few lines down, which suggests the term is being used concretely.
The breaking of bread appears twice in the paragraph and the two occurrences are not obviously the same. Here it stands in a list of religious practices; three verses later they break bread at home and take their food with gladness. Ordinary meals and the meal instituted the night before the crucifixion may well be the same occasions in these weeks, since the second was given at the end of the first. Nothing in the text separates them, and nothing requires that they be identical.
The sharing is described twice as well, and the two descriptions differ in tense in a way that matters. They had all things in common, and they were selling possessions and distributing according as anyone had need. This is not a treasury into which all property was surrendered at entry; it is a continuing practice of liquidating assets as needs arose. The point is made explicit later, when Peter tells Ananias that the land was his to keep and the money his after the sale Acts 5:4. Ownership was not abolished. It was held loosely enough that need could reach it.
The rhythm of the days is Jewish and remains so. They are in the temple daily, at the hours of prayer, and in one another's houses for meals. Nothing has been founded, nothing has separated, and no one has thought to. The people around them approve, and the growth is credited to no strategy: The Lord added to the assembly day by day those who were being saved.
It is a portrait of a church at its best, and it is offered as a portrait. The account is descriptive, taken at a moment before any of the pressures the rest of the book will describe — the first quarrel is four chapters away, and the first deception is three verses. Read as a photograph it is instructive. Read as a blueprint it promises something this book itself never delivers again.
held with reason What this mark means