Commentary on Acts 2:42-47

Acts portrays an idyllic community arising from the fiery events of Shavuot in chapter 2. Those who welcomed Peter’s message create a fellowship (koinōnia), and they commit themselves to learning more about the message. Acts connects the core elements of Peter’s message to how the newly formed community attempts to put the critique of empire into practice. This community understood itself in partnership with each other and with God.

What a fellowship!

Peter’s message hinges on the fact that the audience should understand themselves as living at the edge of time, because the God described in the Hebrew scriptures has acted in their time by anointing Jesus of Nazareth. God has also confirmed Jesus’s anointing by raising him from the dead after he was unjustly lynched by the Roman Jerusalem judiciary. For Luke-Acts, Jesus is the One Anointed for abolition and the one sent to send into freedom those who have been broken by oppression (Luke 4:18–19). Jesus is the One Anointed to proclaim good news to those who have been impoverished through the extortion of empire. 

In the gospel account, it is those very impoverished ones to whom the basileia / kin(g)dom / reign / realm / homespace of God belongs (Luke 6:20). The term koinōnia in Acts 2:42–47 reflects a fellowship, partnership, and/or community attempting to live into the vision laid out by the One Anointed to send the oppressed into freedom and to proclaim abolition for the incarcerated.

Koinōnia is radical sharing and reparations that resist empire

The koinonia was marked by redistribution of resources. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need,” as the old slogan goes. Those who trusted Jesus, the One Anointed for abolition, were filled with the Spirit that had anointed him, which led them to share everything in common (koina). Those with more possessions obviously had to give up more, especially so that they could help those who did not have anything to give and those who were in need. At this point in Acts, it is unambiguous that the Spirit-led community that trusted Jesus as the Anointed One understood their economic life as social and communal.

Luke-Acts is consistent that those who are wealthy are the ones in jeopardy of missing God’s activity in the world. We can see this in the parabolic rich man that tradition calls Dives. He awakens in a post-mortem, fiery hellscape because of his neglect of the poor man Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). We can also see this with Zacchaeus, who gained his wealth from being Rome’s chief collector of the financial penalty that Judeans had to pay for being conquered (Luke 19:1–10). Only after he says that he will pay back what he extorted does Jesus tell him that salvation has come to his house. 

Whether real in the narrative or through characters in stories, the material excess of the wealthy was a hindrance for the spiritual access to the community that Jesus was crafting. This is to say that there could be no salvation without paying reparations. That is Luke’s soteriology. Luke’s Jesus says, “Life is more than the abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15).

The word translated as “poor” in Luke 4:18 and 6:20 should be understood less as a passive state that describes the people in the category. It instead should be read as discussing the empire actively impoverishing and extracting resources, the type of activity that reduces people to begging. The koinōnia in this way provides a counter to empire. 

I do not have the space here to discuss whether it is anti-imperial or alter-imperial, but what is important to note here is that Acts presents a community that resists some of the hierarchical, dominating, exploitative, and violent organizing principles of Rome. Rather than mimicking Rome and taking away what people need, this community shares so that everyone has what they need. Rather than despising the common (koina), this community co-creates the common. Rather than using wealth to make others more vulnerable to death, this community uses wealth to develop more opportunities for life. 

The community in Acts 2 has mutual aid as its foundation. This foundational principle can be traced as the movement develops across Acts, especially in chapters 5 and 6. The offering to support the community in Jerusalem after a famine can also be connected to this impulse of communal support (Acts 11:27–30; 24:17). Even beyond Acts as early Christianity developed, a key feature of Jesus-centered groups was their mutual-aid programs that provided food for the hungry, resources for the impoverished, and burial assistance for the marginalized.

Koinōnia is doing life together at the edge of time

The community broke bread and ate together daily. Whether these meals were primarily Eucharistic or not is beside the point. The point is that they were doing life together. This is significant because they were in a crisis moment. The crisis included that they were living at the edge of time, or in “the last days,” as Peter had dubbed the moment, using an excerpt from Joel. These last days need not be eschatological in that the world was ending, but in multiple ways the world was ending for those who trusted Jesus as the One Anointed for abolition. 

By aligning with Jesus who was executed in a way reserved for troublemakers, they were in solidarity with enemies of the empire. Then they were put into direct conflict with their governmental authorities by agreeing with and studying Peter’s message about God raising Jesus as the ultimate critique of the Roman-inflected Jerusalem judiciary. The danger that this community faced was imminent from the beginning, and in the next chapter they would become victims of local, provincial, and imperially aligned violence. Experiencing this type of violence, for Acts, is a key feature of the community or movement. Regardless, the community still prioritized tending to its most vulnerable, even as it, as a movement, was vulnerable. They leaned into each other even as the empire attempted to press in on them.

What if it was this radical mutuality that made the community attractive to the 3,000 who joined it? What if what was appealing was not only the preaching about Jesus but the living out of the anointed teachings that abolish colonial hierarchy, greed, and carceral violence?

Select bibliography

Margaret P. Aymer, “Empire, Alter-Empire, and the Twenty-First Century,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 59 (2005): 140–46.

Jennifer Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theoeconomics in Early Christianity (Yale University Press, 2020).

Jeremy L. Williams, Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles: Race, Rhetoric, and the Prosecution of an Early Christian Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2024).