Paul and the Early Church Reading 2

Well, for my second installment in my NT 111 class (which is what I am going to start refering to my posts as) I had to read the book of Acts in the New Testament. The problem that I have had now for a number of years is that because I had to read the bible in its entierety several times in college and because of my over zelousness at that time so that I read the bible several more times than was nessacary I can't read the bible now without becoming extreamly board. So what I decided to do last year was to buy the bible on mp3 formate cd's, unfortunatly its the NIV version when I would prefer the NRSV but I didn't have the money to buy that version. So what I did today was listen to the entire book of Acts while I was doing dishes and other things around the house. There were several things that struck me when I listened to this, for one how increadably silly some of the vocals sounded, and this was a recent recording. But more importantly I noticed that there are several times in acts were Jewish behaviors are explained because of this explaination my conclusion is that Acts was written for a "Gentile" audience. This may seem a no brainer especially since I already know that from previous studying, I was drawn to it from hearing the explanations throughout the book. I also noticed the anger that the writer of Acts expressed by such statments as "the Jews." The statments lent themselves as being contemp, they made me wonder if the book of Acts was published after 70 CE. I was trying to remember what I learned of Acts and I think that it was after 70 but I'm not sure. I also read the book of Acts with the intent of listening for how the visions influenced the story. It seems to me that at every major turning point, or at a point were there could be contention within the early church there is a 'vision'. An example is Peter seeing a vision of unclean things and he was told to eat, he was then told not to call anything unclean that God has made clean. Right after that Peter went to a centurions house and basically accepted them into the church community. Later when he had to explain himself he had this vision to fall back on. I have to further devlop this and you should see it in written form here in a couple of weeks because I have to write something like this for class.

I hope that today will be a good day in class and I will be honest that I am concerned about my worship class today. That is because for one it is a long class, but also because in reading the books for the class I encountered the same type of bullshit answers for things that I have encountered in every other book on worship that I have had to read. Most of them are pat answers taken from verses in the bible that are taken out of context, and in this case to add on top of things the author seems to say that he doesn't think that traditional liturgy should be changed. I just don't know how things are going to go. Wish me luck.