The speeches in Acts

In his book The Speeches in Acts Marion Soards seeks to explain and interpret both the content and purpose of the speeches in the book of Acts. The author holds to the position that the content of each speech is best understood by examining Luke's overall purpose and greater rhetorical aims for the speeches as a whole. Soards asserts that a comprehensive understanding of the speeches within Acts does not come from compartmentalization of discrete speech groups (i.e. speeches organized by authorship, literary type, etc.) as works by Debelius, Schneider, and other prominent New Testament scholars have done in the past. Instead he contends that the speeches themselves are the sole medium of unity within Acts serving as Luke's method of guiding the overall narrative through a plurality of ever changing heroes, ethnicities, communities, geographical locations, and other seemingly unrelated events of Christian history to the greater accomplishment of Luke's theocentric historiography. The author's own words frame his thesis concisely as he says, "By considering the book [Acts] along these lines- diverse personalities, ethnic groups, communities, geographical regions, and historical moments are unified in Acts largely though the repetitive occurrence, form, and contents of the speeches. Thus when one asks, What is "the meaning to be attributed to the speeches in the work as a whole?" one finds that the speeches unify the Acts account, and through them Luke advances his theme of divinely commissioned unified witness to the ends of the earth." (p. 15) In his introduction (pp. 1-13) Soards quickly orients the reader to the current status of scholarship concerning the speeches in Acts with a brief history and introduces the reader to his thesis. Soards presents strong evidence for his working assumption that the speeches in Acts are more the creations of Luke himself rather than an objective historical record of the ipsissima verba of the historical figure. He begins the development of his argument by commenting that much of the research on the speeches in Acts has been shaped by the famous statement from Thucydides (a Greco-Roman writer from antiquity) on his practice of recording speeches which "has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually said, to have speakers say what, in my view, was called for by each situation." (p. 1). Soards briefly summarizes the fruit of biblical scholarship as it has moved forward with this analytical orientation concerning the nature of Acts's speeches by summarizing the three main critical conceptions of the speeches: 1) The speeches are a literary device 2) The speeches are a convention of historiography 3) The speeches are a theological (or ideological) device [pp. 9-10]. It is the author's view that any one of these individual perspectives fails to completely and comprehensively explain Luke's usage of the speeches within Acts. He makes the point that the practice o