Leadership in the Book of Acts
A well-known cliche states that hindsight is 20/20. Darin Land's book has given me the benefit of a retrospective glance at the dissertation that I wrote more than 20 years ago. He did well to specify that I avoided "gross eisegesis" (p. 16) and not eisegesis in general. As I read his summary 20 years later, I can see that I retrojected my spin on my denomination's political and doctrinal struggles of the 1980s into an idealized Jerusalem church.
With my biases properly noted, I am impressed positively with Darin Land's argument that the leadership of the Jerusalem church, as described in Acts, followed a pattern of expanding what Weber called legitimate authority. This argument posits that the community's earliest leaders increased the availability of leadership opportunities both culturally, within the local community, and geographically, as the Christian movement expanded. Land, of course, sees this diffusion as a notable component of the description of leadership in Acts. The extent to which other groups in classical antiquity showed parallel tendencies and the implications for questions of succession might prove fruitful topics of future inquiry.
Particularly enlightening is his comparative analysis of the leadership styles attested in various religious movements during classical antiquity. This analysis can be refined and sharpened in subsequent publications, as he looks at early Christian writings in the context of those comparative materials that might be most specific to their presumed Sitze im Leben.
Congratulations are in order, and I will be interested in the paths he takes in his future publications.
