Despite the relatively modest extent of first person plural narration in the Acts of the Apostles, the so-called "we" passages have influenced the understanding of Acts far beyond what the narrative space they occupy would seem to justify. (1) The primary reason for the disproportionate weight given the "we" passages has been the conviction that they offer eyewitness testimony concerning persons, events, and speeches and, therefore, that they provide a window to the circumstances of Paul's mission and to the historical development of the early church. As C. K. Barrett notes, the first person plural in Acts "prima facie suggests that the story is being told by one who was present." (2) The shift in grammatical person from third person (the grammatical person employed throughout most of Acts for nondiscourse narration) to first person plural in Acts has presented perennial interpretive problems, however. The narrator does not provide an explanation for the change from third person to first person plural, and the rationale for the shift is not obvious from the narrative context of the passages. In other words, the narrator does not say that at these points he has entered events personally, nor does the story itself suggest that this is the case. (3) First person plural narration simply appears at certain points in the book, suddenly and seemingly without reason, and then just as abruptly disappears. The proposals offered to account for the enigmatic application of first person plural in Acts can be grouped into four general categories: (1) the author shifted his writing style to first person plural or added first person plural to a source document to indicate that he was present at certain events (author-as-eyewitness); (2) the author retained first person plural from or added it to a source document because the source was present at those events (source-as-eyewitness); (3) the author occasionally shifted to first person plural style, but neither he nor his sources were there (fictional eyewitness); or (4) the author adopted first person plural where literary considerations demanded it (conventional eyewitness).
