Acts 12

Acts 12
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Acts 15:22-24 in Latin (left column) and Greek (right column) in Codex Laudianus, written about AD 550.
Book	Acts of the Apostles
Bible part	New Testament
Order in the Bible part	5
Category	Church history

Acts 12 is the twelfth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the death of the first apostle, James, son of Zebedee, followed by the miraculous escape of Peter from prison, the death of Herod Agrippa I, and the early ministry of Barnabas and Paul of Tarsus. The book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke composed this book as well as the Gospel of Luke.

The original text is written in Koine Greek and is divided into 25 verses. Some most ancient manuscripts containing this chapter are:

This chapter mentions the following places:

This chapter can be grouped:

Meyer estimated that these events took place in 44 AD, the year of the death of Herod Agrippa, at the same time as the prophets from Jerusalem travelled to Antioch and returned with aid for the Judean church. The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges suggests 43 AD.

This verse is referred to in Charles Wesley's hymn And Can It Be.

This part of the chapter tells that Peter was put into prison by King Herod, but the night before his trial an angel appeared to him, and told him to leave. Peter's chains fell off, and he followed the angel out of prison, thinking it was a vision (verse 9). The prison doors opened of their own accord, and the angel led Peter into the city.