Acts 8

Acts 8
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Acts 8:26-32 in Papyrus 50, written in 3rd century.
Book	Acts of the Apostles
Bible part	New Testament
Order in the Bible part	5
Category	Church history

Acts 8 is the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the burial of Stephen, the beginnings of Christian persecution, and the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people of Samaria and Ethiopia. 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 New King James Version organises this chapter as follows:

The writer of Acts introduced Saul, later the Apostle Paul, as an active witness of Stephen's death in Acts 7:58, and confirmed his approval in Acts 8:1. Reuben Torrey, in his Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, wrote "This clause [i.e. verse 8:1] evidently belongs to the conclusion of the previous chapter; there is scarcely a worse division of chapters than this".

This verse is absent from the majority of the Greek manuscripts, but it is present in some, including E (6th or 7th century). It is cited by Irenaeus (c. 180) and by Cyprian (c. 250), and is found in the Old Latin (2nd/3rd century) and the Vulgate (380–400) translations. In his notes Erasmus says that he took this reading from the margin of 4ap and incorporated it into the Textus Receptus.J. A. Alexander (1857) suggested that this verse, though genuine, was omitted by many scribes, "as unfriendly to the practice of delaying baptism, which had become common, if not prevalent, before the end of the 3rd century."