"St. Luke again associates St. John with St. Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, when, after the Resurrection, that strange boldness had come upon the disciples"
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A poet’s “again” is doing a critic’s work: it nudges us to notice a pattern, not a one-off anecdote. Noyes isn’t merely retelling Acts; he’s spotlighting Luke’s editorial strategy - the way the evangelist keeps pairing John with Peter to shape how authority looks after the Resurrection. “Associates” reads almost like a deliberate stitch in a narrative seam. Luke is assembling a public-facing Church, and the repeated two-man tableau signals credibility: testimony corroborated, leadership shared, charisma disciplined by companionship.
Then Noyes drops the charged phrase: “that strange boldness.” It’s an outsider’s word (“strange”) for an insider’s miracle. He acknowledges how psychologically implausible the transformation is if you treat the disciples as ordinary men: frightened followers become confrontational witnesses. The boldness isn’t framed as mere courage or conviction; it arrives “had come upon” them, as if it’s a force, an invasion. That passive construction smuggles in theology without preaching it. Something acts on them.
Contextually, Noyes is writing as a Christian poet in an early 20th-century England where modern skepticism and historical criticism had made religious certainty feel newly contestable. So he leans on literary observation - Luke’s narrative choices, the conspicuous before-and-after - to argue for a kind of experiential proof. The subtext: the Resurrection isn’t only a claim about an empty tomb; it’s a claim about a new temperament, visible in the disciples’ behavior, and structured in the text through Luke’s careful pairing of voices.
Then Noyes drops the charged phrase: “that strange boldness.” It’s an outsider’s word (“strange”) for an insider’s miracle. He acknowledges how psychologically implausible the transformation is if you treat the disciples as ordinary men: frightened followers become confrontational witnesses. The boldness isn’t framed as mere courage or conviction; it arrives “had come upon” them, as if it’s a force, an invasion. That passive construction smuggles in theology without preaching it. Something acts on them.
Contextually, Noyes is writing as a Christian poet in an early 20th-century England where modern skepticism and historical criticism had made religious certainty feel newly contestable. So he leans on literary observation - Luke’s narrative choices, the conspicuous before-and-after - to argue for a kind of experiential proof. The subtext: the Resurrection isn’t only a claim about an empty tomb; it’s a claim about a new temperament, visible in the disciples’ behavior, and structured in the text through Luke’s careful pairing of voices.
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| Topic | Bible |
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