Do most scholars believe the Acts of the Apostles to be a reliable historical record of the early church? I have heard people suggest that the intent was to draw together the figureheads of different factions in early Christianity and create some kind of apostolic continuity going back to Jerusalem.
Historical-critical approaches to the Bible generally assume that some basic conditions in Acts are true: the major characters actually existed, and they did meet in Jerusalem. The latter fact also seems attested in one of the genuine letters of Paul (Galatians 2). However, Paul's account of what actually happened differs substantially from that in Acts. It is therefore quite difficult to draw any broader conclusions from the text, and therefore there is little consensus on anything more than the basic facts.