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This chapter situates Acts of the Apostles historically and examines previous scholarship on Jewish identity and Acts. It argues that Lukan ethnic reasoning—as mediated by the cultural context of Greek cities under Roman rule—sought to create an alternate construal of Jewish and Christian identity. This alternate identity integrated Christian non-Jews into the civic hierarchy. The chapter then surveys the scholarship on Jews and Judaism in Acts and looks at recent developments in interpretation that have emphasized the author's rhetoric rather than “attitude.” It also discusses four texts that highlight the value of ethnic reasoning and, scholar of ancient Christianity, Denise Kimber Buell's discussion of four uses of religious rhetoric in ethnic reasoning. Ultimately, Acts leverages the connection between gods, people, and places in its depiction of Jewish identity. It employs ethnic rhetoric in order to present all Christians as Jews and to privilege Christians as an ideal embodiment of Jewishness for the Roman-era polis.

This chapter assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21). Comparing the ethnic rhetoric of Acts 15 with ethnic rhetoric of the Salutaris Foundation inscription, it calls attention to wider negotiations of civic identity and within the context of formal public documents like this inscription. The Salutaris Foundation inscription, which contains the stipulations for a donation given by a wealthy citizen of Ephesus, provides a useful comparison with the Jerusalem council narrative in two primary ways. First, the inscription was composed within a decade or two of the likely publication of Acts and therefore offers a glimpse of a contemporaneous use of ethnic rhetoric. Second, a majority of the narrative of Acts takes place in an urban context, including in Ephesus. The Salutaris Foundation thus provides a securely dated and located example of the negotiation of identity within the city, demonstrating who had the power to influence identity claims and how such negotiations took place. Both Acts and the Salutaris Foundation leverage religious ideology in their respective forms of ethnic rhetoric in order to legitimate ethnic change, employing ancestral religious rhetoric, a shared sense of the flexibility of ethnic identity, and the authority of councils in ways that delimit the identity of contested populations and their religious activities.

This chapter explores how Acts of the Apostles and the Salutaris Foundation inscription each uses ethnic reasoning together with civic and imperial space to produce unified identities. Focusing on Paul's visits to Jewish civic associations in Acts 15:30–18:23, it shows how the repeated representation of civic space constructs a Jewish identity that includes proselyte non-Jews and at the same time makes an internal distinction between two Jewish identities: Christians and other Jews. Thus, the difference between Christians and non-Christians is one internal to Jewish identity. The chapter then compares this to how the Salutaris Foundation regulates movement through the Ephesian cityscape in ways that both reimagine Ephesian identity and distinguish between “true” and other Ephesians. While Acts seeks to incorporate non-Jewish Christians into the Jewish community, the Salutaris Foundation seeks to marginalize those Ephesians who do not conform to the benefactor's desired construal of Ephesian identity. Finally, the chapter studies how the literary representation in Acts of Paul's journeys throughout the Roman Empire also constructed a unified Christian identity that could be contrasted with the purported disunity of other Jewish civic associations.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the importance of ethnicity and ethnic rhetoric to the formation of ancient Christian identity. The cities of the Roman Empire were filled with gods and the citizens who honored them with festivals, processions, buildings, and benefactions. The followers of Jesus—later called Christians—lived and moved in these cities, navigating avenues lined with statues honoring various deities, organizing their days and months around the feast days that structured civic calendars, and wandering past (and through) the many temples and shrines that populated the busy urban landscape. The importance of this urban context should not be overlooked: civic, ethnic, and religious identities were intertwined with these visible, material, and practical signs of communal life, wherever one was placed within the city's bustling topography. Connections between life in the city and daily religious practices were therefore fundamental to the development of Christian identity. This book then compares the literary construction of Jewish and Christian identity in Acts of the Apostles with the material construction of various ethnic and civic identities by inhabitants of Roman-era cities. It argues that Acts represents Jewish identity as hybrid and multiple in order to situate the earliest Christians within the Greco-Roman city as members of an ideal Jewish community, which was both ancestral and accepted in the city.

This chapter focuses on the production of Jewish identity and difference in Acts 2:5–13. Acts 2:5–13 strategically combines multiple ways of being Jewish in a single passage, thereby emphasizing that Luke understood Jewish identity to be flexible. From Luke's perspective, Jewish identity could be inherited, or it could be achieved through proper ancestral customs as a proselyte. Comparing this passage with civic identity produced by the sculptures of ethnē collected in the Sebasteion (imperial temple complex) at Aphrodisias in Caria, the chapter further suggests that Acts 2:5–13 and the Sebasteion both “collect” ethnē in ways that leveraged Roman imperial rhetoric, religious imagery, and ethnic lists to produce identity in ways that were rhetorically useful for their respective contexts. By juxtaposing Acts 2:5–13 and the Sebasteion, it highlights how Roman-styled population lists “fix” ethnic identities—producing identity and marking difference—in order to legitimate the identity of contested populations.

The authors of the four gospels not only provided support for oral tradition as memories of Jesus faded but also interpreted it for succeeding generations. The continued story of the Church in Acts constitutes the best source for the history of the missionary activities of Peter and Paul among the Gentiles. The Jerusalem church retained authority, especially among Jewish Christians, even after the church in Rome, centre of the Gentile world and scene of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, came to be seen as the most important of the Christian churches. The deaths of Peter and Paul created a vacuum in authority in which various notions, including early Gnostic ideas, surfaced in particular churches. Early Christians came from a cross section of society, and their diversity in origins and language caused them to be seen as a ‘third race’, neither pagan nor Jew.

This chapter discusses the portrayal of Peter in the gospels and epistles, asking how events from 50 to 120 AD shaped the memory of Peter in the various churches of the New Testament. As soon becomes obvious, the portrait of Peter is not completely consistent throughout the New Testament and undergoes certain changes or adaptations depending on the needs of the individual biblical author. Of course, in any study of Peter in the New Testament particular attention must be given to both Matthew 16:13–20 and John 21:15–17, the two texts cited by Roman Catholics as the biblical basis for the papacy.

Baur starts this period (AD 70–140) with the Epistle to the Hebrews, which, he says, mediates between Paul’s critique of Judaism and the apocalyptic writer’s embrace of it. It does so by introducing the idea of an eternal priesthood. The Deutero-Pauline Epistles (Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians) have a Paulinizing orientation but go considerably beyond Pauline christology, making transcendent claims about the divinity of Christ and his cosmic mission. Gnostic influences are evident. The Epistles attributed to James and Peter exhibit a Catholicizing tendency. Baur’s treatment of the Synoptic Gospels focuses on common elements in their presentation of the story of Jesus, and on their distinctive christology: Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension as Son of God. The Book of Acts emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the early church.

This chapter examines the hypothesis that the multifarious activities of philosophers created a philosophy-shaped hole, a template within the structures of imperial public life, ready to be exploited by Jews and Christians who were themselves excluded from the normal channels that facilitated exercise of power within those structures. Advising rulers, seeking to attract the interest of elite citizens, inspiring resistance, and discoursing on the nature, forms, and exercise of power: all of these modes of connection between philosophy and power can be paralleled within the discourses of self-presentation constructed by Jews and Christians. The chapter considers the narrative of Paul's mission in the Acts of the Apostles, particularly at the way in which it constructs the task of evangelizing the cities of the Empire through the use of public and private space, and at some of the contested ways in which the paradigm of the resistant philosopher is used to explore the limitations of power.

This chapter focuses primarily on the New Testament, the charter document for Christian views of conversion. It examines the vocabulary of conversion and the multitudinous ways that Scripture depicts conversion. At a basic level, conversion in the New Testament is a personal response of faith to God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ: theologically, affirming certain beliefs about Jesus; ethically, conforming in behavior to Jesus; and sociologically, joining a community of followers of Jesus. Following a discussion of the vocabulary of conversion in the Old and New Testaments, the chapter discusses conversion in the Synoptic Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles (emphasizing the contrast to the pagan world and discussing household conversions), the Johannine writings, and the conversion of Paul. It concludes with comments about the relationship between baptism and conversion.

One of the purest expressions of John Selden’s thought as a lawyer, political theorist, and Hebraist appears in a legal decision written fifteen years after his death by his disciple, Sir John Vaughan (1603-1674), Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Vaughan’s decision in the very special case of Harrison versus Dr. Burwell constitutes a student’s homage to his teacher, demonstrating throughout Vaughan’s awareness of Selden’s emphasis on the historically determined character of the common law, and of the rabbinic underpinnings of his political philosophy and biblical hermeneutics. The chapter ends with Selden’s citation of an unrecognized talmudic parody of the Apostolic Decree in Acts.

This chapter provides a prelude into the terms of the Problem of Paganism, as it would be discussed in the West until the end of the seventeenth century. It begins by looking at the earliest Christian reaction to ancient paganism, in the New Testament texts which became points of reference in later discussions. Elements of the Problem of Paganism are found from very early in the Christian tradition: not in the Gospels, set in their firmly Jewish environment, but in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul's letter to the Romans. The chapter then offers a glimpse of how the problem was addressed by Christians in the ancient world, before Augustine transformed it for the Latin tradition.