In Christian tradition, Paul is the apostle to the nations. However, his portrayal in the Book of Acts is more nuanced. For a longer period, Paul's ministry is limited to Jews. Only from Acts 13 onwards does Paul slowly emerge as ministering to non-Jews. Yet even then, Paul remains foremost an emissary to diaspora Judaism. In its apology for Paul and his disputed way of including non-Jews into the people of God, Acts emphasises that Paul did so without diminishing the priority of Israel, as a staunch proponent of Jewish monotheism and in a way that took full account of the precarious situation of diaspora Judaism.

While scholars have explored the profound influence of Iphigenia among the Taurians (IT) on Greco-Roman fiction, including Christian apocryphal Acts, the play has yet to be considered seriously as a potential inspiration on the canonical Acts of the Apostles. A close comparison of IT with the story of the Ephesian riot (Acts 19:21–20:1) reveals a compelling relationship in matters of plot, setting, characterization, purpose, and themes. The Ephesus saga in Acts achieves a creatively miniaturized and satirized recasting of this famous Euripidean play.

Simon Magus is a key figure in the earliest apocryphal Acts of Peter. He is a sorcerer and confidant of the emperor who clashes with Peter and, in later apocryphal texts, with both Peter and Paul. However, this is not simply the villain of the Acts of the Apostles. In this article I will argue that the apocryphal Simon is a composite figure drawn substantially, but not necessarily wholly, from the Simon of Acts 8 and the Elymas/Bar-Jesus figure who opposes Paul in Acts 13.

On the basis of Pierre Nora's theory of generations, this article re-examines the relationship between Luke's work and the so-called ‘Pastoral Letters’. From this perspective, informed by the sociology of memory, the article analyses the affinities between these two traditions not as the traces of a community of author(s), but rather as the expressions of a memorial consciousness under construction: that of a foundational past identified with the generation of the apostles.

It is commonly stated that while the author of Acts records some conversions that resulted from Paul's Athenian ministry, it is unlikely that a church was established in the city. This article argues, through an analysis of the use of the κολλάω word family in Luke-Acts, the Septuagint, early Christian writings and other relevant texts, that Luke uses the participle κολληθέντɛς as a way of signifying that a Christian community was indeed gathered together in Athens at this time. Leaving other social groups to join Paul and the other new believers, the new group is fused together by their shared faith, forming a new faith community in this ancient city.

Approaches to ancient texts that focus exclusively on speech are inherently imbalanced. Far from simply an innocuous absence of language, silence can carry thundering significances. Yet, these meanings are not always obvious, and they can be especially difficult to interpret in texts, without attendant non-verbal cues such as facial expressions or gestures. How can New Testament interpreters best discern and describe the interwoven words, whispers, silences and subtexts of ancient narratives? In this article, I seek to build on my earlier narratological study of speech and silence, Silent Statements: Narrative Representations of Speech and Silence in the Gospel of Luke. There, I demonstrate how focusing on silences as well as speech enriches our understanding of the narratological dimensions of Luke's Gospel, including Lukan plot, characterisation, theme(s) and readerly experience(s). The obvious next step is to extend this work to the Lukan sequel. The guiding question of this article is therefore: how do speech and silence contribute to the narrative rhetoric of the Acts of the Apostles?

The Acts narrative's characterisation of Julius evokes the circumstances of Socrates, specifically the end of his life, at which point his prison guard – who exhibits a fondness for Socrates – allows his friends to visit and care for him. The credibility of this reading is strengthened by situating Acts 27 amid other Socratic characterisations of Paul in Acts 17–26, 28. By understanding Julius’ characterisation in this way, readers can regard Paul as a Socratic figure even during his sea voyage and shipwreck. This reading is more credible than others that attribute the characterisation of Julius to the narrative's positive disposition towards centurions.

For many years, scholars have noted striking similarities between the account of Paul's visit to Athens in Acts and ancient accounts of the trial of Socrates. There have been at least five distinct proposals about the significance of these similarities, but each has substantial shortcomings. In this article, I argue that Luke's purpose is to place Paul's Areopagus speech in dialogue with the thought of Socrates as it is represented in traditions about his trial, especially Plato's Euthyphro and Apology.

This article addresses a debate over the proper interpretation of the phrase ἔχοντες χάριν πρὸς ὅλον τὸν λαόν in Acts 2.47. Several authors have been persuaded by T. David Andersen's argument that this expression means that the Jerusalem community was ‘showing favour towards all the people’ rather than ‘having favour with all the people’, as it has usually been translated. Andersen's evidence is much more ambiguous than he suggests, however, and I present three more precise parallels to the phrase in Acts 2.47 that strongly support the standard translation.

This article foregrounds a fact so basic that it often goes unnoticed: stories frequently depict the acts of reading and/or interpreting stories; many narratives are themselves concerned with proper modes of narrative interpretation. I contend that such scenes work rhetorically to inculcate particular kinds of hermeneutical skills in their audiences, and thus can be read as pedagogical scenarios vis-à-vis implied readers. I begin the article by introducing the contemporary notion of narrative reflexivity and situating that concept within the broader literary sub-field of rhetorical narratology. Then, I turn to Acts 8.26–40 as a brief case study in order to demonstrate how narrative reflexivity can help us to think in fresh ways about the pedagogical force of ancient narratives. Specifically, I argue that this story in Acts reflexively commends the following hermeneutical principle for its readers: because reading is not synonymous with understanding, one ought to have an authoritative interpretive guide, and embrace a hermeneutic of hospitality towards the received narrative. Finally, I highlight several examples from ancient literature that demonstrate why my proposed reading coheres with ancient views about pedagogy and textual interpretation more broadly.

It is a remarkable fact that ancient Christianity did not establish a distinct legal system. The early Christians did not take over the Jewish law as the basis for the church. Rather, they accepted the administrative and legal context of the Roman Empire and developed their religious and ethical views within this framework. Consequently, unlike in Judaism and Islam, a “Christian law” was not established, even not after the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion in the Roman Empire or as Christianity became the prevailing religion in the Middle Ages and remained so into modern times. Nevertheless, Christianity developed its own perspective on legal and ethical matters. Distinctive for this view is the difference between the commitment to God's will on the one hand and the respect for human legal systems on the other. In other words, Christianity developed a perspective on the relationship of law and theology that can be described as the implementation of a double directive: Christians are bound to an ethos oriented towards God's will, but at the same time they accept the rules and authorities of this world. This view also means that God's commandments found in the scriptures of Israel are now interpreted in a new way. They are not regarded as ethical and ritual rules that would separate Christian communities from society. Rather, God's law, interpreted by Jesus Christ, serves as the guideline for a life of the Christian believers within the world of the Roman Empire. Both of these concepts—the acceptance of the legislation of the society and the commitment to God's will—can come into conflict with each other, as has often happened in Christian history. Already in early Christianity it was pointed out that obedience to God should prevail over human law.

This essay was presented as the 2015 McDonald Distinguished Scholar Lecture at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University.

This article argues that the expression ‘to the end of the earth’ in Acts 1.8, while not referring to one specific geographical location, as has often been argued in contemporary scholarship on Acts, is best understood as a way of (re)ordering the world geographically and, therefore, ideologically. Drawing on Greco-Roman geographical and literary conventions, the article suggests that the author of Acts invites the work's readers to look at the world in a new way, with Jerusalem and the gospel emanating from it as its centre – and the rest, including Rome, as its ideological (and therefore geographical) periphery. In this way, Acts proceeds to renegotiate the ‘world-view’ of its readers in an intercultural and subversive way.

In Acts 1–7, the Holy Spirit functions as the restored temple presence of the Lord that will restore the kingdom to Israel via the Ekklesia. The Holy Spirit acts through the Ekklesia as one would expect the Lord's temple presence to act. When Barnabas, Ananias, and Sapphira bring their offerings to the temple, they place them at the feet of the leadership of the new religio-fiscal center of restored Israel. As proof that the Lord's presence has indwelled this eschatological temple community, an improper act can, and does in this case, result in immediate death.

Building on the research done by E. J. Epp, B. D. Ehrman situates the origin of the ancestor of the text of Codex Bezae in an anti-Semitic milieu, which would explain the anti-Judaic tendencies of that text. This localisation of the ideological discourse in a specific milieu characterized by a negative stance toward the Jewish people on ethnic grounds seems to rest on the assumption that the text was produced by a non-Jewish Christian. The goal of the present contribution is to test this assumption as it relates to the text of the Acts of the Apostles in the Codex Bezae. With the aid of the concept of ethnicity, and especially the idea of common ancestry, we aim to discover how this text, compared to the text of Codex Vaticanus, depicts the relation of ethnic identity with the Jewish people. Contrary to what might be expected from Ehrman's suggestion, the text of Acts in Codex Bezae emphasizes the indicators of Jewish ethnic identity.