Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles
Race, Rhetoric, and the Prosecution of an Early Christian Movement

Acts of the Apostles presents Roman officials and militarized police criminalizing, prosecuting, and incarcerating a movement of Jesus followers.

Jeremy L. Williams (Author)

9781009366373, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 October 2023

248 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.53 kg

'Williams is a pleasure to read in his clarity, insightfulness, and erudition. His ability to weave together a wealth of Roman, Jewish, early Christian, scholarly, and theoretical resources into a compelling, thought provoking, and politically relevant work is outstanding. It is exemplary in the way that it combines scriptural and historical studies with theory and contemporary issues. Readers will find here fresh and innovative approaches to Acts.' Erin Runions, The Bible and Critical Theory

In this study, Jeremy L. Williams interrogates the Book of Acts in an effort to understand how early Christian texts provide glimpses of the legal processes by which Roman officials and militarized police criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated people in the first and second centuries CE. Williams investigates how individuals and groups have been, and still are, prosecuted for specious reasons – because of stories and myths written against them, perceptions of alterity that render them subhuman or nonhuman, the collision of officials, and financial incentives that foster injustices, among them. Through analysis of criminalization in Acts, he demonstrates how Critical Race Theory, Black studies, and feminist rhetorical scholarship enables a reconstruction of ancient understandings of crime, judicial institutions, militarized police, punishment, and socio-political processes that criminalize. Williams' study highlights how the criminalization of Jesus followers as depicted in Acts enables connections with contemporary movements. It also presents the ancient text as a critique against the shortcomings of some contemporary understandings of justice and human rights.

I: 1. The analysis for rhetorical criminalization (ARC)
2. Analyzing structures in Ancient Roman and Jewish Criminalizing Discourses
3. Analyzing stories and myths in Ancient Roman and Jewish criminalizing discourses
II: 4. 'I am a Human': criminal classification of humans and racializing assemblages in Acts
5. 'Before the Court' and the confines of judicial structures in Acts and Callirhoe
6. 'The Foundation of the Prison Shook' and the critical analysis of Apollo's, Dionysus', and Acts' myths
7. 'Not Lawful for Romans' and the commitments of Roman elites in Acts.

Subject Areas: Biblical studies & exegesis [HRCG]