The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in the capitol of my home state of Alabama, is a remarkable site. The memorial structure at the center of the site is constructed out of over 800 corten steel monuments. On each are the names of victims of a racial terror lynching. Each monument collects the names of the victims from a county in the United States where racial terror lynching took place, including my home county of Madison, Alabama. As I navigated this heart-wrenching and emotionally fatiguing memorial, I came across the quotation that is the epigraph for this introduction.

The words arrested my attention, because they are not bound by time. With the first stanza as a heuristic, I pondered: How far back could we make the promise of remembering? How can this contemporary story of lynching and state terror impact our analyses of ancient stories in which both legal and extrajudicial means are used to terrorize, criminalize, subjugate, and execute bodies? These questions animate this book, which focuses on criminalization in antiquity. Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles examines the question of criminality and criminalization in the biblical book Acts of the Apostles.

I am not the first to consider how lynching in America could be fecund ground for interrogating ancient, canonical texts. W. E. B. DuBois draws a parallel to Jesus’ cross and Southern lynching in his essay, “Jesus Christ in Texas.”Footnote ¹ Poets such as Langston Hughes in “Christ in Alabama” and Gwendolyn Brooks in “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” described how, “on a cross in the South,”Footnote ² “the loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”Footnote ³ From a Black liberation theology perspective, James Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree posits Jesus as the consummate victim of lynching. Cone writes: “The cross places God in the midst of crucified people, in the midst of people who are hung, shot, burned, and tortured.”Footnote ⁴

Although Cone’s analysis is not exegesis, he does appeal to Acts 10:39 on several occasions. In that passage, Acts places these words on Peter’s lips to the God-fearer Cornelius: “They put him (Jesus) to death by hanging him on a tree.” Luke-Acts scholar Shelly Matthews takes up Cone’s work to comparatively analyze how Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles (Luke-Acts) imagined a violent act such as crucifixion that bears numerous similarities to lynching.Footnote ⁵ Both crucifixion and lynching sit at the intersection of state-sponsored and mob-endorsed killing, at the crossroads of court-sanctioned and extrajudicial death.

Matthews analyzes how Luke-Acts’ portrayal of a criminal demonstrates the author’s artistic but problematic imagination and ideology. She explores the statement of the crucified criminal (kakourgos) in Luke 23:41, who announces from a cross that he deserves an asphyxiating, excruciating, torturous public execution. Matthews finds such a statement untenable. She argues that Luke-Acts has invented this dialogue and that these words in the criminal’s mouth in many ways display the text’s privileged status and sympathy to Roman power.Footnote ⁶

Various interpreters use this scene created by Luke-Acts to reconstruct ancient attitudes toward judicial processes and justice, and the aspects of the scene they focus on are linked to their hermeneutical priorities. Interpreters who identify with the characters possessing power and authority have read this scene in a way that says, “I see us in the authority figure.”Footnote ⁷ Those who have been on the underside of judicial and extrajudicial punishments – those such as Hughes, Brooks, Du Bois, and Cone – identify with the criminalized. This book emerges from the questions raised by the Equal Justice Institute and those who empathize with the criminalized. Criminalization in Acts demonstrates that those who are portrayed in Acts as criminals are criminalized by the text – rendered criminals in its prose – and it seeks to understand that criminal status within larger ancient notions of law and justice.

Criminalization in Antiquity and in the Acts of the Apostles

The Acts of the Apostles, an early second-century textFootnote ⁸ in the New* Testament,Footnote ⁹ is particularly fertile territory for considering how the criminalized were constructed and remembered and how such memories impact our contemporary understandings of the criminalized. This book explores the narrative of Acts and how it characterizes figures and groups as criminalized. Interpreters have attributed a number of roles to the author of Luke-Acts that include historian, theologian, and popular writer.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet Luke-Acts defies the limits of our modern genre categorizations. Within the genre hybridity of Acts, Acts writes criminals into existence using historical, theological, and popular tropes. In this way, the author takes on the role of a criminographer: one who creates criminal characters.

While scholars from Martin Dibelius to Matthew Skinner have noted the role that trial scenes and speeches play in disclosing Acts’ agenda,Footnote ¹¹ and others from Otto Weinreich to John Weaver have analyzed the importance of prison-breaks for Acts’ narrative,Footnote ¹² no one has yet assessed how Acts portrays Paul and the Jesus followers in Acts as criminalized. This is particularly worthwhile because Roman elites who discussed Christians in the first centuries often viewed them as criminals.Footnote ¹³ Acts, aware of this disposition, argues that the members of the messiah movement were not criminal but were instead made out as criminals by others.

Analyzing the portrayal of the criminalized in Acts and in antiquity more broadly requires a hermeneutic of suspicion. I suspend judgment on what constitutes a crime and my approach is suspicious of judgments that deem activity criminal. Our understandings of crime and criminality are contemporary and often anachronistic, but they also carry presuppositions that obscure how criminals were depicted legally and socially in antiquity.Footnote ¹⁴ An example of this is murder. Although killing someone is now generally recognized as criminal,Footnote ¹⁵ in many contexts in Roman antiquity, murder was not always considered criminal. For example, an owner could kill an enslaved person that they possessed with impunity.Footnote ¹⁶ Definitions of criminality were – and are – intertwined with complicated networks of power relationships, status, and social discourses.

Roman legal scholar Jill Harries argues that Roman criminal law must be understood in terms of both a social discourse and a legal discourse in the Roman Empire.Footnote ¹⁷ On the one hand, she characterizes the legal discourse as what can be gleaned from explicitly legal documents and materials such as the compilation of jurists’ opinions from the second century ce and beyond, collected in the sixth-century Justinian’s Digest. The social discourse, on the other hand, is found in other materials, particularly novels, rabbinic literature, and martyrdom narratives. They fill in gaps that sources such as the Digest cannot.Footnote ¹⁸

I propose that one must critically assess how ancient social discourses portray individuals and groups as criminals in order to learn about the world that produced Acts, on the one hand, and Acts’ own characterizations of criminals and criminality, on the other. Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles takes Acts as its starting point in order to reconsider how we conceive the first communities that followed Jesus as messiah. Often those communities – frequently called early Christians, or the Jesus movement – are considered persecuted. This book shifts the lens from religious persecution and instead examines how Acts portrays the communities as prosecuted and criminalized.Footnote ¹⁹ This shift allows us to ask questions about ancient justice and the state.

Raising new questions allows for interpreters to glean fresh evidence from overinterpreted passages such as Acts 9:4 where Acts’ Jesus asks Paul, then called Saul, “ti me diōkeis.” Almost universally this phrase is translated as “why do you persecute me?” However, another translation lies within the semantic range of diōkō. This term can also mean “prosecute.”Footnote ²⁰ This translation is particularly relevant for the context of Acts 9:4, in which Saul receives letters from the high priest to criminalize Jesus’ followers,Footnote ²¹ arrest them, and bring them back to Jerusalem for trial. Translating the term diōkō as prosecution highlights the legal processes involved with arresting, trying, convicting, and punishing criminalized people. Of the eleven times that the term is used in Luke-Acts, eight are direct references to Paul prosecuting Jesus’ followers, and one of the two references in Luke involves Jesus communicating to his followers that they will be brought before synagogues, kings, and rulers for trials (Luke 21:12).Footnote ²² In Acts 9:5, Jesus discloses that it is he whom Paul is prosecuting. By attacking the followers, Paul attacks the leader.Footnote ²³ In Luke 10:16, Luke’s Jesus states that “whoever rejects you rejects me.” Paul prosecutes Jesus. This is not strange for Acts, because, for Acts, Jesus the Just One died a criminal’s death after being prosecuted according to Roman and Jewish legal processes.Footnote ²⁴

Translating and thinking with diōkō as “to prosecute” allows us to focus on the legal processes that produce and prosecute criminals in Acts. Such a focus allows for an analysis of those processes in terms of prosecution rather than as persecution, which is usually understood as a religious phenomenon where the judicial aspects function merely as incidental to the narrative. This reading also highlights the legal aspects of the term witness (martus), which is used throughout Acts and has a significant afterlife.Footnote ²⁵ The translation of diōkō as “to prosecute” also allows us to see how Acts invites those who seek to participate in the movement to recognize that they too will be criminalized, especially because they choose to show solidarity with the criminalized, including Jesus the Just One. Referring to the early Jesus followers in Acts as a movement facilitates a reading of Acts that tends to how they are criminalized by Roman and Jewish powers. Such a framing raises questions regarding how ancient sociopolitical processes of criminalization functioned.

Rhetoric plays a significant role in the sociopolitical processes both as a formal discipline and more importantly for this book as an analysis of power. Acts 24 provides a relevant example. There the Jerusalem leaders have hired a Roman rhētor named Tertullus to criminalize Paul before the court of an incompetent provincial procurator named Felix.Footnote ²⁶ In Tertullus’ speech, Acts appeals to textbook rhetorical strategies evidenced in texts such as Rhetorica ad Herennium, and those of Cicero and the first-century rhetorician Quintillian.Footnote ²⁷ Acts also appeals to Roman legal petitions such as those found in Egyptian papyri.Footnote ²⁸ Most useful for our study are the charges raised in the narratio against Paul. He is accused in the following way in Acts 24:5–6: “We have, in fact, found this man a pest, an agitator among all the Jewish people throughout the Roman Empire, and a party leader of the Nazarenes’ sect. He even tried to profane the temple, and so we seized him.” Tertullus accuses Paul of agitation or stirring up an insurrection (stasis) among Jewish people across the Roman Empire (oikoumenē). In reference to this passage, Bruce Winter writes that “according to the rhetorical handbooks, agitation or sedition, stasis, was the right charge to bring against an opponent in criminal proceedings.”Footnote ²⁹ It is beyond the scope of this section to analyze all of the claims in Tertullus’ speech; to some extent that is the project of the book. What is worth noting here is that Paul is criminalized as an agitator and for being a leader of a sect of Nazarenes. Paul challenges the validity of the claim that he caused a stir (Acts 24:12, epistasin) among the crowd in the Temple; however, he does admit that he is member of the Way (hē hodos) that Tertullus and his opponents from the Jerusalem court call a sect (hairesis, Acts 24:14). Paul claims to be of “this Way” (hodos) and a follower of Jesus, who he prosecuted as I explained earlier.

The exchange between Tertullus and Paul before Felix epitomizes how Paul goes from prosecutor to prosecuted as part of the Jesus-following, protagonist community in Acts, which I call “the messiah movement.” Acts uses hē hodos to refer to the sect that trusts Jesus the Nazarene as messiah.Footnote ³⁰ I translate hē hodos as “the movement,” to capture how the term reflects people on a shared journey toward a destination, which is a dominant theme for Luke-Acts.Footnote ³¹ This movement in Acts 24:14 to which Paul refers is the same movement from Acts 9:2. At that time, Paul receives letters from the high priest to arrest them, which is before Jesus reveals that it is he whom Paul prosecutes. Furthermore, in Acts, whenever the followers of Jesus are described as hē hodos, it is in a context in which someone wants to arrest, try, and execute them. As noted earlier, referring to Jesus’ followers in Acts as a movement takes seriously the potential for them to be criminalized by authorities who consider themselves legitimate and are threatened or annoyed by the “movement of salvation” (Acts 16:17, hodon sōtērias).Footnote ³² Maia Kotrosits argues that the messiah movement “is defined not only by the unity and faithfulness of its followers, but also by coalitions that are brief and dubious, often formed under strained political, economic, and social circumstances.”Footnote ³³ The value of movements depends on the eyes of the beholder, and the messiah movement is no different. Those in power are often suspicious of movements. My use of “messiah movement” intentionally both works to recognize the undeniable significance of how Acts shaped Christ-followers’ (messiah-followers’) stories about their origins and marks my participation in the scholarly tradition that troubles the understanding of Acts as church history.

Studying the criminalization of the messiah movement in Acts, which has been understood as the first church history, can reset the tables for how Christians tell stories of their origins.Footnote ³⁴ Criminalization in Acts uses the term “messiah movement” to avoid “early Christians” in an effort both to demonstrate historical accuracy and to provide an alternative point of departure for “Christian” history. Often the terms “early Christians” and “early Christianity” presume a proto-orthodoxy in the first and second centuries that did not exist prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325 ce.Footnote ³⁵ The term “Christian” does not even become a relatively popular designation until the second century, and even then it does not possess the imperial, colonizing, and homogenizing implications that it will later possess.Footnote ³⁶ Even within the New* Testament, we find competing understandings of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, so much so that it is better to consider the texts that become canonized as portraying a variety of understandings for following the Christ/messiah, or put in another way, the texts capture early Christianities.Footnote ³⁷ Among those early Christianities is Acts’ representation that depicts a messiah movement that is prosecuted. Acts only uses the term “Christian” to refer to Jesus followers twice, and in those places it is used by outsiders in a way that is generally derogatory, which is in line with most other early recorded usage of the term.Footnote ³⁸ The term “messiah movement” helps to draw attention to the fact that the protagonists of Acts are criminalized by imperial, provincial, and local forces making criminalization a key component of how some “early Christians” considered their identity.

Another goal of studying the criminalization of the messiah movement is to trouble how Acts juxtaposes its protagonists against Jewish leadership and how Acts’ use of “the Jews” (hoi Ioudaioi) has certainly contributed to the legacy of how Acts has been used for anti-Jewish purposes. I use “messiah movement” to move beyond anti-Jewish readings that portray Judaism as particular and negative in contrast to portrayals of Christianity as universal.Footnote ³⁹ Similar to how Christian identity was not stable in the first centuries ce, nor was Jewish identity.Footnote ⁴⁰ Jewish identity was under debate both in the time period narrated by Acts and in the time period when Acts was written. Acts presents at least two divergent interpretations of what it means to be a faithful Jew.Footnote ⁴¹ Acts juxtaposes and elevates the messiah movement against the Jews who do not trust in Jesus, and Acts places Paul in the first-century contest of defining what it meant to be Jewish or a Ioudaios.Footnote ⁴² While Acts focuses on Jews who trust Jesus as God’s messiah (the messiah movement), at the same time, Acts negatively portrays groups such as Jews from Asia in Acts 21:27 who have not subscribed to the idea that Jesus who was lynched as a criminal by Roman police is the messiah. This juxtaposition still leaves room for violent interpretations, but I offer it to present how the contested nature of the term Ioudaioi in the first and second centuries is much more in view than a delineation between Christianity and Judaism.Footnote ⁴³ In turn, I focus on how Acts’ rhetoric argues that the messiah movement was not criminal but that it was criminalized by others, especially Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. Analyzing how criminalization functions provides tools for reading Acts in its historical context, and it can provide strategies for critiquing how Acts and other anti-Jewish discourses have been wielded throughout history, especially in the Occident.

At this point, I want to flag that analyzing rhetoric as formally displayed in speeches has drifted out of focus in order to emphasize rhetorical analysis as an assessment of public discourses that attempt to persuade audiences to accept their version of a narrative.Footnote ⁴⁴ Acts wields Jewishness, Jerusalem institutions, Roman legal frameworks, stories about Greek gods, and novelistic court scenes to narrate the origins of the messiah movement. I contend that a significant component of Acts’ project is the rhetorical portrayal of the messiah movement as criminalized by its opponents. Within Acts’ rhetorical strategy, I focus on how criminalization functions in Acts, whether it is Jews criminalizing other Jews, Romans criminalizing Jews and members of the messiah movement, or Luke-Acts criminalizing Romans and Jews who do not support the messiah movement.

Organization of the Book

This book is divided into two parts. The first three chapters capture my approach to criminalization and my assessment of Roman and Jewish criminal procedures. In Chapter 1, I discuss my framework, which involves the analysis for rhetorical criminalization (ARC) that provides four categories to study Acts and other Roman and Jewish legal materials. This chapter will lay the groundwork for the four categories of the ARC: (1) classification of humans and racializing assemblages, (2) confines of judicial structures, (3) critical analysis of myths and stories, and (4) commitments of the elite. These four categories contribute to two primary types of analysis: one of structures and another of stories. These categories raise questions inspired by critical race theory (CRT), Black feminism, womanism, and myth criticism. Although those frameworks are contemporary, I argue that they are useful for analyzing ancient scenes and narratives where characters are criminalized. Chapter 2, “Analyzing Structures in Ancient Roman and Jewish Criminalizing Discourses,” and Chapter 3, “Analyzing Stories and Myths in Ancient Roman and Jewish Criminalizing Discourses,” explore the Roman and Jewish legal notions of criminality and their utility for the study of Acts. I engage Roman legal texts such as Justinian’s Digest and the Mishnah to survey the notions of criminal justice operating in the first centuries of the Common Era. I take up two of the categories of the ARC in each chapter to demonstrate how they contribute to analyzing social and legal discourses in Roman and Jewish sources. By tending to those notions, I argue that readers can more carefully observe how Acts portrays the messiah movement as criminalized.

Chapter 4 and the subsequent chapters form the second part of the book. Each of these chapters engage one of the four categories laid out in the ARC. In the four chapters, I directly apply one of the four categories and its questions to two passages from Acts freshly translated with attention to the ARC. Both passages involve Paul and the messiah movement: one passage from the beginning of Acts’ story about Paul’s work in Philippi in Acts 16:16–40, and another at the end of his freedom in Jerusalem in Acts 21:27–23:10. I begin with the end, and in Chapters 4 and 5, I discuss Acts 21:27–23:10 and Paul’s appeal to his Roman humanity and the judiciary’s role in criminalizing him. Chapter 4, “‘I am a Human’: Criminal Classification of Humans and Racializing Assemblages in Acts,” explores how the hierarchization of humans in ancient understandings contributes to how Paul and other members of the messiah movement were criminalized. This chapter argues that tending to the sociopolitical processes around militarized policing, politics of respectability, and ethno-political invective against Egyptianness exposes ancient taxonomies in which some humans are considered fully human, others as not-quite-human, and some as nonhuman in Acts and other texts entangled in the Roman hegemonic imagination. Such texts include the works of Josephus, Cicero, Philo, Plutarch, Cassius Dio, Juvenal, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Exploring how these texts hierarchize humans provides resources for how humanity was measured and the types of justice that different humans could anticipate.

Chapter 5, “‘Before the Court’ and the Confines of Judicial Structures in Acts and Callirhoe,” focuses on the institution of the court (sunedrion) in Acts 23:1–10. I contrast Acts’ depiction of the first-century judiciary in Jerusalem as a criminalizing force against Chariton’s portrayal of the Persian court in the Greek novel Callirhoe. Both texts wield courts to concretize their view of who should be criminalized and how the judicial processes function to reveal the values of a society, who belongs in it, and who is excluded from it.

Chapter 6 and 7 examine Acts 16:16–40 in which Paul and the messiah movement are criminalized by Roman officials and by slave masters. Chapter 6, “‘The Foundation of the Prison Shook’ and the Critical Analysis of Apollo’s, Dionysus’, and Acts’ Myths,” assesses how Acts 16:16–40 critically wields mythology and ideology to criminalize. I refer to that ideology as the Roman hegemonic imagination and use it to discuss how Greek stories about gods are used to criminalize. Womanist Emilie Townes’ framework of the fantastic hegemonic imagination informs this approach and helps us to understand how Euripides’ depiction of Dionysus and the enslaved girl with the Pythian spirit are used to criminalize.

Chapter 7, “‘Not Lawful for Romans’ and the Commitments of Roman Elites in Acts,” illuminates how the Roman masters (kyrioi) and law enforcement criminalized Paul and the messiah movement in Acts 16 in Philippi. This chapter explores three key elements of the rhetorical strategy of Acts 16:16–24, 35–40. First, it finds that Roman logics, especially those that criminalized religious alterity and the charge of vis, were deployed against messiah movement (Acts 16:20, 21). Second, masters aligned with government officials violate not only enslaved but also citizens’ bodies (Acts 16:16, 19–24). Third, Roman officials themselves act criminally (Acts 16:23, 24, 37–9), and their behavior should make them afraid of consequences (Acts 16:38).

My engagements with these scenes in Acts seek to demonstrate how attention to criminalization and the aforementioned theoretical frameworks help to reconstruct the history of the Roman Empire and early Christianities. My analysis can be applied more broadly in Luke-Acts, the New* Testament, and beyond. Through the ARC, these chapters explore how criminals were made in the Roman Empire during the first and second centuries ce. By exploring how individuals and groups were rhetorically portrayed as criminals in the Roman Empire, this book examines the operational and organizing logics of justice functioning within Roman and Jewish texts. I conclude by arguing that the criminalization of Black humans in the West and particularly in the United States provides an unparalleled heuristic for analyzing how ancient legal and social processes construct criminals. Furthermore, the ancient texts can provide a serious launching pad for critical reflection on criminality across time.