Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- 1 Reading Acts in the second century: reflections on method, history, and desire
- 2 Jerusalem destroyed: the setting of Acts
- 3 Acts and the apostles: issues of leadership in the second century
- 4 Spec(tac)ular sights: mirroring in/of Acts
- 5 Acts of ascension: history, exaltation, and ideological legitimation
- 6 Time and space travel in Luke-Acts
- 7 The complexity of pairing: reading Acts 16 with Plutarch's Parallel Lives
- 8 Constructing Paul as a Christian in the Acts of the Apostles
- 9 Bold speech, opposition, and philosophical imagery in Acts
- 10 Among the apologists? Reading Acts with Justin Martyr
- 11 The Second Sophistic and the cultural idealization of Paul in Acts
- 12 Reading Luke-Acts in second-century Alexandria: from Clement to the Shadow of Apollos
- Bibliography
- Index of primary sources
- Index of authors
- Subject index
11 - The Second Sophistic and the cultural idealization of Paul in Acts
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- 1 Reading Acts in the second century: reflections on method, history, and desire
- 2 Jerusalem destroyed: the setting of Acts
- 3 Acts and the apostles: issues of leadership in the second century
- 4 Spec(tac)ular sights: mirroring in/of Acts
- 5 Acts of ascension: history, exaltation, and ideological legitimation
- 6 Time and space travel in Luke-Acts
- 7 The complexity of pairing: reading Acts 16 with Plutarch's Parallel Lives
- 8 Constructing Paul as a Christian in the Acts of the Apostles
- 9 Bold speech, opposition, and philosophical imagery in Acts
- 10 Among the apologists? Reading Acts with Justin Martyr
- 11 The Second Sophistic and the cultural idealization of Paul in Acts
- 12 Reading Luke-Acts in second-century Alexandria: from Clement to the Shadow of Apollos
- Bibliography
- Index of primary sources
- Index of authors
- Subject index
Summary
The general trend of modern scholarship on Acts has been to read the text through the lens of “history,” yet this approach rarely accounts for the tendency of Acts to project back onto the first century the realities, concerns, and exigencies of the second century. When Acts was composed during the first part of the second century CE, the story of Christianity we find in Acts was not a given fact, but through Luke's skill and artistry (and the vagaries of history) it has become just that: the story of Christianity as it moved through the Greco-Roman world. Reading Acts within the context of the Second Sophistic provides a framework for interpreting many of the rhetorical and literary constructions of Acts, which resemble sophistic literature and reflect the wider cultural discourses of identity-politics prevalent in the Greek-speaking Eastern portion of the Roman empire. This essay will specifically examine the characterization of Paul in Acts through the lens of this cultural phenomenon. I will argue that Luke inscribes Paul into a sophist-like role that trades on the social eminence of sophists during this period. This construction of Paul the sophist is seen clearly in Paul's apologiai (“defense speeches”) prominent in the final chapters of Acts, which function in ways analogous to the widespread use of the apologia tradition among Second Sophistic authors such as Lucian, Dio, and Apuleius during this period.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Engaging Early Christian HistoryReading Acts in the Second Century, pp. 187 - 208Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013