Making Criminals: The Rhetoric of Criminality in Acts of the Apostles

Abstract

The Acts of the Apostles writes criminals into existence. Acts, a second-century text that narrates the origins of the messiah movement or “the Way”—its term for Christ-followers—has often been read as a straightforward history of the church. In this understanding, those communities are considered persecuted. This dissertation shifts the lens from religious persecution and instead examines how Acts portrays the communities as prosecuted and criminalized, and it seeks to understand that criminal status within larger ancient notions of law and justice. This dissertation focuses on the Acts of the Apostles in order to reconsider how to historically reconstruct the first communities that followed Jesus as messiah. Particularly, I seek to investigate how Roman conceptions that hierarchize humans manifest in Roman criminal law, courts, and procedure (real and imagined), and how those conceptions for both Acts and Acts’ earliest audiences contribute to how the messiah movement is portrayed as criminalized. Using insights from critical race theory, I argue that the writer of Acts takes on the role of a criminographer: one who creates criminal characters. Acts presents the messiah movement as exposing Roman travesties of justice; at the same time, Acts too often does not attend to those most marginal in Roman society, such as an enslaved girl. This dissertation critically assesses Acts among other contemporaneous legal and social discourses—that is, both laws, insofar as we have evidence of them, and literary imaginations regarding law and justice. To understand Acts’ characterizations of criminals and criminality, this dissertation uses these contemporaneous resources, as well as the insights of scholars attending to topics of law and crime in antiquity, to examine the legal and social discourses around criminality in the Roman Empire. To examine these discourses, I investigate the operational and organizing logics of justice functioning within Roman legal texts like Justinian’s Digest, rabbinical texts like the Mishnah, other elite Roman and Jewish literature, and evidence from material culture like a second-century stele dedicated to Dionysus. Those who first read and heard Acts would have been familiar with these surrounding cultural currents and artifacts, not to mention legal pressures. To analyze the legal and social discourses that Acts incorporates to portray the early Jesus followers as criminalized, this dissertation explores: 1) the concerns of the elite (legal charges and economic commitments), 2) the critical analysis of myths and stories, 3) the classification of humans, and 4) the confines of judicial structures. These categories are heavily influenced by critical race theory, critical criminology studies, Black studies, womanist cultural criticism, and myth criticism. These contemporary theoretical frameworks aid in my project of more accurately reconstructing ancient sociopolitical processes, especially those around criminalization, imperial power, and judicial structures.