Fewer Answers and Further Questions: Jews and Gentiles in Acts

Abstract

The author of the Acts of the Apostles uses criteria commonly employed in his cultural context to legitimate the Jesus movement and the extension of the mission to the Gentiles as the divine plan. While these literary strategies result in material that can be employed uncritically and tragically to serve a bias against the Jewish people, a far more fruitful transposition of the Lukan strategies would raise intelligent questions about the ways of God in the world and the cooperation of humans with those ways.