This essay responds to C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age, and seeks to press Rowe’s argument further in two ways: first, by engaging with the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and the vital heavenly dimension to the story of Acts, which assist in defining the narrative shape of the book; secondly, by considering the locatedness or spatial dimension of the ‘new cultural reality’ which is the believing communities in the Mediterranean basin, in order to see how the cultural shift brought about in believing in Jesus finds spatial expression.
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