Book Review: Acts in the Discourse of Empire

Abstract

In this book, Drew Billings analyses Acts as evidence for how its author represented his protagonists, primarily the apostles, as provincial subjects of the Roman Empire. He argues that Acts should not be read simply as either pro-Roman or antiRoman, but as reflecting a provincial perspective that he dates to the early second century ce. The author’s method is mainly comparative, and is informed by scholarship on monumental historiography, i.e. how Roman imperial monumental and commemorative art served as a visual medium to advertise the achievements of individuals in society. At the heart of the book is a comparison between the Column of Trajan, still standing in Rome, and the book of Acts. Both ‘texts’, he argues are contemporaneous secondcentury works that ‘share similar purposes in glorifying the memories, perpetuating the honor, and constructing the status of their protagonists.’ Further, he claims, ‘the narrative style of the Column provides the closest nonverbal analogy to the book of Acts existing from antiquity.’ Billings offers three stylistic features that allow him to compare these two ‘texts’. First, each employs an extended narrative format as its chosen form of representation, with a continuous narrative style that draws together a series of dramatic episodes. Second, each also employs verisimilitude in furtherance of its aims (he appeals to the visual realist grammar of the column, designed to give it a documentary feel, and the verisimilar mode of narrative representation in Acts, where many extraneous details give a realistic texture to its discourse). Third, each displays an encomiastic rhetorical style, designed to praise its subjects and to present them as exemplary models for others. In his discussion of representations of Trajan, Billings draws on a wider base of evidence than Trajan’s column alone, and focuses on the emperor’s depiction as an example for others, particularly in his role as a generous benefactor both in Rome and in the provinces. He argues that provincial elites sought to present themselves in similar ways, and that this in turn influenced the author of Acts in his portrayal of Paul as a community patron who brokered the benefactions of a benevolent and generous God. That seems an entirely reasonable claim, at least on the level that Paul was as an itinerant delegate of his Lord who sought to mediate God’s beneficent gifts in Asia Minor and elsewhere. I was less convinced, however, by Billings’s claims for the specifically Trajanic complexion of such representation, and found no compelling or even probable reasons why much of what he argued could not be true of the period before or after Trajan. Billings is undoubtedly correct that it is helpful to read Acts within the discourse of empire, but the date of Acts remains elusive, despite Billings’s claim to the contrary. Perhaps his strongest case for a Trajanic dating comes in the fourth chapter of the book, in which he discusses Acts characterization of ‘the Jews’, which he considers to be misanthropic, and influenced by imperial anti-Jewish rhetoric and propaganda; but even here he appeals to trends that likely began before and continued after the time of Trajan. Although Billings shows how Acts fits with evidence from the principate of Trajan, he does not show why it could not fit also with evidence from earlier or alter periods. In a final chapter Billings compares the representation of women and gender on the Column of Trajan and in Acts, and offer a number of suggestions as to how the former can help to contextualise gender ideologies and representations in the latter. Here as elsewhere his comparative approach to both ‘texts’ helps to shed some light on Acts, but questions remain about some of the details of his case.