This book extends scholarly debate beyond the analysis of pure historical debates and concerns to focus on the associations between Acts and the diverse contemporaneous texts, writers, and broader cultural phenomena in the second-century world of Christians, Romans, Greeks, and Jews.

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