British New Testament Society

This paper attempts to read the speech of the non-Christian Gallio through the literary technique of dramatic irony. That is, the device whereby a writer-because of the very nature of narrative-constructs a message that has significance at the level of characters inside the story and at the level of the audience outside the story. The paper suggests that the "deeper" significance of the speech is that of an apologia on behalf of Paul. The paper then suggests ways of making this ironic reading "stable" and concludes by connecting the "deeper" message of the speech of Gallio to other orations of non-Christians in Acts. The principal thesis is that, by means of dramatic irony, the speeches of non-Christians affirm what is elsewhere stated directly by the narrator or said in the speeches of Christians.

A strong consensus exists with Lucan scholarship that the Spirit is to be understood as primarily the "Spirit of prophecy", which is taken in turn from a corresponding generalization about first century Jewish thought. However, there is disagreement about the scope of this notion in Luke-Acts: is it to be conceived more narrowly in terms of mission, or more broadly in terms of the creation and/or maintenance of Christian life.

This paper argues that the rubric "Spirit of prophecy" is not the right "catch-all" historical generalization to describe first century Jewish thought, and therefore it is not a socio-literary dominant conception influencing Luke. To demonstrate this argument we examine the usual Jewish evidence that is cited (Targums, Rabbinical texts, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha) and assess its evidential value; we also argue that a self-fulfilling analytical framework is cast around this evidence to produce the conclusion that for Jews in the first century, the Spirit was the "Spirit of prophecy".

Our contrary proposal is that a less specific set of generalizations about the Spirit, based on relevant and weighted Jewish evidence, facilitates a broader understanding of the Spirit in Acts which gives due weight to the "personal" aspects of Luke's narrative understanding.

The character of the intertextuality pervading Peter's speech is determined by this speech's function in Luke's narrative strategy, and shaped by its dialogue between event and scripture.

By character, I understand Luke's 'choice' of scriptures and his manner of inter-relating them.

By function in Luke's narrative development, I have in view three of this speech's features. First, Luke's final quotation (Acts 2:34-5; Ps 109:1) closes one of his two inclusios framed by core psalms, definitively answering Jesus' question about Messiah (Lk 20:41-4) while tightly linking Luke's two volumes. Second, Peter's speech opens an apostolic argument crystallising David's foundational role in God's economy of salvation, a role extensively explored in Luke-Acts. Third, Peter's speech is Luke's first outworking of his key 'witness' theme (Lk 24:44-9; Acts 1:6-11); essentially, Peter's witness to 'all Israel' is that while they crucified Jesus of Nazareth, God made him 'Lord' and 'Messiah'. How is this affirmed?

The shape of Peter's speech is that of dialogue between apostolic witness to 'what God has done' and a scriptural subtext interpreting these events. This subtext - quotations and allusions together with their context-fields -- comprises psalms by and about David, horizontally linked in mutual enrichment by shared words and themes; vertically, these psalms' themes enable Luke to 'prove' that God's raising Jesus explicates Ps 109:1, which, appropriated to Jesus, entails Acts 2:36.

The paper presents the results of a detailed structural analysis of Acts, comparing it with rhetorical and poetical structures known in classical and biblical literature. The analysis works down from the level of the book overall to that of individual sentences, and finds that the whole work is made up of a hierarchy of finely balanced patterns. At the sentence level, where the work is the most new, carefully constructed frameworks can be seen, with the elements that make up each episode of the story being arranged in concentric or symmetrical form. An element is defined as the smallest unit of text into which a narrative can be broken down, essentially the equivalent of a line in metric poetry. How to determine just what constitutes an element in narrative depends on identifying and classifying linguistic criteria, especially the connectives between each sentence and the relationship between finite verbs and participles. These features are notoriously subject to textual variation, with the result that different texts produce different structural arrangements (though, in fact, far less often than may be supposed given the amount of variation).

In consequence, the structures I have identified are to some extent provisional and would benefit from informed discussion to which they readily lend themselves. The benefit of identifying the structure of episodes is that the narrative thread can be seen more clearly in some passages that otherwise can seem (do seem, to e.g. Barrett) to be a loose stitching together of source material. And because most of the structural patterns are built around a central point, they highlight what the narrator intended to be the focus or pivotal point of an episode (with sometimes surprising results).