In this study, Jeremy L. Williams interrogates the Book of Acts in an effort to understand how early Christian texts provide glimpses of the legal processes by which Roman officials and militarized police criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated people in the first and second centuries CE. Williams investigates how individuals and groups have been, and still are, prosecuted for specious reasons – because of stories and myths written against them, perceptions of alterity that render them subhuman or nonhuman, the collision of officials, and financial incentives that foster injustices, among them. Through analysis of criminalization in Acts, he demonstrates how Critical Race Theory, Black studies, and feminist rhetorical scholarship enables a reconstruction of ancient understandings of crime, judicial institutions, militarized police, punishment, and socio-political processes that criminalize. Williams' study highlights how the criminalization of Jesus followers as depicted in Acts enables connections with contemporary movements. It also presents the ancient text as a critique against the shortcomings of some contemporary understandings of justice and human rights.

‘Societies routinely use language and policies about criminalization to protect their powerful members and degrade others. Jeremy Williams has given us a groundbreaking study for understanding how Acts depicts Jesus’s followers as a movement at odds with the elites and systems that held and guarded prerogatives in the Roman world. Through careful analysis of rhetoric used to criminalize people as deviants and corrective translations of key passages in Acts, this valuable book provides clarity to the theological and apologetic tendencies of the Bible’s narrative about the early church. Williams’s critical reflections on how Acts illuminates the rhetoric of criminality in American society and vice versa make this book even more of a ‘must read’ within academic and ecclesial circles.’

Matthew L. Skinner - Asher O. and Carrie Nasby Professor of New Testament, Luther Seminary

‘As Acts scholarship has revisited critical inquiries about identity, politics, and imperial power while at the same time movements for justice have illuminated the dynamics of policing, Criminalization in the Acts of the Apostles lands at an ideal moment. Drawing upon sophisticated engagement with interlocking theories of racism, politics, and criminology alongside careful engagement with the text of and the scholarship around Acts, Jeremy Williams brings to light translational and interpretive possibilities that draw scholars to reimagine not just the narrative texture of Acts but the potent infrastructure underlying its storytelling about power, politics, and the divine. This book promises to help reshape our understanding of the literary world of Acts but also cause us to question anew the too often unstated and unexamined ideological stances of its interpreters.’

Eric D. Barreto - Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament, Princeton Theological Seminary