Approaches to ancient texts that focus exclusively on speech are inherently imbalanced. Far from simply an innocuous absence of language, silence can carry thundering significances. Yet, these meanings are not always obvious, and they can be especially difficult to interpret in texts, without attendant non-verbal cues such as facial expressions or gestures. How can New Testament interpreters best discern and describe the interwoven words, whispers, silences and subtexts of ancient narratives? In this article, I seek to build on my earlier narratological study of speech and silence, Silent Statements: Narrative Representations of Speech and Silence in the Gospel of Luke. There, I demonstrate how focusing on silences as well as speech enriches our understanding of the narratological dimensions of Luke's Gospel, including Lukan plot, characterisation, theme(s) and readerly experience(s). The obvious next step is to extend this work to the Lukan sequel. The guiding question of this article is therefore: how do speech and silence contribute to the narrative rhetoric of the Acts of the Apostles?

Recent narrative critical studies of the religious authorities in the Fourth Gospel have proposed, first, that the term ‘Jews’ has only one meaning in the Gospel and, second, that ‘the Jews’ and ‘the Pharisees’ constitute a single group character. However, when viewed from a different perspective, the term ‘Jews’ can be said to have three different meanings in the Gospel. Moreover, when viewed from this perspective, the various usages exhibit a remarkable consistency, one not evident when all instances are thought to have the same meaning. If only those instances of ‘the Jews’ that refer to religious authorities are studied from the point of view of narrative analysis, their character exhibits a great homogeneity but at the same time contrasts consistently with the portrayal of the character of ‘the Pharisees’ (together with ‘the chief priests’ and ‘rulers’). This article describes eight ways in which the character of the religious authorities is portrayed differently (and in a contrasting manner) in the two sets of terms, thus indicating that not all instances of the term ‘Jews’ have the same meaning and that the terms for religious authorities do not constitute a single group character, thus raising substantial questions about the proper method for interpreting these texts within the Gospel.