Journeying Through Acts

Book excerpt: F. Scott Spencer's reading offers a guide through the book of Acts, charting both narrative features (plot development, character development, and shifting points of view) and cultural scenarios informing the story (honor-shame contests, patron-client relations, and purity-pollution boundaries). Within this "literary-cultural" framework, Spencer maps the time, place, and circumstance of each segments of the Acts journey. The element of surprise is maximized, so that the commentary reads like a first time exploration of the text.