Early Christianity and Classical Culture: Comparative Studies in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe

David L. Balch

The ancient historian who is the author of Luke-Acts argues for the reception of all nations into the people of God, a social policy that is a radical contrast with the attitude toward foreigners expressed by the Priestly editors of the Pentateuch and by the Maccabean books.¹ This paper investigates the antecedents of this social policy. There are structural parallels between Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, and Luke’s history that involve this social policy. I will very briefly set out some of those similarities and then ask another question: can we trace the origin of the language and the social inclusiveness involved back to Alexander the Great, i.e., back to a cultural impulse of Hellenism?

Without going into detail, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities,² and Luke-Acts both divide history into three periods: First, they each inform about ancestors, second, they narrate a central period of history in which the Founder(s) teach(es); and third, they tell of the successors.³

* I offer this essay in graditude to Abraham Malherbe, a mentor whose ideas and approach to exegesis has been generative for me. This contribution builds on the sort of question he discusses in ‘“Not in a Corner’: Early Christian Apologetic in Acts 26:26,” in Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989) 147–63. John Fitzgerald’s suggestions as an editor have also been very helpful.

¹ See my article “Attitudes toward Foreigners in 2 Maccabees, Eupolemus, Esther, Aristeas, and Luke-Acts,” in The Early Church in its Context: Essays in Honor of Everett Eerguson, ed. A.J. Malherbe, F. W. Norris, and J. VV. Thompson (NovTSup 90; Leiden: Brill, 1998) 22–47.

² Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, trans. E. Gary (LCL; Cambridge: Harvard, 1978).

³ I set out this argument most fully in “METABOAH ΠOΛITEIΩN: Jesus as Founder of the Church in Luke-Acts: Form and Function,” in Contextualizing Acts: Lukan Narrative and Greco-Roman Discourse, ed. T Penner and C. Vander Stichele (Symposium Series; Scholars Press and E.J. Brill, in press).

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