Publications, 2011.

Acts attempts the recategorization of Judean and non-Judean Christ followers … into a common ingroup by presenting Peter and Paul as prototypical of a common superordinate Christian identity in the midst of diversity and conflict within the Christ movement in the last decade of the first century CE ” (p. xv). This recategorization is intended to establish the boundaries by which it can be seen who, from the Judean and Greco-Roman cultural groupings, is included in the Christian community and who is excluded from it. Drawing on narrative and reader-response approaches— especially Paul Ricoeur’s “three-fold process of narrative interaction ” (p. 71)—Baker moves away from the quest for the “historical ” Peter and Paul, past the “literary ” Peter and Paul, and on to what Baker calls “an identity-forming Peter and Paul ” (p. xvi). Baker proposes that such an approach builds on the vital but essentially incomplete social-scientific and literary approaches. The aim is to establish “a model for reading biblical texts as identity-forming documents within their historical and cultural context ” (p xvii). In this work, Baker uses Acts as the test case for his theory. In chapter one Baker argues for his methodology, which he names the narrative-identity model. This is a fusion of the Social Identity Approach and Narrative Theory. Baker argues that this is “a helpful model for understanding the identity-forming interaction between text and audience ” (p. 1)