Social Geography in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles

Abstract

Employing the paradigms of critical geography, this article offers that the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles display the Christian project to reconstitute contemporary power relation through their narrative recoding of some of the dominant spatial categories of their culture.The theme of broken boundaries is central to the Acts as seen in their repeated emphasis on women escaping domestic space (and apostles entering it) and characters entering and exiting prison space at will.Through these themes, Christians manifest their intent to 'break out' of the order of things and to resist spatial formulations that keep certain people in their place or out of place.By redefining prison as a place of community, Christians in particular create an alternative space from those defined through the hierarchical practices operating in the contemporary society.For after the division of the empire into humiliores and honestiores and the calibration of judicial punishment to social status, prison became a space where the elite were patently 'out of place.'By offering the prison as the center of community and the apostles as the sort of people who socially might find themselves in prison, the Acts create a countersite to the public spaces where the elite of the period forged their community.Henri Lefebvre, in his monumental work, The Production of Space, posited the basis for any social transformation: 'to change life...we must first change space.' 1 Considerable theoretical attention has recently been directed toward the importance of space in articulating relationships of power.Space is not, as too often has been assumed, some inert, innocent backdrop.Rather, as are all cultural productions, space is a social construct and plays a constitutive role in -----1 Lefebvre 1991, 190.

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