Reading Acts in motion: movement and glocalisation in the Acts of the Apostles

This chapter discusses the central role that travel, motion, and mobility plays in the Acts of the Apostles. Written in the late 1st or early 2nd century CE, Acts uses motion as a topos to describe the early Jesus movement as a global, or supra-ethnic, group in which Judaeans and non-Judaeans come together. After showing how the term “the Way”— by which Acts denotes the Jesus movement—encapsulates a combination of proclamation and physical movement, I demonstrate how the apostles’ journeys and their encounters with local cultures result in the emergence of a glocal movement, in which local traditions are taken up within a global whole rooted in the ascended Jesus. This portrayal of the Way, as I argue in the final part of this chapter, combines the perspectives of Judaean eschatological expectations and Roman elite culture.