Commentary on Acts 2:14a, 22-32

This commentary highlights the importance of reading the lectionary passage with attention to how Acts portrays Judeans (Jews) under the Roman Empire. The selection for this week frames the words of Acts 2:22–32 by calling the reader’s attention back to the beginning of Peter’s message during Shavuot, in Acts 2:14a. The Judean festival of Shavuot marked the end of the harvest, seven weeks after Passover. Acts refers to it as the pentēkostos or 50th day. Peter rises during Shavuot and addresses a group of Judeans from across the Roman diaspora who are temporarily in Jerusalem for the festival.

Reading Jews/Judeans in Acts

I translate Ioudaioi (yoo-dai-oy) in Acts 2:14 as “Judeans.” Many translate the term as “Jews,” and some, like the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue) translate this phrase as “men of Judea.” The NRSVue translation sheds some etymological light on why it can be useful to translate this term here and in other places throughout Acts as “Judean/Judeans.” The NRSVue translation shows one aspect of the complexity of Judean/Jewish identity in the first centuries CE. The term Ioudaioi can refer to people who share ancestry, adoration of Adonai, active cultural practices, or actual residence in Judea. Ioudaioi can refer to people who claim any or all of those descriptions.

I translate the term as “Judeans” here for two primary purposes. The first purpose is to provide a resource for interpreters to avoid anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic readings of the text. Often the characters described in Acts as Ioudaioi are the antagonists to the apostolic protagonists of the movement (hē hodos, the Way) in Acts. This is clear in the early messages in Acts, in which Peter and Stephen blame Ioudaioi for the execution of Jesus the Messiah. 

Later in Acts, Ioudaioi are categorically portrayed as the jealous, bloodthirsty group of people who cause troubles for those of the Messiah movement (the Way) from city to city across the Roman Empire. I want it to be clear that contemporary Jews should not be held responsible for Acts’ portrait of first-century Judeans. Closely examining the narratives proves that Ioudaioi in Acts are less of a competing religion and more of a literary foil.

Translating Ioudaioi as “Judeans” also allows interpreters to consider the function of the characters described as such in the narrative. Reading Ioudaioi this way brings out an irony of Acts: Although the antagonists are described as Ioudaioi, all the protagonists in Acts are also Ioudaioi, and they remain so throughout the entire narrative. 

Some have attempted to reconcile this irony by calling the protagonists in Acts “Jewish Christians,” but that interpretive move presupposes a separation between Jews and Christians that would not be pronounced until at least a couple centuries after the events portrayed in Acts. To that end, Ioudaioi in Acts should not be used to draw historical links to contemporary people, nor to draw an anachronistic definitive line between Christianity and Judaism. 

The story in Acts is messy. As if the complexity of Ioudaioi is not enough, our reading for this week further complicates it. After Peter cites Joel 2:28–32, he turns to his exegesis. Assuming he is addressing the same group, he switches his address from Ioudaioi to Israēlitai, from “Judeans” to “Israelites.” The term Israelitai conjured a mythic past. 

At the time of the writing of Acts and at the time of Jesus, there was not a governmental entity or geographic territory recognized as “Israel” by the Romans. “Israel” functioned as an ideological homeland where David had been king, and it was a source for projecting a collected identity for people whom empires had dominated and dispersed. The evidence for Israel lacking a kingdom or governmental entity is provided earlier, in Acts 1:8, when Jesus’s disciples ask whether he is going to restore the kingdom to Israel. Jesus effectively answers “no.”

What should be clear by this point is that Acts appeals to various nodes of Ioudaioi identity to describe the audience Peter addresses. It should also be clear that Acts wants us to understand Peter’s message within Ioudaioi traditions and texts in the first and second centuries CE. This helps contextualize how Acts has Peter apply Joel 2:28–32 to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Acts’ first prison break

Peter declares that despite God performing mighty works and signs through Jesus, he was executed with a death instrument reserved for people who were enslaved or of low status. Peter blames the death of Jesus on the Jerusalem Judean judiciary who had been empowered by the Romans. Acts has Peter acknowledge a historical fact: The Romans, those outside of the law (anomōn), are the ones ultimately responsible for lawlessly lynching Jesus. He says that it is their hands that do the despicable deed.

To this grave miscarriage of justice, God responds by overturning the layered violence directed toward Jesus of Nazareth by raising him from the dead. This, for Acts, proves God’s ultimate plan that the power of life has the final say over the pangs of death.

Peter quotes Psalm 16, demonstrating again that Acts wants its audience to interpret this story through the lens of Ioudaioi texts and traditions. One important feature of this quotation is the reference to hades, which the King James Version translates as “hell.” Although more contemporary understandings of hell are the products of imaginations that arise later than Acts (and later than the New Testament, for that matter!), it is worth noting that within both Ioudaioi-specific traditions and Ioudaioi traditions influenced by Greco-Roman traditions, hades or sheol was understood as a holding place, and more nefariously as a place of confinement, a carceral space, a prison.

Recent scholarship has highlighted how ancient prisons were subterranean, so there was a connection, at least mythologically, between imprisonment and death. Acts is not shy about its understanding that Jesus was shackled by death (thanatos, 2:24) and incarcerated (temporarily) in hell (hades). To this reality, God stages a prison break, which is a foreshadowing of what God will do throughout the book of Acts. God abolishes (lusas, 2:24) the shackles of Jesus’ incarceration through resurrection. 

Remembering that Jesus explains what the Spirit anointed (echrisen) or “christed” him to do according to Luke-Acts is significant here. One of the tasks he is anointed for is to proclaim abolition to the prisoners (kēruxai aichmalōtois aphesin, Luke 4:18). So when Peter notes that David the Psalmist foresaw the resurrection of the Anointed One (christou, Acts 2:31), we should see that for Acts, this event signals the resurrection of Jesus, the one anointed to proclaim abolition to prisoners. Such is a paradigm for Luke-Acts, and it should be a guidestar for interpreters of Acts. The bottom line is that the God of Judeans breaks people out of prisons and, in the process, breaks the prisons themselves.

Select Bibliography

Megan Henning, Hell Hath No Fury: Disability and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (Yale University Press, 2021).

Matthew Larsen and Mark Letteney, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (University of California Press, 2025).

Mitzi J. Smith, The Literary Construction of the Other in Acts of the Apostles: Charismatics, the Jews, and Women, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Pickwick Publications, 2011). 

Christopher Stroup, The Christians Who Became Jews: Acts of the Apostles and Ethnicity in the Roman Empire (Yale University Press, 2020).

Jeremy L. Williams, “Bible and Racial Violence,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible, Race, and Diaspora, ed. Mitzi Smith, Raj Nadella, Luis Menéndez-Antuña (Oxford University Press, 2025).