As far as the Romans were concerned, the Jews were anti-social atheists. But they were not persecuted by Rome simply for being Jews; they had been granted the status of a permitted religion.23 Luke’s massive two-volume work can be read as claiming, among many other things, that this status ought now to belong to the Christians. They are the ones who have inherited the Jewish promises of salvation; they are the ones to whom accrues the status proper to a religion of great antiquity.24 They, time and again, are shown to be in the right, to be innocent, even when magistrates have pronounced them
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