Drew Billings's monograph, Acts of the Apostles and the Rhetoric of Roman Imperialism, situates the narrative of Acts within norms of representation current in the early second-century Roman empire, particularly the reign of Trajan. The book is interdisciplinary in nature, combining biblical studies with empire theory and the study of Roman art and architecture in what is fundamentally a work of comparative socio-rhetorical analysis. Especially novel is the attention the author gives to the Column of Trajan in Rome, whose carved panels depicting Trajan's success in the Dacian conquests are analyzed extensively as representative of the imperial rhetoric that dominated the context in which Acts was written and which, allegedly, shaped fundamentally the theology, aesthetics, and social aims of Acts.

The book begins with an introduction reviewing scholarship on Acts and empire and laying out Billings's case for dating Acts in the early second century. Chapter 1, “Acts and Monumental History,” lays out Billings’s methodology by presenting the Column of Trajan as a pictorial “narrative” of Trajan's Dacian Wars and Acts as a literary “monument” of the apostolic movement. Between these now comparable “texts,” Billings discovers three major stylistic commonalities—the use of a continuous narrative format, an encomiastic presentation of protagonists, and literary realism—that together facilitate the rewriting of history according to the authors’ ideologies and social ambitions.

Chapter 2, “Imperial Virtue and Provincial Representations,” surveys representations of the emperor in Roman art, architecture, and literature, demonstrating that imperial ideology was concerned with a ubiquitous display of Trajan's expansive power, which was cast as a beneficent, civilizing force delivering the provinces from barbarism. Despite the chapter's title, most of Billings's attention is given to expressions of imperial virtue in Rome itself, particularly Trajan's Column, though data from a study by Arjan Zuiderhoek—The Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire: Citizens, Elites and Benefactors in Asia Minor (Cambridge University Press, 2009)—is reproduced to argue that that provincial leaders in Trajan's day were especially keen to model themselves upon the magnanimous emperor. These observations prepare for the book's most important chapter, “Paul and the Politic of a Public Portraiture,” in which Billings discovers in Acts’ portrayal of Paul the essential ideological elements of imperial representation: Like Trajan, Paul is a civilizing benefactor of the provincial cities he visits, disbursing the benefits of “a divine ruler who exchanges gifts for praise” (122). Interestingly, the expansive nature of the early Christian mission in Acts is placed in parallel to Trajan's conquests in a shared vision of a “new global imaginary” (127), so that we may understand Acts to have been written “to forge a place for ‘the Way’ within the Roman Empire” (122).

The two remaining chapters detail the fallout of Luke's dependence upon imperial modes of representation and their oppressive values. Chapter 4, “Acts and Anti-Jewish Propaganda,” engages the debated question of the relation of Luke-Acts to Judaism. Billings follows the analyses of scholars who see Luke's construction of Christian identity as dependent upon his image of Jews, who are “stereotyped as inherently bellicose and hostile toward the expansion of any collective entity other than their own” (158). Jews in Acts who might serve as counterpoints to this tendency (such as Gamaliel in 5:33–39, Alexander in 19:33–34, and the Roman Jews in 28:21–22) are not considered, nor is Paul's own Jewish identity. Instead, Billings uses comparison with portrayals of Dacians in Trajan's Column to set Luke's anti-Judaism in parallel with anti-barbarian ideologies of Rome, including Trajan-era anti-Judaism, which Billings helpfully discusses. Billings's final chapter, “Women, Gender, and Roman Imperial Masculinity,” compares Acts’ portrayal of women and gender ideology with those of Trajan's Column. Just as women play an instrumental role in constructing male power and virtue on the column, so they do in Acts. Billings acknowledges a diversity of views on Acts’ portrayal of women, but he “puzzles over those who still insist on asserting that Act's [sic] view of women is ‘remarkable’ and ranks among the ‘more progressive’ of the author's day” (171). Nor is he persuaded by scholars such as Brittany Wilson, who argues in Unmanly Men: Reconfigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts (Oxford University Press, 2015) that Acts subverts certain Roman views of masculinity through parody and intentional deconstruction. As with the image of Paul and the negative images of Jews, so with portrayals of women and gender: Acts “measur[es] up to the standards of the day” (188). A two-page conclusion brings the argument to a close.

Billings's multi-media approach to Acts is a welcome corrective in a discipline dominated by text-focused studies of early Christianity. But the book suffers from a scarcity of exegesis of the major text it sets out to elucidate. While analysis of Trajan's Column abounds (there are twenty-one of Billings's own photographs), his exegetical engagement with Acts is shallow and often outsourced to the authorities with whom he agrees. An unfortunate result of this approach is the presence of numerous misleading statements: “Acts clearly employs the benefactor paradigm” which Billings says is central to Luke's characterization of Jesus as well as Paul (93), despite the fact that Jesus explicitly denounces the paradigm at Luke 22:25; Billings says Peter acts as “an independent broker of divine power” despite his protests to the contrary in 3:12–16 (104); and Paul's warning to centurion at 27:10 about the dangers of their coming nautical voyage makes Paul a “master of the sea” like Emperor Trajan on the Column (115), despite the fact that Paul was a prisoner of the Romans and eventually suffered shipwreck with them. In these and other instances, greater attention to the complexities of Acts and to the possibility that the text might sustain a more complicated relation to the rhetoric of empire which Billings ably describes might have resulted in different and more compelling conclusions. In view of Billings's argument that Acts is socially aspirational within the power structures of the Roman empire, the outdated dependence on Hans Conzelmann (cited throughout) and the brief dismissal of C. Kavin Rowe's rival position (see pp. 7–8) are hardly sufficient to persuade readers who might need persuading. It does not help that the manuscript contains numerous spelling and grammatical errors, inconsistent spacing or lack thereof between sentences, and several instances of unnecessary repetition. But it is, unfortunately, the lack of sufficient exegetical argument that renders this novel study of the relation of Acts to Roman imperialist ideology less than fully persuasive.