| Sumario: | This article reviews Jeremy L. Williams's 2024 volume *Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles*, which introduces the Analysis for Rhetorical Criminalization (ARC) as a framework to interpret the New Testament book of Acts within its Roman imperial context. Williams situates criminalization as a socio-rhetorical process that labels certain behaviors as crimes, linking this to contemporary issues of racialized criminalization and power dynamics, particularly from a Black American perspective. The work engages interdisciplinary scholarship, including Critical Race Theory (CRT), to explore how Acts reflects imperial ideologies and discourses of punishment, while also highlighting tensions in Williams’s use of respectability politics and underutilization of CRT’s counternarrative approach. The volume challenges readers to reconsider Acts’ narrative and its implications for understanding historical and modern processes of criminalization, making it a significant contribution to biblical studies and contextual biblical criticism.
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