When you watch a movie you get the film first, and then later you might go and look up the special features to get a sense of what the director and actors were thinking. That works fine because movies are made for us and the people who make our cultural texts can assume that we get them and they get us. Encountering the Bible is a little different though, because it was written to a culture 2,000 years and half a world removed from modern-day Western readers.

With that in mind, I'm going to take a couple of episodes to set the context of the book of Acts before we get going on the text itself. I think it's going to make a lot more sense to all of us if we know more about Luke's world and the culture he was writing to.

I think you'll learn stuff in this episode and feel like you've got a better feel for the history of the world and Jewish people leading up to the time of Jesus.