Populating the Middle: The Social Location of the Author of Luke-Acts

Despite recent theorizing about variegated literacies in the ancient world, evidence remains scarce for authors or literary-textual communities that fall between elite contexts and basic functional literacy, understandably leading some scholars to continue to work with a binary frame, ignoring the middle ground. I suggest that we can begin to populate this middle ground by 1) arguing that recent scholarship supports Loveday Alexander’s conception of the author of Luke-Acts as a sub-elite author, placing him in this ‘middling’ territory (along with the rest of the New Testament) and 2) suggesting three other ‘middling’ literary-textual communities roughly contemporary with early Christianity. In doing so I emphasize the importance of paying attention to the reasons each community engages in literary-textual activities as they provide explanatory power for atypical phenomena and better inform our historical work. Finally, I show that one feature of interest in middling groups is their proclivity for literary innovation.