In Identity, Memory and Narrative in Early Christianity, Coleman Baker argues that “the narrative of Acts attempts the recategorization of Judean and non-Judean Christ followers … into a common ingroup by presenting Peter and Paul as prototypical of a common superordinate Christian identity in the midst of diversity and conflict within the Christ movement in the last decade of the first century CE” (p. xv). This recategorization is intended to establish the boundaries by which it can be seen who, from the Judean and Greco-Roman cultural groupings, is included in the Christian community and who is excluded from it. Drawing on narrative and reader-response approaches— especially Paul Ricoeur’s “three-fold process of narrative interaction” (p. 71)—Baker moves away from the quest for the “historical” Peter and Paul, past the “literary” Peter and Paul, and on to what Baker calls “an identity-forming Peter and Paul” (p. xvi). Baker proposes that such an approach builds on the vital but essentially incomplete social-scientific and literary approaches. The aim is to establish “a model for reading biblical texts as identity-forming documents within their historical and cultural context” (p xvii). In this work, Baker uses Acts as the test case for his theory. In chapter one Baker argues for his methodology, which he names the narrative-identity model. This is a fusion of the Social Identity Approach and Narrative Theory. Baker argues that this is “a helpful model for understanding the identity-forming interaction between text and audience” (p. 1). The name is not new, having been used by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative. Ricoeur, however, uses it primarily in connection with the reader’s interaction with the text, whereas Baker argues for the inclusion of social identity and memory. Much of this chapter is taken up with literature reviews of the Social Identity Approach and Narrative Theory. These are two large and diverse fields, and Baker does an admirable job of summing up the key works in each field, what he regards as deficient in each field, and how his fusion of the two resolves those deficiencies. Thus social identity and social memory are vital for understanding how prototypical figures are used by ingroup members to “re-interpret the past, present, and future of the group to make its identity more compatible with new situations and future directions” (p. 16). Narrative theory is needed, however, to understand how the interaction between text and reader creates identity formation, both personal and communal. Baker thus agrees with Ricoeur that “identity is formed in the interaction between text and audience” (p. 23). Having established the importance of Social Identity and Narrative Theory, Baker introduces the Narrative Identity model, which he argues “is chiefly interested in the way that identity is shaped through the interaction between the narrative and the audience” (p. 30). By this Baker means Peter Rabinowitz’s “contextualized ‘implied reader’” (p. 39) 1 of the text, so chapter two proceeds to identify both the historical context and the narrative world of Luke and Acts. Baker argues that “Luke” was “a Judean Christ-follower … from Western Asia Minor who had received a relatively high level of Hellenistic education” (p. 35), who did not personally know any of the main characters in his works (Jesus, Peter, Paul), but who, for community identity-forming purposes, writes as though he were present for at least some of the events he records. The authorial audience was a mix of Judean and non-Judean Christians in the very late first century CE, who had “varying opinions of Paul and