In this case, for example, some predominantly Gentile branches of the Jesus movement began to imagine more and more essential, representational, or ideal distinctions between themselves and the group that becomes, retroactively, “the Jews” as a suspicious name for what they themselves are not or with which they (self-protectively) do not want to be identified. The drama of Acts remains haunting, of course, and the eventual function of this canonized Western theologico-political history will end up having everything to do with the fact that “Christianity” emerges here through an agreement to participate in an economy of imagined identities within which “the Jewish question” under Roman imperial sovereignty was always really about someon