n the ancient instance, the projection of distinct, ideal types coupled wonderfully with the brutalities of effective history in the first centuries C.E., as if this violence afforded the all-important teleological supplement (or clear interpellating experience) by which to drive forward the self-protective, self-constituting self-differentiation from “the Jews.” As the repetition of self here implies, it was with historical narration, in other words, that a populist Platonism came into its own as a force in the Christian world, one so remarkably powerful as soon to attempt to render the Jews into the Christians’ own recalcitrant shadow. The fact that Rome murdered and stole Jews en masse during the sixties and early seventies—just decades before the production of Acts, perhaps—simply provoked and bolstered the investment in an imagined ideal distinction between what would soon be referred to as two “religions.”