Le scene di tumulto negli Atti degli apostoli. Comparazioni euristiche con opere coeve

In the book of Acts of the Apostles, the crowd, understood as a potentially uproarious gathering of people, plays a peculiar narrative role, especially in some episodes, which present its involvement in riots (θόρυβος στάσισ, σύγχθσις, τάραχος). In these mob scenes – a subcategory of crowd scenes, to classify the scenes of crowd stirring that could become real riots – one notes the consistent precision in the description of urban contexts and the frequent use of technical-legal language. R.I. Pervo considered the mob scenes to be one of the signs of the novelistic genre of Acts. This paper would like to challenge this position. A preliminary study of these scenes in the works of some contemporary authors (in primis Cha- riton and Philo) is proposed; their structure, content and function are considered in order to ob- tain keys for evaluating the form of the mob scenes, the aim pursued by the author, through their inclusion, and the historical reliability of their content. In conclusion, the paper would like to demonstrate that the literary form of these scenes is not novelistic, but recalls historiographic forms (in particular apologetic historiography, which wants also to establish the identity of a group), and the vividness of the scenes derives from the use of the rhetorical figure of ἐνάργεια.