The Fall and Rise of Eutychus

The story of Eutychus in Acts 20 seems to narrate a scene of a Pauline community, meeting for a communal meal and instruction in an insula building in Alexandria Troas. Some scholars have argued, however, that this tale was borrowed by Luke and appropriated to tell the story of Paul. When read through combined theoretical lenses from Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu, the story of Eutychus provides a window not into one of Paul’s communities, but into Luke’s own spatial practice, and the habitus of community that he knew from his own late-first-century context. Luke therefore repurposed the framework of the story, but also filled the story with his own experience and expectations of space and practice in his creative reconstruction of a Pauline vignette. The tale of Eutychus provides evidence of late-first-century or early-second-century urban Christianity in Asia Minor, not of a community from the life of Paul

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