In order to derive maximum insight from the method described in chapter 1, each of the analyses above has approached its particular story in a deliberately schematising fashion, breaking the text down into several different levels of style (e.g., transitivity and intertextuality) and context (e.g., co-text and culture). In chapter 4, however, my treatments of co-text, implied situation, and context of culture began to pull together the main discoveries from the various levels of analysis and lay out the contours of an interpretative synthesis. My aim here is to finish what I began to do there.

In the interest of producing a synthesis, the relationship between my genre-critical inquiry into the Acts 16 narrative's silence about the fate of the slave-girl and my prior sketch of the four stories' implied situation has special importance. More specifically, by demonstrating how that particular instance of silence helps to foreground an image of Paul as an ideal Jew who embodies the antithesis of paganism and nobly endures the Judeophobic machinations of greedy charlatans and gullible magistrates, my cultural analysis of Acts 16.16–18 and its immediate co-text confirms a central thesis in my prior reconstruction of the exorcism stories' context of situation: namely, as the implied audience of these episodes needed reassurance that both Paul and the Jesus he preached were loyal to Jewish ancestral custom and legitimate heirs to the heritage of Israel, that audience itself must have been either partly Jewish, or partly composed of the sorts of Gentiles represented by Lydia in Acts 16 (i.e., those who to one degree or another had sympathised with Judaism before joining the Christ cult), or constituted chiefly by a combination of those two socioreligious types.