Luke’s history is anecdotal and is carried along by reference to just a handful of people and what they said and did. With his subject now the history of the church’s early expansion, Luke turns for an exemplar to Philip. One of the Seven and influenced no doubt by Stephen, Philip took the church two important steps forward. First, he preached to the Samaritans. O. Cullmann attaches great importance to this episode as marking “the actual beginnings of the Christian mission” to a non-Jewish community (pp. 185–94; but cf. Luke 9:52ff.; 10:30ff.; 17:16; John 4:5–42). Second, he baptized a Gentile. By the nature of the case, this made little impact on the church, but it illustrated Luke’s theme, and the more so since in the Ethiopian the gospel reached “the ends of the earth” (1:8; cf. Irenae…