A novel for gentiles.
Harold W. Attridge:
The Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament Yale Divinity School
What do we know if anything about Luke?
Traditions report that Luke was a companion of Paul, a physician andtherefore someone learned in Hellenistic literary and scientific culture. Allof those are secondary traditions and most scholars view them as somewhatunreliable. What we can infer from the evidence of the Book of Acts and thethird gospel is that the author was someone who was steeped in scripture, inthe Septuagint, and who was aware of Hellenistic literary patterns,historiographical and novelistic. And these kinds of patterns certainly havean impact on his literary products.
What did Luke write?
Luke wrote two works, the third gospel, an account of the life andteachings of Jesus, and the Book of Acts, which is an account of the growth andexpansion of Christianity after the death of Jesus down through close to theend of the ministry of Paul.
What's the picture of Jesus that emerges from Luke's writing?
In Luke, Jesus emerges primarily as a teacher, a teacher of ethicalwisdom, someone who's confident and serene in that ethical teaching. Someonewho is very much interested in inculcating the virtues of compassion andforgiveness among his followers.
What do we know about the context in which Luke was writing?
Luke was probably writing in the latter decades of the first century,probably in a thoroughly Hellenistic environment. Scholars speculate onwhether the gospel was written in Antioch, which would have been a significantHellenistic city, or in Asia Minor, in places like Ephesus or Smyrna. Ineither case, Luke would have been in touch with, and very heavily in dialoguewith, Hellenistic culture broadly conceived.
What would have been the great concerns of the other Christian churches thathe might have been addressing?
One of the major concerns that the composite work of Luke and Actsaddresses is whether Christians can be good citizens of the Roman Empire.After all, their founder was executed as a political criminal, and they werebeing associated with the destruction of Jerusalem, and some people would havethought of them as incendiaries, as revolutionaries. And Luke in his portraitwants to show that Jesus himself taught an ethic that was entirely compatiblewith good citizenship of the empire. And that despite the fact that one of theheroes of the Book of Acts was himself executed, namely Paul, although that wasa serious mistake and had nothing to do with the political program, it wasn'tin any way dangerous....
Holland Lee Hendrix:
President of the Faculty Union Theological Seminary
LUKE/ACTS - AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ROMANCE
Luke/Acts is a very interesting example of evolved early Christianliterature because the author now is undertaking this work... commissioned by abenefactor. And he goes about it very, very methodically as a good Romanauthor would. He sets the stage historically as you would expect in some kindof sort of almost historical novel, and then he tells a perfectly wonderfulstory. In fact, it's such a good story that many scholars have compared it tothe novelistic literature of time, and have interpreted Luke/Acts as really anearly Christian romance, with all the ingredients of romance, down toshipwrecks and exotic animals and exotic vegetation, cannibalistic natives -all kinds of embellishments that one finds in the romance literature of thetime. But it's done in a very historically disciplined way, or at leastone that seems to be historically disciplined, by a very careful author whoidentifies himself as an artist under the economic sphere of a particularbenefactor. So Luke/Acts does represent a very interesting stage in theevolution of early Christian literature. It's now become thoroughlyRomanized.
JESUS IN LUKE
The Jesus of Luke is an enormously powerful figure. I mean he comes onthe scene as a prophet straight out of the Hebrew Bible. At his firstappearance in his hometown synagogue he quotes the prophet Isaiah and it's thepassage that talks about freeing those who are oppressed and letting those whoare blind see. Jesus is a powerful figure and comes across as a liberator, agreat miracle worker. But also, and this is interesting in view of theauthorship of Luke, also as the quintessential benefactor. He is the one whodispenses the great gifts of God and God is viewed again as a great benefactorfigure in Luke/Acts. So Jesus is probably at his most powerful in the gospelof Luke, from a variety of perspectives, as prophet, as healer, as savior, asbenefactor.
Helmut Koester:
John H. Morison Professor of New Testament Studies and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History Harvard Divinity School
JESUS IN LUKE -- THE DIVINE MAN
Luke portrays Jesus in the gospel in essentially according to the imageof the divine man. The person in whom divine powers are visible and areexercised, both in his teaching and in his miracle doing. The image of thedivine man also belongs in Jesus' travel narrative. The gospel of Luke is theonly one that has a long travel narrative of Jesus.... The travel motif hasbeen a very important motif in antiquity to describe the life of great divinemen, miracle workers, teachers....
The divine man motif is important even through Jesus' suffering and death,because Jesus dies the perfect martyr's death, an exemplary death. There is nocrying, "my God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?" But Jesus dies commendinghis spirit into the hands of the father, as a pious martyr really should do ina suffering death. So the image of Jesus is one that is fully developed out ofthe image of the divine human being....
L. Michael White:
Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin
LUKE'S AUDIENCE
In contrast to either Mark or Matthew, Luke's gospel is clearly written morefor a gentile audience. Luke is traditionally thought of as one of Paul'straveling companions and it's certainly the case that the author of Luke wasfrom those Greek cities in which Paul had worked. Luke's gospel is a productof a kind of Pauline Christianity. And so it tells the story in some slightlydifferent ways than do the other gospels. It has different interests. It hasdifferent thematic concerns. It probably also has a different political selfconsciousness because it's writing predominantly for gentiles in the Greekcities of Asia Minor or Greece itself.
Luke's audience seems to be a much more cultured literary kind of audience.Luke's Greek is the highest quality in style of anything in the new testament.It reads more like a novel in the Greek tradition, rather than Mark's gospel,which has a kind of crude quality at times to the Greek grammar. So anyone onthe street of a Greek city picking up Luke's gospel would have felt at homewith it if they were able to read good Greek....Tradition holds that Luke wasactually a traveling companion of Paul. He's often called Luke the physicianwhich means he's portrayed as a kind of educated person from the Greco-Romanworld....
Now the concerns of Luke's gospel are a little different, therefore; thereare political as well as social concerns that we see in the way the story istold precisely because it's writing for this much more cultured kind ofaudience.
Luke's audience seems to be predominantly gentile.... when they talkabout the story of Jesus there's more of an emphasis on the political situationof Jesus today. Jesus is less of a rabble rouser, and so is Paul, for thatmatter, in these stories. And this suggests something about the situation ofthe audience, that they too are concerned about the way that they will beperceived, the way that the church will be perceived by the Roman authorities.It's sometimes suggested that Luke's gospel should be seen as a kind of anapologetic for the beginnings of the Christian movement, trying to make itsplace in the Roman world, to say, "we're okay, don't worry about us, we arejust like the rest of you: we keep the peace, we're law abiding citizens, wehave high moral values, we're good Romans too." ...
LUKE/ACTS -- THE FIRST CHRISTIAN HISTORY
It's also important to recognize that Luke's gospel has a companion volume.Luke is by the same author as the Book of Acts in the New Testament, the bookthat tells the story of the beginnings of the Christian movement and downthrough the time of Paul's career. And it's very clear from the way the twobooks open up, and the prologue to each one, that we're working with the sameauthor and that the narrative continues from one to the next. So the author ofLuke/Acts, and that's what we call them now, that's a two-volume work, theauthor of Luke/Acts is telling us a bigger story, a grander story, a story thatstarts with Jesus and is concerned with how his life played out , but then seesthe story continuing with the founding of the church and with its spread andwith the eventual travels of Paul that take him to Rome itself. It's a storywith a much greater political self consciousness. It's a story told from theplateau of history. Indeed Luke/Acts is the first attempt to write a historyof the Christian movement from the inside.
JESUS IN LUKE -- TEACHER, MARTYR
Jesus in Luke's gospel comes across differently, he's much more like aphilosophic teacher, kind of like Socrates: he's reasoned, he's dispassionate,he's a critic sometimes of society but he's certainly concerned about the wayhis teachings bear on society. And in the end he dies very much like Socrates.The death of Jesus in Luke's gospel is more like a martyr's death, it's muchcalmer, he goes inexorably to the cross, knowing that it is what must happen.Pilate isn't at fault at all. Pilate tries to get rid of the case by sendingJesus away to Herod.... Pilate isn't the enemy of Jesus, he isn't the bad guy.And once again this may reflect the kind of political concerns of Luke'sgospel. Jesus also isn't a source of concern because he's not a kind of rebelfigure now, rather he's a teacher, a philosopher, a social critic, a socialreformer. He's a good member of the Greco-Roman world.
LUKE'S ANTAGONISM TO JUDAISM
Now ...the counterpart to the realization that Luke is telling the story for aGreco-Roman audience with a kind of political agenda is what happens to Luke'streatment of the Jewish tradition. Luke is much more antagonistic towardJudaism. And so the gospel of Luke and its companion volume, Acts, are alsoreflecting the development of the Christian movement more away from the Jewishroots and in fact ...developing more toward the Roman political and socialarena. This political self consciousness and ethnic self consciousness that'sbeing reflected by Luke/Acts is beginning to say that we, the Christians, theones who are telling this story, are no longer in quite the same way just Jews.And so there's a growing antipathy toward at least certain elements withintheJewish tradition and within Jewish society.
LUKE'S PRODIGAL SON
One of the places we see this most clearly is in the way that Luke tells theparable of the prodigal son. It's a very familiar story. And it's a storyabout repentance. The younger of two brothers who runs away, squanders hisinheritance living a vile life and only after he goes into the depths ofdepression because he has no money and doesn't know where he's going to live,he decides to go home and be just a slave in his father's house. But when hereturns, his father welcomes him with open arms and says, "Let's have a greatbanquet to welcome you back." Now the older brother who had stayed at home allthis time becomes jealous because he had been faithful to his father's wishesand desires. He had been doing what his father wanted all along. It's theyounger brother who had squandered everything and gone against his father'swishes. This story is really about Luke's perception of the relation betweengentiles and Jews in the household of God. It is Luke's description of thechurch as being willing to accept both the older brother, the faithful brother,the Jews, alongside of the prodigal son, the gentiles, who had lived a terriblelife away from the father for so long but now in the church are being welcomedback with open arms. Luke's vision is of a unified humanity in the church thatbrings all of God's children back together.
Read more on the Gospel of Luke in this essay by Marilyn Mellowes.
