The Theology of Luke-Acts: Jesus as Prophet

By Paul Kragt

This is a thematic and theological commentary on two books of the New Testament. It is at an intermediate level. Occasionally Greek is used but an English translation is always given.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Kragt
• Release date: Jun 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781370345229

Book preview

Preface

This book began as a commentary on Luke. But in attempting to explain what the idea of church would mean in association with the theme of Jesus as Prophet I found that referring to Luke’s other work, Acts, was both convenient and necessary. Thus this is now a theological commentary on Luke-Acts and organized via themes. It is fairly comprehensive as to content since before I finish I will in fact have something to say about quite a few of the sentences, paragraphs and pericopes to be found in Luke’s Gospel as well as some at least, of the stories or events in Acts, but this will be a thematic and theological coverage rather than that more familiar type of commentary, the comprehensively detailed and much more lengthy verse-by-verse commentary.

As well, in this short volume I will not be introducing readers to Luke. I assume that the reader already has some basic familiarity with the content of Luke and Acts and wishes to go on to discussion of doctrinal or theological meanings found by means of careful interpretation of the text. Thus for example I usually begin by assuming that the reader is already somewhat familiar with a specific miracle or parable. Then after I give my own interpretation of this story or pericope–my hope, my best expectation–would be that the reader at this very moment might want to carefully re-read that section or that pericope in a good English translation (or in the original Koine Greek) in order to re-evaluate, re-assess, check-up on whatever I might have offered as interpretation. The ultimate question for the reader must be: Are you as careful and informed reader of Luke’s Gospel able to read Luke again with this or that new meaning and/or emphasis–or not?

As to scholarly level, I would like for this volume to achieve attention appropriate to its somewhat serious academic intentions; not to be neglected because the author may lack full academic credentials, not to skimmed merely to glean a few of the book’s more obvious ideas.

Where I introduce notions which may be somewhat novel and unconventional I hope that I will also be writing at a popular, that is, at an accessible level. But my more important objective always would be–to claim that these notions which I present actually do arise from the text itself and are not my own individual spin. I wish to successfully explicate Luke's original and/or intended meanings.

I also hope that any theological ideas or opinions presented here are in fact consistent with the best or most recent Biblical scholarship, with expertise in Greek language, expertise in early theology, etc. I ask for some indulgence from the more scholarly reader who might find that I have made what they consider to be significant mistakes or omissions in linguistic or historical evaluations of the text. But as theolegoumena , as theological opinion, I make less of an apology and invite rather a rigorous assessment of any and all ideas. What I believe I am qualified to offer to the public is not scholarship as such but textual interpretation or Biblical theology.

It is common practice for individuals who write New Testament commentaries to include within their verse-by-verse exegesis an individual and ad hoc English translation based upon the original Greek text, and this is what I have done also. Whenever my careful though perhaps make-shift effort at an exact English translation goes beyond a fairly literal translation and becomes more of a paraphrase, then I will state that such is paraphrase. Else, my own explanatory comments will be enclosed in parentheses within a literalistic English translation.

Paul Kragt

Advent 2010

Seattle

Revised and enlarged 2015

minor revision 2023

Introduction

Any religious studies student or any inquisitive adult for that matter–who begins to read through the early Christian Patristic writings will likely be surprised, as I certainly was, by meeting some of the various and unusual ways in which Christian Redemption was explained during Christianity’s first few centuries. But of course we must at this point also admit that there are in fact already a multiplicity of approaches and descriptions of Christian Redemption to be found by anyone who looks carefully and systematically enough at the New Testament Scriptures themselves. The Patristic diversity forces one to re-assess and then to admit that even within the New Testament there is no one exclusive or definitive version of Christian Redemption or Salvation. Is it to be reconciliation, propitiation, renewal, health and eternal life, victory over death, ransom, sacrifice of some specific kind...?

A second surprise of a fundamental sort for anyone raised and educated within one of the Christian traditions can arise after having come to a better appreciation of what is actually included in one of the other Christian Traditions. As personal example, I myself, brought up in a Protestant tradition, was quite inclined to the Western prejudice that Eastern Christian asceticism was extreme and excessive. Living on a pillar of some kind for years at a time (and presumably being fed during this time by gifts from the local populace)—this certainly seems to exhibit a bizarre (and inappropriate) version of Christianity.

But this same extremely individualistic type of Christian Spirituality took place in the Eastern Mediterranean during the very decades in which Christianity was in transition from being an illegal religion to becoming the one and only official Roman-Greek-Imperial religion. Within such a social and psychological context, is it really so strange that quite a few Christians individually (and haphazardly) did take off for the deserts of Egypt or Syria in order to live and explore an ascetic Christian lifestyle. Christianity was still a very young religion, and its religious territories were yet unexplored… With the benefit of some personal familiarity with Eastern Christianity, along with better knowledge of the history itself, this quite strange type of spirituality makes quite good sense to me now–as being a genuine effort towards exploration of the boundaries or frontiers of genuine Christian piety.

Benedictine monasticism of a century or so later, as well as almost all later forms of monasticism in the West have been strictly communal. Western Christianity (and of course there are sensible and practical reasons for this) simply did not (and still does not) trust this same sort of individualistically-isolated (Eastern) spirituality even if historically this was the first mode in which significant numbers of people set out to practice a monastic Christianity.

Thus, having myself arrived at what I believe to be a better appreciation of this same Eastern tradition and its more individualistic spirituality, I now also find it quite ironic that the West should in the present day, set forward and unchallenged, its claims to individualism. Even if the West has in fact encouraged a political individualism, because of my familiarity with this Eastern Christian tradition, I cannot go along with simplistic claims made about Western religious individualism. And this was a striking realization for me just because the standard assumption of course is that the West values individuality while the East tends to place much less value upon individuality.

An analogous skepticism has infected my understanding of another favorite Western term–Democracy. Rhetorically I might ask myself; if the West didn’t invent the individual, perhaps the West didn’t invert Democracy either.

I note for example, that anthropologists describe societies which have a fundamentally egalitarian approach to social organization, meaning that explicit authority is not a primary need when setting up the social arrangements of such a society. In some groups for example the tribal chief can only lead by actually beginning to do the work himself and hoping that others will follow his example; his authority as chief is not an authority which allows him simply to issue commands to others. Thus, I myself now believe that it is philosophically defensible to say that both authority and the democratic impulse are perennial and universal. This means that the West did not invent democracy just as the West certainly, did not somehow discover authority as socio-political reality.

But what does all of this have to do with Luke’s Gospel? Well, I have arrived at the pragmatic opinion that the best way in which to approach the actual reading of Luke’s Gospel (whether the reader is in fact Western or Eastern) would be for the potential reader to bring to it a sensibility which is as broadly and fundamentally democratic as possible. Although Luke’s theology ought to be very approachable and easily understandable just because we (as Western readers especially) are so very comfortable and conversant with democratic ideals, surprisingly, ironically this is not so.

In my own reading of Luke’s Gospel I have been surprised to find unusual, striking, and unexpected themes and meanings. I am sure that this same experience of surprise does occur–will occur as well for any reader who with intensity and care takes the time to study almost any portion whatsoever of Scripture, and this just because Scripture is classic, it is grand and many-dimensioned. But at the present moment what surprises and disappoints me is that certain themes or ideas from Luke which now seem to me to be fundamental, obvious, or significant, remain minimally noticed by others. By means of this book I would like for some of these unusual or surprising theological themes and motifs from Luke’s Gospel to become more widely assessed and evaluated, more widely appreciated.

To this point in my introduction I have been developing an appeal; a positive appeal. The ideal reader will be that reader lively enough to step out of his/her familiar and conventional box and to allow for the possibility at least of a life-changing and fundamental re-orientation of perspective of the kind that I myself have experienced in relation to the two topics mentioned above: the varied possible meanings of Christian redemption, and the individualistic Eastern spirituality which has implications for how I now understand democracy. I also know that listening outside of the box is difficult. So in addition to a positive appeal I include at this point a sort of hermeneutical warning about what I will call synoptic conflation.

According to my own ad hoc terminology synoptic conflation is that somewhat natural but always more or less harmful and subversive psychological tendency –that when reading one of the synoptics, the NT interpreter will read into this gospel at hand–meanings taken from the other gospels; foreign meanings. Upon initial consideration and to many readers a tendency such as this might even seem to be something which is largely harmless. Perhaps one or two readers will even suggest: The more meanings the better! If the other gospels might add something of meaning to our attempts to explain the text of this one gospel at hand, why not include those other meanings. But such a simplistic attitude would seem to me to be in serious denial regarding the levels and dimensions (of a metaphorical, philosophical, or political sort) which are necessarily involved in any hermeneutical activity. In religious matters especially should we not be most careful not to deny that we do in point of fact usually arrive upon any particular interpretative consideration with strong pre-formed dispositions; with very strong individual religious prejudices. Religious exegetes will almost always arrive at consideration of any given text of scripture with a large number of very definite pre-judgements, beliefs, and opinions. And my first point here is that unless this interpreter can keep those preferences and pre-judgements in the background and effectively disengaged, this same interpreter will quite likely never be able to see anything new in a given text–beyond those things which they (of course) already have come to know or recognize as being present.

At least prior to the days of political-correctness in academia, the literary interpreter, the interpreter of fiction, would have been expected to do their job, to present their interpretive results, without inclusion/display of overt political bias. Such a literary interpreter who then talks too much about politics demonstrates by such bias that he/she is probably not very capable as literary-interpreter. But for the religious exegete, this practical demand that the interpreter be able to remain politically non-partisan is even more difficult to attain. The NT interpreter without political, that is, without churchly affiliation, would be the anomaly. Adherence to a specific tradition, loyalty to a certain set of beliefs, would seem both normal and necessary. The NT interpreter who is without doctrinal allegiance to a fairly specific tradition might appear to others as someone who is shifty, solitary, or idiosyncratic, and thus less deserving of the reader’s trust.

But while the above may be true, in my opinion it does not change the demands of the situation: that the interpreter as attentive reader must be able to put all inherent predisposition to one side while reading, else they cannot see their text with fresh perspective. And the fact that there are three synoptics in the New Testament each purportedly looking at the same collection of real events–this can only add to the difficulty placed upon this reader.

Synoptic conflation would be the notion that with the synoptic Gospels especially, because there is significant overlap in subject matter, the interpreter must make greater efforts, must immediately take maximal care and exert significant psychological effort so as to read the text at hand without importing meanings from those other two or three Gospels.

It seems to me that each of the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a different Biblical theology. This Biblical theology can be characterized as being a matter of themes and as such quite similar perhaps, to the way in which a work of fiction might be explicated by a literary critic or interpreter (or any ordinary reader of that work of fiction) in terms of fictional themes. The fiction writer has complete control over his/her choice of words, descriptions, etc., and in any proper literary appreciation or interpretive evaluation, each and every word may/should count in our attempts to assess intended or actual literary effects. An interpretation which will pass over or leave out (or minimize) some of the written material which is present within a text must by that very fact be a less successful interpretation than another interpretation which is true to all (or at least more) of the primary text. This basic principle must operate also I would insist, in any preliminary interpretation of the synoptic Gospels, even if these synoptic authors present a real and historical subject rather than an essentially fictional subject.

Each of the synoptic writers build their Gospel account out of relatively short pericopes, each pericope being an event, an action, a saying directly associated with Jesus. The interests and theological themes of the writers will be observable in what they choose to include, how they arrange these pieces, and sometimes in the details and phrasing of each pericope rather than by way of explicit theological statement: My second theological theme is...

So even where all three synoptic writers have included the same objective or factual content as, for example, Jesus' presentation of the illustration/image of a sower of seed, each of the Gospel compilers will also likely wish to shape and present this common content in a different manner. Each author, we may presume, has already digested the meaning of this image to some degree, and each will arrange it in relation to other content and other of their own preferred meanings so that it will contribute towards the thematic perspective of that same author-compiler. The synoptic Gospels are not just collections; they obviously each present a singular and unified perspective, which to the degree that we can explicate this would be the Biblical theology of that author, the themes most prominent within that same Gospel.

I expect that someone might at this point wish to make an attempt at recovering a strictly original meaning for the image of the sower and the seed—presumably obtaining then not merely Jesus’ exact words but Jesus’ own thought, his actual psychological interest or interests in offering this one image. But then (we ask rhetorically) must Jesus’ intentions be so simple and simplistic as ours by default perhaps most often are? Might not Jesus have intended what the three synoptics writers each picked up upon–and even more! Did the seed image mean only one thing to Jesus?

The modern-day interpreter’s best mode of access it would seem must (ordinarily) be to attempt to grasp, to understand first, the theological interpretations of each of the synoptic writers relating to such an image rather than to hope to arrive somehow beyond those synoptic presentations at a primal or original significance. Those writers were certainly closer than we are to the original reality, they have provided us with a fairly extensive textual record and literary narrative describing Jesus as verbally and literally presenting this image to his contemporary audience, and their written accounts (and included theological themes) have also been validated by inclusion within Christian Scripture. Their efforts at this level deserve our respect at least, even if their multiplicity contributes to an interpreter’s difficulties.

But beyond this, just as it seem to me to be futile and largely pointless to attempt to develop a single aggregate narrative from all three (or four) of the Gospels—(Does, for example Luke's account of the one blind beggar occur before, after, or can it be taken to be the same as Matthew's account of the two blind beggars, etc.)—so it also seems to me to be pointless as well as in fact futile on the level of theological themes to wish to directly combine the theologies of these three authors.

Matthew describes Jesus as insisting that the twelve meet him in Galilee after the Resurrection, Mark shows each of the twelve seriously failing to comprehend the need for Jesus to die, and Luke describes the Risen Jesus (on a journey to the nearby town of Emmaus) expending a great deal of time and effort explaining to two disciples who are not even from among the twelve exactly how scripture had recently been fulfilled through his (Jesus’) life, passion, and death. These interests seem to me to be obviously quite disparate, and for most practical purposes irreconcilable also within one larger theme or emphasis—at least at this level of Biblical theology.

So in order to be fair to each of these authors, I would insist that they must be read individually, must be read