I, Lukas, Wrote the Book

By Donald R. Fletcher

What was it like, in the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, to sit down to write a gospel, specifically, the Gospel According to Luke? Extensive scholarship has recently been focusing on Luke/Acts, the two-volume New Testament writing. This book uses such scholarship, but in an imaginative way. It sets out to follow Lukas, the author, through the whole process of writing his first part, the gospel. We are given, paragraph by paragraph, the complete gospel text in a vigorous translation, but interspersed with Lukas own human contacts and vivid experiences as he composes it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 27, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469104331

Donald R. Fletcher

Donald R. Fletcher grew up in pre-WWII Korea, earned degrees in English and theology at Princeton, and has lived and worked in Chile, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as the southwest, south and east of the U.S.. He has taught at high school, college and university levels and served extensively in Presbyterian and ecumenical churches. Always eager to learn as well as teach, he has spent a lifetime with the Biblical writings and particularly the first three Gospels.

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Copyright © 2003 by Donald R. Fletcher.

Library of Congress Number:    2003091124

ISBN:    Hardcover    1-4010-9784-7

Softcover    1-4010-9783-9

ISBN:   ebook   978-1-4691-0433-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Note to the Reader

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Dedication

To Martha,

loving companion in all the turnings

of our road.

Note to the Reader

What was it like, in the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, to sit down to write a gospel, the story of Jesus, called Christ? And how might it have been, if it was the Gospel According to Luke, the most carefully crafted of them all?

This present book is not a novel based freely on some biblical events, nor is it a scholarly commentary on Luke’s Gospel. It is something of both. It offers to put us inside Lukas, a real, living person, sharing his struggles and perplexities as he produces his orderly account of what he believes God has done in Jesus Christ. We follow through the Gospel paragraph by paragraph, as it may have been when Lukas was writing it. We are with him in his world and time, listening to his thoughts as he prepares and writes, and as he encounters the people around him.

This book is for serious readers and admirers of the New Testament message everywhere. It may help you to understand some of Luke’s more difficult passages. It should enhance for you the humanity of this noble, fallible, first-century fellow servant of Jesus Christ.

Luke’s creation has fascinated me as I have been absorbed by the Synoptic Gospels, studying them and teaching them over many years. As a student of literature I take delight, and believe you will also, in what this spiritual brother accomplished in his time, prompted by the Spirit. Excellent scholars have written voluminously on Luke-Acts, currently one of the liveliest areas of biblical study, and I am indebted to many of them, but most particularly to Joseph Fitzmyer. Some finely imaginative fiction has also focused on these events of history. I do not attempt to duplicate either sort of achievement, but to explore imaginatively the very act of creating the monumental Gospel According to Luke.

To make the reading easier to follow, what Lukas writes is printed in italics, to distinguish it from what he is thinking and remembering. I have put in square brackets, after each passage in his writing, the conventional chapter and verse numbers for your convenience in referring to them, as likewise the numbers for passages quoted from the Hebrew Scriptures. For the text of the Gospel I have generally used the New Revised Standard Version, but have followed in places Fitzmyer’s translation (in The Anchor Bible Commentary) both of these used by permission, and have occasionally proposed a personal reading.

I wish you as much satisfaction in reading Lukas as I have had in writing it.

Donald R. Fletcher

Rossmoor, November 2002

I

ATHENS

I must have been staring a long time into the coals in the bronze brazier tonight. The murmured talk around me ebbed and went silent. Different ones yawned or stretched, said something and left. The quick blue flames, sometimes yellow-fringed, licked with light the burnished form of Zeus in bas-relief on the brazier rim, Zeus the bull carrying off Europa.

Are you going to bed? Trophimus asked. His voice came from far away.

Not yet. There’s something I have to think about.

Finally the courtyard was empty, washed with white moonlight— benches, pillars, the brazier itself, its coals veiled with ash, seen in a perspective of white and dark, line and shadow. I picked up my thick new cloak, which I bought today in the agora, wrapped myself against the chill and came away, climbing here toward the Propylaia of the Acropolis.

Zeus the bull carrying away Europa. I am here, really here, in Athens. Hellas, Greece, I was only a boy in the gymnasium in Antioch of Syria when your strong, harmonious wisdom carried me away. Eagerly I wore the short white tunic, trained eagerly for the games, rubbing my limbs with olive oil until they gleamed like bronze. And eagerly I read the fine, long speeches, the sonorous soliloquies.

What are those good for, son? Father used to ask. Are they better than Moses and the prophets?

I learned by heart the philosophy of the calm, clear-minded Stoics, who could stand serene in the welter of their times, seeing beyond the idle gods a purpose: all-fulfilling Wisdom. Chrysippus and Cleanthes, your exalted Logos, controlling all things, turning into good all ills in life—it was like a wine to my young mind. I drank it thirstily; it was the first that I had proved quite on my own. But as I drank I mixed and mingled it with what I heard in the synagogue with my father.

You see, we weren’t Jews; but he had embraced belief in the one mysterious Deity, Yahweh, God of the mountain, cloud and fire, who gives his people a covenant and Torah, law to live by.

This, my father said, is an end to wanderings, a certain way.

I don’t remember his saying it the first time—I was too small—but he would repeat it on occasion. He himself had been a desert man, a son of nomads who settled at Palmyra. Dimly out of my earliest childhood I can see the fortress up on the mountain there, hulking dark against the flames of a sunset sky. I can see the caravans of camels drinking noisily at their troughs, splashing and dripping water that to me was shoulder-deep. What was I then, two or three?

Then we moved to Antioch and had a shop selling almonds, raisins, and the flat, warm, tawny barley cakes. Just at dusk the wispy fragrance from my mother’s oven would bring them clustering around, laborers, sailors, stevedores, women hurrying home and needing something for their families. It was a good life; and the synagogue became a center for us.

While he lived Father kept the customs. On Sabbath eves he shuttered up the shop. His customers knew they had to come before sundown, before the Sabbath lamp was lit, the food laid out, the small, low-timbered room a cove of peace washed distantly by street noise as Father spoke the blessing, Blessed art thou who givest bread. My mother and my sisters, their Sabbath dress glimmering in the lamplight, part of the sweet calm, would respond, and so would I. It was a good life.

With Rabbi Jochanan I sat each day and learned to read the scrolls, to pore over the mystic passages—in Greek, of course, but calling up a far, mysterious past into which we were engrafted to become children of the covenant. But I aspired more to be a son of the prophets. Isaiah with his eagle flights; Amos, ruggedly imagistic; Hosea yearning after the faithless wife—they moved heart and imagination both to soar.

It’s strange and silent here, a little eerie, coming up the steps of the Propylaia in the moonlight—no festival crowd, no music, no one in sight at all. I almost hesitate to go on. I can see how the Athenians feel about this place. It would be easy to sense a Presence here—Athena Nike, goddess victorious and supreme.

But down below there, while I was staring into the coals, I was back in the crowded streets of my old home, Antioch of Syria, jostling my way almost two score years ago through the joyous welter of the place: smoky, silver-beaded bedouins; a corpulent merchant ushering along some sun-and-wind-burned camel drivers, men whose caravan, a thread of brown, had crossed the vastness of the Scythian steppes, at last to disgorge here a gorgeous, fragrant flood of silks and sandalwood, incense and jade. I was seeing and hearing and smelling it all again.

What a place it was to grow up in! What exhilaration, every day when school was out to run to the riverfront and watch the ships come up the brown Orontes, sails bellying, oars thudding into place with shouts in foreign tongues and creaking gear, and foreign faces peering overside when they finally were berthed! I loved to see the stout hawsers snubbed, the gangways set; and then to see baskets and bales, clay amphorae, goatskins of wine, even cages of live birds, bright-plumaged, raucous, rising from the holds on sweating shoulders that gleamed, while bare feet padded down the swaying plank, pausing where the fox-eyed clerk kept his tally, quick to spot an oozing jar or ruptured bale. I reveled when the rich olive oil leaked out, or choice stuff from Arabia down the coast, myrrh and cinnamon. They made a heady mix with hemp and tar and sweat and smoke and salt of two weeks at sea, and the refuse floating underneath the stern.

Look! There it is, coming into view: the Parthenon. There can’t be anything of human invention more superb. Pericles, your ancient, magnificent spirit welcomes me here. The long lines of graceful columns, more graceful in this still moonlight, breathe serenity. High up, triangular, the eastern gable floats on a milky sky, its pediment framed in shadow. There is Athena armed, wisdom sprung from the head of Zeus Olympios attended by Hephaestus with his axe. The forms stand out pale, half seen, half sunk in darkness—like the myth, crude and quaint; but Phidias’ rendering is masterful even after these centuries.

Wisdom. We preach only Christ, you used to say, Paulus, Christ crucified, foolishness to Greeks who seek after wisdom. True; but a holy wisdom, Hagia Sophia, sprung from the mind of God; what would you say of such a divine Logos? This Christ, Lord, Revealer—Paulus, you said you wouldn’t try to know him after the flesh. It was the risen Christ whose splendor seized and threw you in the dusty road and spoke to you out of the blinding light, I am Yeshua, Jesus, whom you persecute. They took your shaking hand and led you into Damascus.

Here in the white, chill moonlight, under the marble gaze of Zeus whom the Stoics call All-Father, I have to ask the questions that you left unasked, Paulus, old Jewish friend. Do you know that Onesimus came today bringing a message from one Theophilus, official of the very household of Caesar in Rome? Such a man knows of Markus’ sparse account of Jesus and has received, furthermore, a writing containing in passable Greek many sayings of the Lord. He sends them both on to me—a copy of Markus’ roll and a copy of these collected sayings of Jesus—and with them his modest request that I verify, collect and set down a full account. He says he has known from Onesimus and others my reputation for learning and eloquence!

The holy Spirit constrains me, Paulus, the Spirit who broods over God’s people Israel in these times, renewing the covenant, although by fire. I have also seen other writings of this and that, remembrances of what was said and done in the Lord’s days. I’ll bring together what I can. I will verify for Theophilus; I will weave a clear, harmonious account, so that he may see how God in these last times has visited his people. The prophetic word comes to fulfillment; God’s salvation breaks through to the pagan world. Jesus is made both Lord and Messiah, Christ.

You spirits of Socrates, Zeno, and all you others, here among the moon-blanched porticoes of splendid Athenian wisdom, I declare to you: The veil is thrust aside. Into the mass of simple life in an obscure habitat the Mystery erupts; a man is there. For as by a man came death, by a man has come the resurrection of the dead. Paulus, you used to put it so. I will set out to gather the materials. I’ll go to Judea and to the Galilee to see what I can find; and I’ll set it down in order, from beginning to consummation.

II

CAESAREA

How still the harbor is, each ripple a sliver of sky burning gold and red! A trireme, late, becalmed, is moving black and huge out of the glowing west around the breakwater’s end and through the narrow gap, wide sail hung limp. I can hear the drum rhythm and the thump and splash of oars distinctly, here on this rooftop. It mixes in with street-cries, barking dogs, and our neighbor’s gaggle of geese. Old Simon is moving around down there among his stinking vats in the narrow court below. I’m grateful for his kindness; but being lodged in a tanner’s house has some drawbacks. That is why I came up to his roof this evening for some air—and now the sunset. Off there the glowing harbor stirs in the wake of that almost benighted ship. The ship heaves to; I hear the oars thudding inboard and the anchors being shouted down. Now a slow, grand sweep as the trireme turns to face the current. There is a tender being rowed out to meet it, the reddish light glinting on Roman arms and insignia. Rome is everywhere. The Roman eagle is probably welcoming fresh reserves from Pontus, Cyrene, even from Gaul, to keep order up in turbulent Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often would I have gathered your children!

I have read such a saying of Jesus. Who could gather them now, with the Temple utterly destroyed? I saw that pathway up which they say that Jesus rode while the people shouted, Peace and glory! and spread their cloaks. Some of it has been cleared, but much is still choked with rubble.

The years are passing. There are very few witnesses left who can say, These eyes once saw him; these ears heard the words he spoke. Paulus, noble, beloved fanatic, the thirsty dust drank your blood outside Rome, what blood there was when your worn-out body crumpled there. That also now seems a long time ago. The fellowship of believers in Jerusalem that was then the center for the churches has mostly been scattered. I didn’t find much there.

It seems that Theophilus has laid on me a heavier task than I thought. But I will verify, confirm, and set down the acts of God in Jesus, Prophet, Messiah—the signs and wonders that attended his life, how God raised him from death and gave the Spirit, who moves here among his witnesses until the time when he returns.

Tomorrow I begin my ascent to the Galilee. Paulus, looking out over the port tonight I am remembering how Aristarchus and I boarded ship with you here, we two attending on you when you went in chains to Rome. May the angel of God who stood by you then stand by me too!

III

GALILEE

This was his setting—rough stone walls, sooted by cooking fires, a roof of branches daubed with mud baked dry and hard, the underside now dimly seen where a clay dish-lamp of olive oil burns—and these smells of sheep and cattle, urine, ordure, drift in from the shed, mingling with leather, hemp, stale cooking odors, woolen cloaks long used for wrapping unwashed bodies. All these are blended in a timeless air of peasantry. Breathing the air makes me remember again the caravans of my childhood.

But I must listen to catch the cadence of this old woman’s song. A song it is, a wistful yearning of long ago. It surges, soars to a triumph, then poignantly subsides. She sits there, her old face washed by the flickering light, the history and hope of all her people written in its wrinkles.

A pause, and she is speaking again.

Yes, my father knew the carpenter Joseph—and Mariam, he used to see her come to the village well with her water jar and two or three of her children, when she was young and they were small. Yeshua he could remember too, a quiet lad. ‘Who would have thought?’ he used to say later. My ears can hear him yet—‘Who would have thought?’

Her voice trails off again. Old woman, I will think—and ponder.

* * *

Now the hut is still; humans and animals, all now asleep. Off there above the black hills to the east comes a brightening—at length a slice of white light and finally the whole moon rising, late, lopsided, wavering across the lake. Gennesaret, it was his sea; these hills were his hills.

Old woman, I will use the signs and portents of your song: angels, shepherds, the old priest Zechariah, Anna the prophetess and Simeon in the Temple. I’ll weave it all together for a prologue, rich in the rhythms of old Israel. I’ll set together and harmonize the birth of the Baptizer, son of Elizabeth, child of promise, and the greater birth promised to Mary, handmaiden of the Lord.

I thank you, Lord God, for this quiet place, wrapped now in sleep and darkness. I thank you for the old woman, mother in Israel, your church, and for that young girl, her granddaughter, whose dark eyes glowed in the lamplight as if Gabriel were speaking to her also. See me here, the Lord’s handmaiden; let it be so to me … Like Mary, I will take these things to heart and ponder them.

The moon is well up in the sky. A night breeze stirs on the lake; before long the restless cock will be crowing. I’ll bed down and get some sleep. Lord of the Universe, I praise you that the Spirit brought me here, having prepared these souls. Soon I can begin to write.

IV

PROLOGUE

1

There was little else to be had in Galilee. I saw ruins and devastation left by Vespasian’s legions almost twenty years ago; walls no one is allowed to repair; a people cowed, but still unbroken. Rome may yet reap a bitter harvest there, I think.

I walked the hills, inquired in the villages. One day I went down to Capernaum, where they said Jesus had taught and where they showed me the house of Simon Peter. A group of disciples still meets there and they have enlarged the place. I heard some things, but not very much to add to what I had already gathered. Plainly it has pleased God that Israel’s flourishing should be among the Gentiles.

Galilee left me sobered and somewhat saddened; so I took ship again, came up and around the coast, and am arrived now here at Ephesus.

What a day this is! Last night the rain was washing roofs and temples, streets, gutters, all. Now the sky is intensely blue beyond the wall of this courtyard. Standing here, just in this corner, I can look over that low place, across the valley to where the majestic columns, row on row, lift the roof of the Artemision.

I’ve been there to see the image that towers up in the shadowy sanctum fogged with incense. Why couldn’t these Ephesians aspire to the pure line, the fleet beauty, of the virgin huntress? Their Asian Artemis hulks above her worshipers, grotesquely mothering, a score of naked breasts bulging from her torso. I turned away, sickened as much, I think, by the smell of incense and sweat, and by a temple prostitute— priestess, if you will—a child, perhaps thirteen, who accosted me. All I could hear in my brain was that rioting mob shrieking in the theater when Paulus was here, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! over and over; Great is Ephesian Artemis!

I’m grateful to you, Onesiphorus, for your gracious hospitality. If I am to carry out this work it seems that I have to be indebted to many people. There are brothers and sisters whom I meet and who have something to tell, and there are those various voices that speak when I spread out the papyri I have gathered. But my special thanks go to you, good Onesiphorus, for your welcome here to your spacious home and for this pleasant room, my sanctuary. The boy was here well before dawn