The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles: Interpreting Biblical Texts Series

By Prof. F. Scott Spencer

Introduces literary, historical, and theological issues of Luke and Acts.

Biblical texts create worlds of meaning, and invite readers to enter them. When readers enter such textual worlds, which are often strange and complex, they are confronted with theological claims. With this in mind, the purpose of the Interpreting Biblical Texts series is to help serious readers in their experience of reading and interpreting by providing guides for their journeys into textual worlds. The controlling perspective is expressed in the operative word of the title--interpreting. The primary focus of the series is not so much on the world behind the texts or out of which the texts have arisen as on the worlds created by the texts in their engagement with readers. In keeping with the goals of the series, this volume provides an introductory guide to readers of the New Testament books of Luke and Acts. It focuses on both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of the literature in an effort to acquaint readers with literary, historical, and theological issues that will facilitate interpretation of these important books.

F. Scott Spencer is Professor of New Testament at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426750861

Book preview

PART ONE

ORIENTATION:

PREPARING TO

INTERPRET THE

LUKAN NARRATIVES

PREFACE

From the outset, intrepid interpreters of Luke and Acts confront a couple of thorny challenges. First is their sheer size. Individually, the two roughly equivalent narratives constitute the largest works in the New Testament, and together, they represent about a quarter of the canon and the largest corpus by a single author (dubbed Luke by convention).¹ Frankly, these two volumes are a lot to handle. Despite my best intentions, I have never satisfactorily covered all of Luke and Acts in full-semester courses devoted to them.

To complicate matters further, the New Testament’s order splices the fourth Gospel between Luke and Acts. Such an arrangement has its merits: Luke’s story of Jesus’ career fits nicely with Matthew’s, Mark’s, and John’s Gospels; and Acts’ account of the apostles’ witness to Jesus serves as an apt introduction to Paul, James, Peter, and John’s letters. But obscured in this demarcation between Gospel and Apostle are linguistic and thematic connections between Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. Of course, nothing keeps us from jumping over the fourth Gospel, going directly from Luke 24:53 to Acts 1:1, like one might flip from the lectionary’s Gospel reading to the Epistle text. But literary gaps can be frustrating to negotiate (we prefer one-stop reading), and canonical gaps can be forbidding (no trespassing sacred territory). We might be more inclined to examine Luke’s two-volume work if it had come to us as 1-2 Theophilus, named after the addressee in both volumes, similar to 1-2 Corinthians or 1-2 Timothy.²

These obstacles, although far from insurmountable, highlight the importance of some orientation to the landscape of Luke and Acts, including borders and bridges between these two works, before traversing this vast territory. A basic interpretive guide to these writings, as they have survived through history, approaches them as first and foremost religious literature or scriptural narratives. Hence, the ensuing introductory chapters explore Luke and Acts’ (1) literary framework (how these books were composed in their final form) and (2) theological focus (why these books were written as narratives unfolding God’s purposes for God’s people and the world).³ Exploring these background topics requires a number of strategic probes into Luke and Acts, but such preparatory work in no way substitutes for sustained immersion in their complex narratives; hopefully it stokes the desire for close reading and analysis.

CHAPTER 1

LITERARY FRAMEWORK:

How Were Luke and Acts Composed?

Newsflash—Luke and Acts are works of literature! Seems more like a flicker than a flash, but being reminded that Luke’s contributions to early Christianity come to us as literature establishes key parameters for interpretation. Fundamentally, we read, hear, and process Luke and Acts as literary works, similar in some, but not all, respects to how we read other art forms. Although Luke’s scenes have inspired artistic masterpieces,¹ Luke and Acts are not paintings. Although portions of Luke’s birth narrative, like the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), resemble the psalter and have inspired Christian hymns, Luke and Acts are not musical scores. Although they may borrow popular conventions from Greek or Roman epic poets (Homer; Virgil) or comic playwrights (Terence; Plautus), Luke and Acts are neither poetic sagas nor dramatic comedies.² And although they feature numerous cities, regions, and other territories organized around various journey schemes, Luke and Acts are neither geographical textbooks (Strabo), nor cartographical sketches (Rand McNally), nor travel guides (Fodor’s).

So we need to appreciate Luke and Acts as literature. But accepting that desideratum raises a host of attendant questions about Luke’s literary project: How did Luke go about writing it? What structural and stylistic elements does it display? What kind of literature is it? Starting with a broad answer to this last question and stating the obvious (but not always the most observed by scholars), Luke and Acts are principally works of religious or sacred literature. Luke probably had no clue his writings would wind up in a canon of Christian Scripture, alongside the Old Testament; but the fact that they did, and have been so preserved in the Church for centuries, demonstrates their dominant religious tenor. I will make much of this religious (theological) dimension throughout this study.

But the ultimate fate of Luke and Acts as Holy Writ does not demand that these books were originally penned within a hermetically sealed chamber in an esoteric dialect of Holy Ghost Greek, as some older scholars quaintly opined. Luke’s Greek is quite good, but not that good. Like all New Testament books, Luke and Acts reflect the common (koinē) Greek vernacular of the first century, even as they betray their own peculiar styles and patterns. Accounting, as we may, for a measure of spiritual guidance and prayerful insight (Luke makes much of both the Spirit and prayer), Luke’s writings still emerged, like any other publications, out of creative human processes of gathering and forging thoughts and materials into a coherent literary composition. Understanding something of this scribal procedure promises to enhance our understanding of the final product.

Fortunately, we find a few hints of Luke’s literary method in the prefaces to each volume.

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed. (Luke 1:1-4)

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. (Acts 1:1-2)

These personal disclosures—the only I references from the Lukan author or narrator—introduce four issues concerning the composition of Luke and Acts:

• Two Volumes. Acts’ reference to the first book (or first word, prōton logon) addressed to Theophilus about Jesus’ ministry points back to Luke’s Gospel as the preceding work of a two-volume set. But how is this set configured? Should we view Acts as a seamless continuation of Luke’s story; a supplemental appendix, update, or revision of Luke; or a different book altogether?

• Many Sources. As any good writer in antiquity, Luke depends upon many (polloi) preceding documents and eyewitness reports. Although Luke decided (lit. it seemed good to me) to offer his own account, he began by investigating everything carefully that others had reported and written. Accurate accounts of the past must be grounded in rigorous research. So what were Luke’s primary sources, and how did he use them? Unfortunately, we have no footnotes or bibliography to check. We have similar, Synoptic Gospels, Mark and Matthew, that Luke might have examined for his first volume and possible parallels from Paul’s letters informing Acts. But theories of literary dependence must be carefully sifted on a case-by-case basis.

• Broad Patterns. The NRSV designates both his predecessors’ projects and Luke’s own as orderly, rendering two different Greek terms. The first, a verbal form of anatassomai used only here in the New Testament, generally means, to organize a series of items, and, more specifically in Luke, to organize (a report), to arrange, to compile, to put together.³ The second term, the adverb kathexēs used five times in the New Testament (all in Luke and Acts), denotes successively or sequentially in relation to time (chronology, Acts 3:24), place (itinerary, Luke 8:1; Acts 18:23), or plot (narrating step by step, Acts 11:4). Following Luke’s cue, we seek to discover the main orderly sequences and patterns structuring his writings.

• Various Genres. Literary works, ancient and modern, typically appropriate one or more established generic templates, not as straitjackets stifling new developments, but as starter kits stimulating imaginative thought. The closest we come to a genre designation in the Lukan prefaces is diēgēsis, denoting account or, better, narrated account or just narrative (Luke 1:1). As a literary narrative, Luke’s Gospel is distinguished from other written discourses, such as a public inscription, personal diary, business letter, philosophical essay, technical manual, or medical journal. But the wide narrative classification still begs several questions. What specific type(s) of narrative(s) did Luke produce? Do Luke and Acts share the same diēgēsis genre or subgenre (the term is not repeated in the Acts preface)? What particular narrative forms or models do they follow? Has Luke composed, singly or as a set, a succession narrative, biographical narrative, historical narrative, fictional narrative, or a mixture of these (and other) genres?

TWO VOLUMES

In 1927 Henry Cadbury launched a new nomenclature for Luke’s two-volume work: Luke-Acts. Acknowledging that the hyphenated label was not typographically beautiful or altogether congenial to the English language, Cadbury suggested that the sacrifice in English style was worth gaining a convenient handle highlighting the historic unity of the two books.⁴ However, in literature, no less than religion or politics, unity is a multifaceted ideal difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Without selling our souls to a full-blown postmodern or deconstructive agenda, we can still acknowledge that no text exhibits perfect coherence; that awkward gaps, loose threads, and nagging inconsistencies complicate any narrative; and that readers’ perceptions of unity and tension vary greatly across time, culture, and ideology.⁵

Concerning the unity of Luke and Acts in particular, apart from likely disjunctions and digressions within each book (counterpointing order and design), the fact that both volumes never circulated together or appeared adjacently in any canonical list, as far as we know, should give us pause. If Theophilus shelved the original Luke and Acts side by side in his library, he may have been the only one to keep them together! They were likely never copied and sold as a double-set (with or without a box). Moreover, as Mikeal Parsons and Richard Pervo have observed, Luke’s Gospel nicely wraps up Jesus’ career with his ascension and discloses no plans for a sequel, as we find at the end of first installments of two-volume treatises by Josephus (Against Apion) and Philo (Life of Moses).⁶ Finally, even a cursory comparison of the lengthy travel narratives in Luke 9–19 and Acts 13–28—the former, a loosely connected, vaguely situated string of episodes; the latter, a tightly linked, precisely mapped series of expeditions—demonstrates that Luke and Acts vary at points in their modes of presentation. More than grammatical infelicity strains the Cadbury hyphen.

But despite disruptions in the stylistic, canonical, and generic unity of Luke and Acts, the two works still enjoy authorial (though anonymous) unity and a close (not cloned) association in other areas: though free to shift styles between writings, Luke shows a preference for select vocabulary (repentance, salvation), characters (Jesus, Peter), sources (Old Testament), and patterns (male/female pairings) in both volumes; though not directly paired in the New Testament, Luke and Acts still made the same scriptural canon (a rather exclusive club), separated by only one book (John); and although not identical generic twins, they bear more than a passing family resemblance as extended narratives. Such observations (discussed further below) suggest that we may profitably interpret Luke and Acts as a double work by appreciating intertextual links between the two narratives while respecting the integrity and individuality of each. We may expect to find numerous unifying elements, even as we take care not to force them.

Although Luke may not have anticipated a companion volume to his Gospel, he clearly built upon it when composing Acts. Casting more than a perfunctory glance back to his first book for Theophilus, Luke picks up several strands from that work for further development in Acts 1. First, he succinctly summarizes the Gospel’s contents: I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven (Acts 1:1b-2a). Excepting the birth narratives in Luke 1–2, this statement epitomizes Jesus’ entire career from the beginning of his public ministry—in deed and word—to his heavenly ascension. (Christian belief in Jesus’ ascension [cf. Apostles’ Creed] derives almost exclusively from Luke and Acts.) The NRSV translation, all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning, may also be rendered, "all that Jesus began (ērxato) to do and teach." This reading may offer a subtle clue to the contents of Acts: as the Gospel (Volume 1) tracked what Jesus began to accomplish on earth, this book (Volume 2) will track what the living Jesus continues to do and teach from his heavenly post. Indeed, Acts repeatedly shows Jesus’ continued involvement in earthly affairs, albeit in Spirit and epiphany rather than body and ministry (2:33; 7:55-56; 9:3-6; 16:17; 18:9-10; 22:17-21). The ascended Lord is no absentee Lord. Comparing Jesus’ words and works in Luke’s two volumes opens up fruitful avenues for interpretation.

Second, Acts 1 flashes back to Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in Luke: "After his suffering (paschō) he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). Luke’s last chapter features two convincing (eventually) appearances of the risen Jesus to his followers (24:13-32, 36-53; cf. v. 34), in which he affirms the necessity of his suffering or passion" (paschō) in God’s plan (24:26, 46). Acts adds extra temporal (forty days) and topical (kingdom of God) items to the Gospel appearance scenes, but such accoutrements coordinate well with other material in Luke: a forty-day period of instruction recalls Jesus’ forty-day ordeal of temptation (Luke 4:2), and announcing the kingdom of God follows the prime directive of Jesus’ mission: "I must (dei) proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God . . . for I was sent for this purpose" (4:43).

Third, the risen Lord’s parting mandate in Acts 1:4-5, 8 that his apostles wait to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and empowered for witness echoes both the commencement and denouement of Jesus’ mission in Luke.

Acts’ close dependence on Luke’s Gospel in characterizing the Spirit’s activity is hard to miss. Tracking the constants and developments of the Spirit’s role across Luke and Acts opens ups further lines of interpretation.⁷

Fourth, in addition to maintaining the Gospel’s starring roles for Jesus and the Spirit, Acts also brings back the apostles for a second run with fresh opportunities. Not merely recapping Luke’s final episode, Acts expands upon the apostles’ reaction to Jesus’ ascension. Before returning to Jerusalem, they are confronted by two white-clad messengers: Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven (Acts 1: 11). The apostles seem frozen in their tracks, fixated with wide eyes and dropped jaws on their heaven-bound Lord. But just before departing, Jesus had commissioned them to be his witnesses across the earth (1:8). No time to stand still gawking up at heaven. Jesus’ apostles have an urgent assignment to fulfill before he returns. How will they respond to this challenge? Stay tuned for more exciting adventures of The Acts of the Apostles.

Lest we have forgotten, Luke reprises the names of the apostolic cast in Acts 1:13. They match the original list in Luke 6:13, except for one abbreviated name, a few changes in order, and the conspicuous absence of Judas Iscariot.

Eliminating Judas Iscariot is scarcely surprising, given his original entry in the last position with the ominous qualifier, who became a traitor (Luke 6:16). He played out his villainous part at the end of Luke, betraying Jesus to the authorities (22:3-6, 47-53); and to complete the tragic story, Acts soon reports Judas’s gruesome death and prompt replacement among the Twelve (1:15-26). Excepting Judas, the other apostles remain in the same clusters of four. The same figures head the subgroups (#1—Peter; #5—Philip; #9—James the son of Alphaeus), with some reshuffling underneath. In the top group John swaps places with Andrew. As it happens, the apostles from Andrew on down make no further appearances in Acts (they are effectively written out of the story).⁸ Peter and John pair off for a while as early church leaders (Acts 3:1–4:22; 8:14-17), and James (John’s brother) gets a brief, but noble, obituary as a martyr (12:1-2).

But the main apostolic spotlight in Acts trains on Peter. From the start, he stands up and superintends the first order of business—filling Judas’ vacant post (1:15-22). Peter’s leadership in this matter reflects as much irony as authority. The threefold denier of the arrested Jesus overseeing the replacement of the initial betrayer: what is wrong with this picture? Nothing, actually, from the perspective of Luke’s Gospel, which set the stage not only for Peter’s crushing denials of Jesus but also for his restoration of faith and strength:

Simon, Simon [Peter], listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. And he said to him, Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death! Jesus said, I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day, until you have denied three times that you know me. (Luke 22:31-34)

Acts picks up the Gospel’s cue and charts the remarkable recovery—and at times, regression—of the volatile Peter after Jesus’ ascension. Tracking Peter’s progress presents another banner case of orderly Lukan interpretation, following the story’s plot and characters step by step (cf. Acts 11:4). A certain narrative unity between the two volumes coheres around common characters, but not in flat, static dimensions. Protagonists like Jesus, the Spirit, and Peter grow, develop, change, and build character⁹ in Luke’s narratives, and not always in predictable and positive (Peter) directions. The Peter of Acts both is and is not the Peter of Luke. Alertly navigating the story’s dynamic ebbs and flows, breakers and detours, marks a basic, indispensable method for interpreting Luke’s double work.

MANY SOURCES

Luke’s methods and aims would have been more transparent if he had provided annotations and bibliography, as research projects require today. But such was not the literary practice in antiquity. Ancient writers freely borrowed from predecessors without attribution. This is not to say they practiced wholesale plagiarism or forgery.¹⁰ Authors were expected to alter and amalgamate others’ works into their own; then as now, literary artists (composers) were distinguished from technical copyists (scribes). The best composers, like Luke, deftly wove both traditional sources and original ideas into their own fresh tapestry. Still, critics persist in attempting to disentangle source from product, tradition from redaction, knowing full well the dubiousness of the enterprise, not only in terms of identifying uncited sources but also of discerning how and why a writer adapted other materials (authorial tendencies and intention). But the critical payoff of engaging an ancient text, as best we can, in its ancient context, in comparison with other ancient texts, makes the probe of sources worth the risk of uncertainty.

Fortunately, in Luke’s case we are not completely in the dark. One source is explicit and pervasive throughout Luke’s narratives: the scriptures of ancient Israel in Greek (Septuagint, or LXX). Luke ranges far and wide across the main sections of the Old Testament, following Jesus’ pronouncement at the end of the Gospel: "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44, emphasis added). As Jesus concludes his ministry on a scriptural note, so he begins with a personal appropriation of an Isaiah lection: Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:16-21; Isa 58:6; 61:1-2); likewise Peter kick-starts the early church’s mission in Acts with proof-texts from the prophet Joel and Davidic psalms (Acts 2:16-21, 25-28, 31, 34-35; Joel 2:28-32; Ps 16:8-11; 110:1), and Paul wraps it up with another Isaiah citation (Acts 28:25-27; Isa 6:9-10). Such evidence sparks Jacob Jervell’s provocative assessment:

[Luke] actually intends to omit nothing that Scripture offers. Everything in the Old Testament is Scripture, everything is important, everything is binding. Luke is the fundamentalist within the New Testament. There is in Luke-Acts no criticism whatsoever of Scripture, such as we find in Matthew and Mark, not to mention Paul.¹¹

Although Jervell might overplay the fundamentalist angle (Luke makes some strategic changes when quoting the Old Testament and also exploits biblical narratives in highly allusive as well as verbatim fashion), he correctly stresses the broad and thick scriptural foundation of Luke’s writings. Interpreting Luke and Acts with a pocket New Testament will not do. To mine the riches of Luke’s work, readers must regularly sound its vast Old Testament depths.

Given Luke’s claim that he carefully investigated many accounts of events recently fulfilled among us, we should also probe contemporary Gospel materials. Luke does not name these sources, but the Gospels of Matthew and Mark stand ready to hand for comparative investigation (John’s Gospel provides some interesting character connections—Samaritans, Martha, Mary, and maybe Lazarus—but overall blazes its own narrative trail). But the situation is much sketchier with Acts. Its preface does not acknowledge literary predecessors (except for Luke’s first volume), and it lacks true synoptic partners. The canonical Acts predates apocryphal Acts from the late second century and beyond, some of which build on Luke’s work and embellish it with more romantic and novelistic elements.¹² However, beyond continued Old Testament usage, Luke may also have appropriated available apostolic speeches, Pauline traditions, and popular epics in composing Acts.

Mark

The dominant theory of Gospel origins posits Markan priority and Matthew and Luke’s literary dependence on Mark’s work. The main evidence derives from close comparative analysis of synoptic (parallel) stories. The following juxtaposition of widow’s mite accounts, appearing only in Mark and Luke, illustrates why many scholars hypothesize Luke’s use of Mark and how they assess Luke’s editorial tendencies.¹³ Single underlines represent identical language in both Greek and English (NRSV); double underlines indicate the same English translations of different Greek terms; italics emphasize distinct word choices in both Greek and English; and bold print signals redundancy of words or ideas.

• The close similarities (verbatim in some cases) between accounts suggest literary dependence; the greater conciseness of Luke’s text commends it as the secondary, edited (redacted) version.

• For better Greek style, Luke tends to eliminate Mark’s cumbersome and simplistic repetitions (treasury; two coppers = penny; everything/all). Although the NRSV repeats poor widow in Luke 21:2-3 (as in Mark 12:42-43), Luke uses two distinct terms denoting