Luke the Priest

The Authority of the Author of the Third Gospel

Rick Strelan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367887988
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351921190
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

This book focuses on the authority and status of the author of Luke-Acts. What authority did he have to write a Gospel, to interpret the Jewish Scriptures and traditions of Israel, to interpret the Jesus traditions, and to update the narrative with a second volume with its interpretation of Paul and the other apostles who appear in the Acts narrative? Rick Strelan constructs the author as a Jewish Priest, examining such issues as writing and orality, authority and tradition, and the status and role of priests. The analysis is set within the context of scholarly opinion about the author, the intended audience and other related issues.

Chapter One
Who Were the Gospel Writers?

The blunt truth is simply expressed by Burridge (and acknowledged to various degrees by most others) that ‘despite two thousand years of tradition, research and speculation, it is important to stress at the outset that in fact we know practically nothing of who the original authors and audiences of these texts were’ (2005: 100). But, as he also says, ‘human beings are naturally curious animals’, so this ignorance is not going to stop a curious animal like me from constructing the author and speculating about him.

There is very little internal data in the Gospels to help answer the question. Paul at least offered a little self-disclosure when he introduced himself in most of his letters by name and, for example, as ‘an apostle … a servant of Jesus Christ’ (Rom 1:1). He also signed himself off at the end of some of his letters with his own mark (1 Cor 16:21; 2 Thess 3:17). But the Gospel writers did nothing of the kind. The Gospels of Mark and Matthew have no self-referents, no signature at all; they are not even pseudonymous. The closest we get to any author identification is in the Gospel of John, but the data there are more confusing than clarifying. In its intriguing closing section there is a reference to ‘the disciple who has written these things’ (21:24), and it then refers to ‘we’, a group who have received the text and verify to its truth (21:24); but then the last sentence uses the first person singular (21:25), and that person is not the ‘disciple who has written these things’. In the Third Gospel, the writer does refer to himself in 1:3 (‘it seemed good to me’,

as ‘one who has followed things accurately from their beginning’

, but he too refers to ‘us’ in 1:1 (‘the things accomplished among us’,

, and again also in 1:2 (‘as they delivered to us’,

). From 1:5 and throughout the Gospel narrative only the third person is used. In Acts 1:1 the writer refers to himself again: ‘I wrote the first account …’

, only to immediately continue in the third person until 16:10 which introduces the first of the famous and puzzling ‘we’ passages which occasionally punctuate the rest of the narrative of Acts. That is all we have in terms of any explicit identity-disclosure on the part of the writer of Luke and Acts. Interestingly, what little is disclosed has much to do with authority.

‘Luke’ has left us two texts, but they can be read as one continuous narrative – they are both addressed to the same person, Theophilus; they both portray their central characters in the same way, and they are connected by the theme of the Lordship of Jesus which is arguably at the very heart of the author’s thinking. While there are some who prefer to call the two writings ‘Luke and Acts’, I will side with the majority who use the term ‘Luke-Acts’. In any case, it would appear that the author is personally closer in time and place to the characters and events in Acts than he is to Jesus and his life in Palestine. He appears to include himself as an eyewitness to some of the events in Acts, but he excludes himself from the same vantage point in the Gospel.

For some scholars, particularly those working since the 1980s, the reader is allimportant and crucial in any interpretation of a text. Any effort or interest to know anything about the author, least of all their intentions, is regarded as futile. Meaning, they say, comes to a text from the reader. Some believe that Barthes sounded the death-knell to any interest in the author. With rhetorical flourish, he wrote, ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (Barthes 1988: 172). Others might not go so far, but for them too the question of author is still relatively insignificant. In Cadbury’s opinion, for example, what a Gospel author’s name was and what profession he had, if any, in the end does not help us much, or make much difference to the way we read what the text says (1927: 359–60). More recently, Fitzmyer also says: ‘In the long run, as most people realize, the question of authorship of these writings is relatively unimportant’ (1981: 8). And again, ‘it makes little difference to the interpretation of the Third Gospel whether or not one can establish that its author was the traditional Luke, a sometime companion of Paul, even a physician …The important thing is the text of the Lucan Gospel and what it may say to Christians, regardless of the identity of the author’ (1981: 53). Ehrman repeats the relative unimportance of knowing the author: ‘Knowing the name of the author of this book. Or even knowing that he was a companion of one of its main characters, does not help us very much in trying to understand what he wanted to emphasize …’ (2000: 139).

I take the point. But I wonder whether it makes any difference to my reading of Fitzmyer’s commentary on Luke (to take one example) if I know that the author is a Roman Catholic (of the Jesuit variety), white, male North American academic, trained also in Belgium and Rome, and who writes mainly at the end of the twentieth century. I suspect it does make some difference. And I wonder whether Fitzmyer would say the same about Josephus’s writings as he says of Luke-Acts. Would he regard the fact that it was written by Josephus as ‘relatively unimportant’ for his understanding of the Antiquities or War?

Knowing something about the author is important, even if we don’t know the name. The truth of the matter is that we do not know for certain any names of any of the Evangelists. We can be even less certain as to their intended audiences, to whom or for whom they were writing. And we certainly do not know where they were when they wrote, nor where their audiences were; and as to when they wrote, we can only guess that it was somewhere between 50 and 110 CE. To make matters even more complex and frustrating, we cannot even be certain of precisely what they wrote. The simple comment of Christopher Evans is really all that can be said on nearly all of these issues: ‘Here we can only guess’ (1990: 13). For some of us as modern readers these uncertainties and unknowables create problems. If we knew something about the authors and something about their intended audiences, we would have some idea as to what lens to use for reading the texts given to us under their names. That would certainly be true for anyone interested in finding out what the author might have intended. For example, if ‘Luke-Acts’ was written by a companion of Paul, as many have thought over the centuries, then that could impact on how some passages, especially in Acts, are read and interpreted. My guess is that Hobart’s book on the medical language of Luke-Acts (1882) would never have come into existence if there were no traditions of Luke the physician as its author. In the case of my suggestion in this book, if ‘Luke’ has authority to write as he does because he is a Jewish priest and an older man, as I will propose, then that too will have some bearing on how I read his writings. If, on the other hand, the author is a Gentile, then his interpretation of Jesus, of Paul, of Jerusalem and its Temple, of the Torah, of the eschaton and so on, all take on different flavors indeed. So knowing something about the author, if not his name, is not insignificant because it can shape the way I read and interpret the text.

The lack of explicit data about the authors has not stopped scholars from trying to hang some flesh on these shadowy Gospel writers. Hengel has done so with John, suggesting that the driving force for that Gospel was one man, an elder, ‘one head, an outstanding teacher’ (1989: 80). Goulder did something similar with Matthew, suggesting that the writer was ‘a scribe discipled’, who was a bishop of a Syrian church (1974: 9), a scribe who saw himself as ‘the Christian inheritor of the noble title borne by a line of servants of God from Ezra to Ben Sirach and Hillel and Shammai’ (1974: 13). With Mark, the tradition that the apostle Peter is behind the Gospel is often accepted as credible, and so the author ‘Mark’ is basically ignored and treated merely as a copyist and conveyor of what really, in the end, is Peter’s gospel. Hengel is one who resists this notion and insists that Mark ‘enters with his new, revolutionary work as a known authority in the church’ (2005: 80; italics his). And Black (1994) has preempted what I want to do with Luke and has tried to give some flesh and individual status to the author of Mark’s Gospel. He found that it is virtually impossible to find the historical ‘Mark’, but he accepted the tradition of the Peter–Mark connection, assumed that the Mark of second century and later traditions is the John Mark of Acts, and so tried to give as much flesh-and-blood to the figure as is possible from the scant data available. His conclusion is that ‘early Christians found in Mark (among other figures) an image by which they could hold fast to their confessional identity and sense of religious belonging’ (1994: xiii). Among the ‘other figures’ was Luke.

Individual or Community?

Sometimes driving this desire to put some flesh on the bare bones of an author is the agenda to counter the notion of the form critics (and others) that the Gospels come out of communities. Hengel has this aim with his construction of a dominating, influential single elder standing behind the Fourth Gospel, a counter to the very common ‘Johannine circle’ idea which abandons any need for and interest in an individual author. Scandinavian scholars, in particular, have stressed the importance of understanding Jewish transmission of traditions, of orality, and of memory, with the result that they too are more interested in individuals than they are in communities. Gerhardsson, probably the leader of this approach, believes that the form critics are largely responsible for the lack of interest in concrete persons being the authors of early Christian texts, especially of the Gospels. He says they ‘blithely speak of “Church-constructions” and of traditions “which circulated in the churches” instead of asking who it is who has formulated, reformulated, or transmitted a text’ (1991: 86). Byrskog (2002) follows Gerhardsson and likewise aims to counter the form critics’ view that the sources for the Gospels were a collective enterprise within a community. He stresses instead that individuals, like Peter, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Jesus’ siblings and kin, were the evangelists’ sources, and he accuses the form critics of neglecting the importance of aurality, autopsy, and individual experience. Byrskog recognizes collective memory and that individuals were never in social deserts, but he insists that ‘groups and cultures do not remember and recall; individuals do’ (2002: 255). The focus on individuals as authorized tradents rather than on communities is also crucial in Bauckham’s recent book (2006) in which he claims that eyewitnesses, who in many cases can be named, played crucial roles in the transmission of the ‘things about Jesus’, and these eyewitnesses were regarded by Luke and his first audiences as reliable transmitters of authentic data, which for Bauckham is the equivalent of data that is ‘historically reliable’.

There is, however, little suggestion in scholarship that the Lukan texts come out of a Lukan ‘circle’, even if they might have been written for a Lukan community. This is partly because the writer talks in the first person (1:3), and because Luke- Acts is addressed to an individual, Theophilus (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1). Esler (1989), however, insists that Luke writes to address concerns within a particular local ‘Lukan community’, and that those concerns have shaped his stories of both Jesus and Paul. The stress on the oral performance of the Gospels makes it explicit that the written Gospel texts are for a community, if not indeed from a community. The Gospels are concerned with the memory of Jesus, and that memory in particular, if not all memory, is not that of an isolated individual, but of a community, or at the very least of an individual who belongs within a community and whose memory is shaped by that community.

There is some support for the opinion of Bauckham (1998) that the Gospels were not intended for local communities but for wider Christian audiences. Mount would agree, claiming that Luke-Acts was written for all Christians living ‘in a Hellenistic (literary) culture’ (2002: 80). Mitchell (2005) counters Bauckham’s claims and calls on the witness of the patristic literature in which there is the commonlyknown tradition that each Gospel came into written form at the request of a local community. In addition to these ‘audience request’ narratives that Mitchell notes, John Chrysostom, in the fourth century, was a little bothered as to why ‘for the sake of a single individual he [Luke] took such pains as to write for him [Theophilus] an entire Gospel … and why he did not make one book of it, to send to one man, Theophilus, but has divided it into two subjects’. His answer to the first question was that Luke had ‘benevolent and apostolic feelings’, and to the second, ‘for clarity, and to give the brother pause for rest. Besides, the two treatises are distinct in their subject matter’ (Homily 1, Acts of Apostles). They are hardly answers that satisfy today, but the point is that Chrysostom understood Luke-Acts to be written for one individual, not for Christians at large. It is the opinion of Origen and Theophylact as well, although they extend the readership by claiming that others might also be called

and thereby rightly see themselves as being addressed in the Gospel (Origen, Homily on Luke, 1.10).

In any case, it is worth remembering a few factors concerning early Christian communities. First of all, the ‘circles’ of Christians in any one given location in the latter quarter of the first century of the Common Era were very small – we are probably right to think of something like 40–60 people, or even less. Secondly, such small groups nearly always find themselves dominated by one powerful, sometimes charismatic, person who has unchallenged influence and control (often also of a financial nature) over the group. Thirdly, in an educational or instructional setting, the teacher or instructor often has total control and authority; they and their teaching shape the group’s identity and its distinctiveness from others. Fourthly, we have to consider the high and significant possibility that the majority of Christians were illiterate. And finally, such ‘circles’ do not write books; individuals do, especially the teachers (or their literate students, who note and publish their teachings). In general, I agree with the point of Hengel’s comment, ‘The authors of these works do not represent the view of a collective community, but of an individual yet authoritative teacher of one or more communities …’ (2000: 107). I suggest that this is also true of the author commonly known as ‘Luke’.

The Anonymity of the Gospels

While the prefaces to the Gospel and to Acts indicate that an ‘I’ was involved in the writing, no name is given. The author is anonymous, and it has to be a possibility that his text circulated anonymously for some decades, simply being referred to as ‘The Gospel’, as ‘The Narrative’, or as one of the ‘Memoirs of the Apostles’. This baffles Bovon, ‘The absence of the author’s name in the prologue remains a riddle to me, despite the church’s tradition, and the possibility that the name was mentioned in the title of the work’ (2002: 18).

The anonymity of the Gospels already raised some problems for Tertullian which he then attempted to address. The problem was in part caused by the creation of Marcion’s Gospel which was anonymous. Tertullian saw this as a weakness in Marcion’s defence: ‘A work ought not to be recognized which holds not its head erect, which shows no boldness, which does not assure of its trustworthiness by fullness of title and the fitting declaration of its author’ (ad Marc. 4.2). When talking of those Gospels that he did accept, Tertullian claims that they had apostles as their authors ‘to whom was assigned by the Lord himself this office of publishing the gospel’. Obviously aware of the questionable status of Mark and Luke, he goes on to include them as apostolici who ‘do not stand alone but are with apostles and after apostles’. Mark published Peter’s gospel, and ‘Luke’s form of the gospel men usually ascribe to Paul. And it may well seem that the works which disciples publish belong to their masters’ (ad Marc. 4.5). Tertullian knows he is on shaky grounds because Luke is associated with Paul, and the latter was only a ‘later apostle’ who had not known Jesus as an eyewitness. He also knew, of course, that Marcion claimed to accept Paul’s gospel. But, says Tertullian, the gospel of Paul by itself is not enough. ‘There would still be wanted that Gospel which Paul found in existence, to which he yielded his belief …’ namely, the gospel of the apostles themselves, whose approval Paul sought in Jerusalem. And then the concluding statement in his argument, ‘Therefore, as the enlightener of Luke himself desired the authority of his predecessors for both his own faith and preaching, how much more may not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Who Were the Gospel Writers?
• 2 Gospels, Authors, and Authority
• 3 The Status of Luke in Scholarship
• 4 Why Write Another Gospel?
• 5 Owning, Controlling, Guarding the Tradition
• 6 The Oral and the Written
• 7 Luke in the Tradition
• 8 Luke among the Scholars
• 9 Luke the Priest
• 10 Luke as Authoritative Interpreter of Scripture
• 11 Luke as Interpreter of the Jesus Traditions
• 12 Luke as Interpreter of Paul
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Modern Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index