Discovering Luke

Joel B. Green

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780802874962
• eBook ISBN: 9781467462266
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This interpretation of Luke encourages in-depth study of the text and genuine grappling with the theological and sociohistorical questions it raises. It draws on a range of methodological interests (author-, text-, and reader-centered) as complementary rather than mutually exclusive ways of understanding the text. It also recognizes the importance of the reception history of biblical texts, increasingly viewed as a vital aspect of interpretation rather than an optional extra. 

Throughout  Discovering Luke, Joel Green  gives readers strategies for reading the Gospel of Luke and guides them through Luke's world in its historical, ideological, political, and economic contexts. Green reviews key issues raised by the Gospel and connects these issues to questions of how Luke should be interpreted today.

1

Ways of reading Luke’s Gospel: through the Middle Ages

Strange as it may seem, this book is an invitation to read Luke’s Gospel in ways that would seem quite extraordinary when compared with the way it has been read for some 19 centuries. My aim is to treat the Gospel of Luke – sometimes called the Third Gospel, due to its canonical location as the third of the four NT Gospels – as literature. What this entails will unfold in this and the following chapters.

From early on, the Church has dug into Luke’s Gospel as though it were a rich lode of scenes and stories from which to mine nuggets in the service of a range of purposes, especially historical, theological and moral. This is true of theologians and preachers, but also artists, who found here a wealth of material for portraying Jesus’ life and teaching.¹ To borrow a term from particle physics, earlier approaches to Luke’s Gospel were atomistic in their interest in the elements that make up the Lukan narrative, piece by piece, rather than with the narrative read as a whole. The reception of Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth is a good example: ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus …’ (Luke 2.1 AV) – a short passage read annually in homes and churches, typically without reference to how it introduces major concerns that permeate the Gospel of Luke. Other examples are readily available, including the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, the tale of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and Jesus’ words of forgiveness from the cross. These renowned texts are all found in Luke (and not in the other NT Gospels), yet are remembered generally without reference to their setting and interpretation within Luke’s Gospel. By way of example, we need to look no further than Robert Wuthnow’s sociological study of American altruism and magnanimity. Wuthnow documented how the parable of the Good Samaritan encouraged charitable behaviour in American public life in the twentieth century – this in spite of the fact that few Americans could actually retell the whole parable and even fewer could identify Luke’s Gospel as our source for this parable; we might add that the question of how the Good Samaritan story meshes with Luke’s wider theological and ethical interests was never even raised.²

We can trace the beginnings of serious study of the Gospel of Luke as Luke, as a literary whole, only as far back as the twentieth century, especially to the literary-historical work of Henry J. Cadbury (1883–1974), the introduction of redaction-critical study of Luke by Hans Conzelmann (1915–89), and the heroic efforts of Joseph Fitzmyer (1920–2016) and I. Howard Marshall (1934–2015) to put Luke on the map as a theologian in his own right. Writing in 1927, Cadbury both introduced study of Luke’s Gospel as literature and presaged much of what would become central areas for theological enquiry. By the 1960s, W. C. van Unnik (1910–78) could refer to the study of Luke-Acts as a ‘storm center’.³ Subsequent study has drawn attention to Luke’s Gospel in a way unparalleled in the history of interpretation.

We begin, then, with the interpretation of the Gospel of Luke in the Church of the first centuries and Middle Ages. Then, in the next chapter, we will sample readings from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras before turning to the interpretation of Luke in the modern era and today. As much as possible, we will explore readings of a single Lukan text, Mary’s Song (or the Magnificat):

Mary said,

‘With all my heart I glorify the Lord!

In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my saviour.

He has looked with favour on the low status of his servant.

Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favoured

because the mighty one has done great things for me.

Holy is his name.

He shows mercy to everyone,

from one generation to the next,

who honours him as God.

He has shown strength with his arm.

He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.

He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones

and lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things

and sent the rich away empty-handed.

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,

remembering his mercy,

just as he promised to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants for ever.’

(1.46–55)⁴

I have chosen this text for two reasons. First, Mary’s Song is found among the NT writings only in Luke’s Gospel. Second, Mary’s Song announces and documents what will become in Luke’s narrative a series of intertwined theological motifs, including Luke’s understanding of the story of Jesus (and of the Church) as the continuation of Israel’s story, and the topsy-turvy nature of salvation, in which the powerful are pulled down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up.

The early (and medieval) Church

Location, or context, is crucial for understanding the practice of biblical interpretation. By context, I refer initially not so much to a biblical text’s own historical or literary setting, though questions of this kind will surface quickly enough in what follows. Rather, my present interest is the setting or place within which the Bible is read. For the Church of the first centuries, say, through the sixteenth century, the Bible’s legal address was manifestly and incontrovertibly the Church. Even when attempts were made to give Scripture a more public, even universalizing voice, the Bible was read by and on behalf of the Church – its formation, its faith and its witness.

Although Luke’s Gospel belongs generally to the margins of early and medieval church exegesis, what we find in what we may loosely call ‘commentary’ on Luke exemplifies Scripture’s ecclesial (or churchly) address. The early Church had much to do with the Gospels of Matthew and John, much less with Luke and even less with Mark. Notable exceptions include readings and homilies associated with major celebrations in the Christian calendar, such as the Christmas season or Feast of the Annunciation.⁵ For Luke’s Gospel we have only three ‘commentaries’ from the early Church – from Origen (185–254), Ambrose of Milan (339–97) and Cyril of Alexandria (c.378–444). Commentaries as we know them today did not line the shelves of even the most sophisticated libraries of the Church’s gifted interpreters and theologians. Instead, the work of exegesis was homiletical, pastoral and theological, as ‘biblical scholars’ simply were preachers and pastors, theologians and defenders of the faith. ‘Commentary’ therefore took the form of sustained work with Scripture in letters and theological treatises, and in sermons. Cyril’s commentary on Luke’s Gospel, for example, is a compilation of his sermons on the Third Gospel – a kind of running exposition of Luke, proceeding sometimes phrase by phrase, sometimes line by line, and sometimes skipping over Lukan material on which we might have wished to benefit from Cyril’s wisdom.⁶

If the Bible’s legal address is the Church of Jesus Christ, perhaps it only follows logically that its scriptural interpretation is characteristically centred on Christ. The early Church practised a Trinitarian approach to the Bible, a hermeneutic emphasizing the Father’s revelation of the Son by means of a Spirit-inspired Scripture to Spirit-enabled readers (or hearers). For the early and medieval Church, then, what we might call the intent of the author is all-important. This claim turns on an important distinction, however. The author in question was not Moses or David or Ezekiel or Luke or Paul. The Bible’s author is God. For the early Church, God stands behind and authorizes these Scriptures, and God’s aim infuses these scriptural words. The central aim of these Scriptures is to reveal Christ – or, to put it differently, interpreting the Scriptures is Spirit-empowered contemplation of Christ. This is true of all the Scriptures, Old and New, plain or obscure. As Luke 24 has it, Jesus ‘interpreted for them the things written about himself in all the scriptures, starting with Moses and going through all the Prophets’ (v. 27), or as the early credo Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15 declares, it was in accordance with the Scriptures, all of them, that ‘Christ died for our sins’, ‘was buried’ and ‘rose on the third day’ (vv. 3–4). Finally, just as the Holy Spirit spoke the Scriptures, and continues to speak in them, so the early Church assumed that only the Spirit could lead its readers to a right understanding of them. To anticipate a tectonic shift in biblical interpretation in the early modern era, for the early Church the Bible cannot be read ‘like any other book’, nor is its full meaning readily available to the non-churched public. The Holy Spirit is at work in and through the Church to form readers (and hearers) so that they might grasp what would otherwise leave one in puzzlement, namely, the truth of Scripture, christologically understood.⁷

Irenaeus of Lyons (c.125–c.202)

The extant writings of Bishop Irenaeus exhibit little by way of interaction with Mary’s Song, but his theological exegesis does provide insight into the centrality of theological hermeneutics of Scripture in early, inner-ecclesial struggles for orthodoxy. In particular, the bishop exemplifies what it means to read Scripture from within the Christian tradition – a mainstay of exegetical practice until the modern era.

In the first book of his celebrated work Against Heresies, Irenaeus explicates the Valentinian Gnosticism known to him (chs 1–8) – a cosmology according to which the primordial Plēroma (‘fullness’) was compromised, resulting in the creation of a defective world and, within it, a flawed humanity. The OT God is thus the imperfect creator of the material world, and the way of salvation would have human beings escaping the shackles of that material world in favour of the spiritual. When Irenaeus critiques this view (ch. 9), he accuses his opponents primarily of bad exegesis. In doing so, he provides this analogy: someone might glean phrases and names from Homer’s epic poems (which were widely known in the Roman world), then recast them in verse that the naive might regard as Homeric. In the same way, Gnostics collect names and phrases scattered throughout Scripture, then organize them within a narrative of their own making. Such a narrative could never be confused with the hypothesis of Scripture, one that expresses Scripture’s own economy – that is, with the way God has arranged Scripture, its own plot line or narrative sense. The Valentinian theological system derives not from the words of the prophets, nor from the teaching of the Lord Jesus, nor from the traditions received from the apostles. Unsurprisingly, then, their scriptural interpretation disregards ‘the order and the connection of the Scriptures’ (1.8.1).⁸ Those who retain the Rule of Truth received at their baptism, however, discern and are guided by the proper order and position of scriptural expressions and so understand Scripture rightly (1.9.4). Irenaeus proceeds in this context to articulate the unity of the Church’s faith, the Rule of Truth, derived from the apostles and their disciples.

The Rule of Truth, also known as the Rule of Faith, takes a Trinitarian form – identifying and characterizing the work of the Triune God: the Father Almighty, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. As Irenaeus articulates the Church’s unified faith, its christological core grants special im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Ways of reading Luke’s Gospel: through the Middle Ages
• 2 Ways of reading Luke’s Gospel: from the Reformation to the present
• 3 Reading Luke’s Gospel
• 4 Mapping Luke’s Gospel
• 5 The architecture of Luke’s Gospel
• 6 ‘I rejoice in God my saviour’: God, God’s purpose and Luke’s narrative
• 7 ‘I must preach the good news of God’s kingdom’: Jesus and his mission
• 8 ‘Take up their cross daily’: disciples and discipleship
• Bibliography
• Scripture acknowledgements