Luke–Acts

Luke–Acts is the composite work of the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. Both of these books of the Bible are credited to Luke. They also describe the narrative of those who continued to spread Christianity, ministry of Jesus and the subsequent ministry of the apostles and the Apostolic Age.

Luke the Evangelist, painted by James Tissot (c. 1886–94)

Authorship

Both the books of Luke and Acts are narratives written to a man named Theophilus. The book of Acts starts out with: "The former treatise have I made", probably referring to the Gospel of Luke. The view that they were written by the same person is virtually unanimous among scholars. Luke–Acts has sometimes been presented as a single book in published Bibles or New Testaments, for example, in The Original New Testament (1985) and The Books of the Bible (2007).

Luke is the longest of the four gospels and the longest book in the New Testament; together with Acts of the Apostles it makes up a two-volume work from the same author, called Luke–Acts. The cornerstone of Luke–Acts' theology is "salvation history", the author's understanding that God's purpose is seen in the way he has acted, and will continue to act, in history.

Composition and setting

It divides the history of first-century Christianity into three stages, with the gospel making up the first two of these – the arrival among men of Jesus the Messiah, from his birth to the beginning of his earthly mission in the meeting with John the Baptist followed by his earthly ministry, Passion, death, and resurrection (concluding the gospel story per se). Luke used the Gospel of Mark for the narrative of Christ's earthly life. While Two-source theorists maintain the Q source, other scholars increasingly argue Luke used Matthew directly or vice versa. The study of hypothetical pre-Gospel sources is declining in scholarship.

The work is Hellenized and written for a gentile audience possibly, though it does not express interest in later Gnosticism or hold to an Ignatian ecclesiology. Marcion, a famous 2nd-century heretic, who used a modified form of Luke known as the Gospel of Marcion, did not use Acts, perhaps because he was unaware of it or intentionally excluded it from his biblical canon; Irenaeus, a proto-orthodox apologist, is the first to use and mention Acts, specifically against Marcionism.

Some scholars note that there are two versions of Luke–Acts with the longer version 10–20 percent longer than the shorter version. Scholars disagree on which came first.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Luke 1:3Acts 1:1
  2. ↑ Acts 1:1, Authorised Version
  3. ↑ Martin, Dale B. (2009). "Lecture 9 – The Gospel of Luke". RLST 152: Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature. Yale University. Retrieved 19 July 2018.
  4. ↑ Hugh J. Schonfield, ed., The Original New Testament (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985). ISBN 978-0062507761.
  5. ↑ Thompson 2010, p. 319.
  6. ↑ Allen 2009, p. 326.
  7. ↑ Andrejevs, Olegs; Joseph, Simon J.; Lupieri, Edmondo; Verheyden, Joseph, eds. (2023). The Synoptic Problem 2022: Proceedings of the Loyola University Conference. Peeters Pub and Booksellers. ISBN 9789042950344.
  8. ↑ Keener, Craig (2019). Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels. Eerdmans. p. 142. ISBN 978-0802876751. Although a majority of scholars, including myself, do infer Q, a substantial and growing minority of capable scholars demur; see, e.g., Goodacre, Case; Goodacre, Synoptic Problem."
  9. ↑ Foster, Paul (2023). The Oxford Handbook of the Synoptic Gospels. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0190887452. While the study of pre-Gospel sources has in general seen a waning of interest among scholars, this tendency is nowhere more pronounced than in relation to the two proposed early sources M and L, and the early intermediary stage of Proto-Luke. Given the importance of these three hypothetical sources in theories of the solution to the Synoptic Problem during the late nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century, it is instructive to trace the emergence of these source-critical hypotheses, to discuss the reasons for the demise of adherence, and to consider whether anything of value endures from these earlier theories.
  10. ↑ Keener, Craig (2020). Acts (New Cambridge Bible Commentary). Cambridge University Press. p. 49. ISBN 978-1108468688.
  11. ↑ Carrier, Richard (2014) On the Historicity of Jesus Sheffield Phoenix Press ISBN 978-1-909697-49-2 p. 271

Bibliography