As the first historian of Christianity, Luke's reliability is vigorously disputed among scholars. The author of the Acts is often accused of being a biased, imprecise, and anti-Jewish historian who created a distorted portrait of Paul. Daniel Marguerat tries to avoid being caught in this true/false quagmire when examining Luke's interpretation of history. Instead he combines different tools - reflection upon historiography, the rules of ancient historians and narrative criticism - to analyse the Acts and gauge the historiographical aims of their author. Marguerat examines the construction of the narrative, the framing of the plot and the characterization, and places his evaluation firmly in the framework of ancient historiography, where history reflects tradition and not documentation. This is a fresh and original approach to the classic themes of Lucan theology: Christianity between Jerusalem and Rome, the image of God, the work of the Spirit, the unity of Luke and the Acts.

The First Christian Historian. Writing the "Acts of the Apostles"

Pauline Christianity takes a fresh perspective on the composition and reception of Luke-Acts in relation to the category 'Pauline Christianity' as it has been used to describe traditions, communities, and persons connected to Paul. This inquiry is pursued along three lines. (1) The reception of the Acts of the Apostles and the 'Pauline' Luke by Irenaeus is addressed. (2) The compositional intentions of the author of Luke-Acts in constructing 'Pauline' Christianity are analyzed. (3) The literary Paulinism of the author is separated from the Paulinism of his sources. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion of Paul's role in the history of early Christianity by making clear the extent to which the 'Pauline Christianity' of Luke-Acts has its origins in various second-century attempts to reconstruct the Christian origins.

Pauline Christianity: Luke-Acts and the Legacy of Paul

1. Background and methodology 2. Authorial data: seams and summaries 3. Authorial criteria: Greek prose compositional conventions 4. Authorial unity: analysis results and probabilities 5. Final considerations and future directions.

The Assumed Authorial Unity of Luke and Acts: A Reassessment of the Evidence

This thesis examines possible allusions to the cult in Luke and indicates their potential impact on his soteriology. Various Jewish concepts of ‘salvation’ current in Luke’s day are discussed. This is followed by a critical examination of the Nazareth pericope (Lk 4.16-30) and the Emmaus encounter (Lk 24.13-35), as possible allusions to the Jubilee, and that Jesus might be presented as the fulfilment of the prophetic redemption contained therein. The sabbath-day healings are considered as possible indications that Luke’s Jesus deliberately healed on the sabbath in order that the sick might, being healed, receive shalom. Indications that Luke and his contemporaries may have understood the consecration of the sabbath in Genesis to be, at least partly, a celebration of shalom as the work of creation, is presented as possible evidence that the healing ministry of Jesus in Luke was fulfilling the purpose of the Temple cult (the ritual re-creation of Edenic shalom), and that Jesus applied to himself the exemption from sabbath-day rest granted to the Temple priests. Finally the prayer of the parabolic tax collector (Lk 18.13) is treated as a possible allusion to the prayer of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement and an indication that the righteousness attributed to those who observe the Day is now available to the penitent sinner.

Salvation in Luke: the impact of allusions to the cult on his soteriology

Nearly every scholarly investigation of Luke—Acts today must address the question of unity. It is a hermeneutical hinge and the answer to the question has wide-ranging interpretive implications. The call to dissolve the unity of Luke and Acts—and the `hyphen' Cadbury inserted—focuses on four `bolts': (1) genre, (2) narrative, (3) theology, and (4) reception history. Despite far-reaching argument over the past twenty years favoring removal of the four `bolts', the hinge remains securely fastened. In addition, there is significant coalescence around certain issues such as the presence of an intermixing of genre types in Acts and an intertwining of the narrative and theological themes in Luke and Acts. And questions about unity have led to new avenues of exploration and the identification of trajectories that crisscross both volumes and tie them together.

The Unity of Luke—Acts: A Four-Bolted Hermeneutical Hinge

Joseph Tyson's The Death of Jesus in Luke-Acts and Robert Tannehill's The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts, published in 1986, are good examples of the interpretive wealth being mined by scholars who are adopting literary-critical methods for approaching the Lukan writings. What most distinguishes these critics' approaches from older, more familiar ones is the claim that the Bible's historical narratives are imaginative re-enactments of history – thus, in form, more akin to fiction than to theology, biography, or history. Robert Alter called the Biblical stories ‘historicized fiction’, meaning in our case that the author of Luke and Acts employed the artifices of fiction-writing, among others, supplying feeling and motives and creating speeches and dialogue for his characters. Professors Tyson and Tannehill, and other literary scholars like them, are helping us better discern how these techniques were used in Luke and Acts, thus opening new windows to the characters, the way that the author ascribes intentions to them, the plot, themes, nuances, points of view, uses of irony, and word-plays and associations in the writings.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0028688500024498

J. Dawsey

Papers

The Literary Unity of Luke-Acts: Questions of Style – a Task for Literary Critics