Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles – “The New Testament In It’s World” – Wright and Bird

The gospel of Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles, are regularly seen as a double work from a single author. For that reason people today regularly refer to them together, as ‘Luke-Acts’. This two-volume work has enormous significance in the New Testament and within early Christianity as a whole. First, it is the largest sub-corpus of the New Testament. Luke-Acts makes up a massive 28 per cent of the New Testament. Paul’s letters comprise only 24 per cent; the Johannine corpus covers a mere 20 per cent—and that’s assuming the authenticity of the authorship of all the writings attributed to Paul and John, which is disputed. Second, Luke is both an evangelist (in the sense of ‘a gospel-writer’) and the first church historian. He has his own unique depiction of Jesus as the ‘Lord’s Messiah’ and he narrates the beginnings of the church with emphasis on the ministries of Peter and Paul. In fact, Luke’s two-volume work is something of a New Testament in miniature, telling the story of Jesus and the apostles in one continuous narrative.

If Luke-Acts has one central theme, it might be ‘salvation’—though that word has become such a Christian cliché that saying this may carry less weight than it ought. Luke-Acts is the story of the ‘Saviour’, the story of ‘those who are being saved’,6 and traces how salvation extends from Israel to the ends of the earth.

I (MFB) have often imagined Luke as a cross between the Anglo-Irish literary critic and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis and the Scottish archaeologist and biblical scholar William M. Ramsay. Luke writes in stylish prose, contends for faith in Jesus, defends Paul, and interprets Israel’s scriptures through a messianic grid, all while being immersed in the history and culture of the Roman empire. There are many questions we might wish to ask him. Exactly which sources did he use in his composition? (He tells us up front that he has compared things that other people have written.) How might he explain some of the apparent discrepancies between the Paul he describes in Acts and the Paul of the actual letters? What would he say about the continuing Jewish people who have not recognized Jesus as Messiah? Is he biased—either against them or for them? Or is that the wrong question? Are the sermons by the apostles in Acts a reliable account of their preaching, or did he just make them up? What might he say to those who have called him an ‘early Catholic’? Is there more to be said about women in the church? Was the early church really a proto-socialist movement? What was an average worship service actually like? And so on.

Tradition has identified the author of the third gospel and the Acts of the Apostles as Paul’s travelling companion Luke, a physician, who was with Paul on many of his missionary journeys and also during Paul’s imprisonments in Ephesus and Rome. Sources in the late second century (including Irenaeus, the Muratorian canon, and the anti-Marcionite prologues) ascribe authorship to this Luke.

A more promising line of enquiry can be found in Acts. During Paul’s second missionary journey, the author abruptly starts using the first-person plural, ‘us’ and ‘we’, starting when Paul and his friends are in Troas. This feature is then repeated, ending with Paul’s dramatic voyage and shipwreck. These sections are usually referred to as the ‘we’-passages. At first glance they appear to indicate that the author of Acts accompanied Paul during this phase of his missionary travels.19 This would correspond to Paul’s noting of Luke’s presence in some of his letters.

Most scholars today would insist that Luke-Acts is to be dated after AD 70. First, Luke is dependent upon Mark’s gospel, and Mark is normally dated sometime around AD 70. Second, a post-70 dating corresponds with the view that Luke 19 and 21 seem to regard the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple as a past event that has now ushered in the ‘times of the Gentiles’. Some suppose that a pre-70 date is possible, because Luke would have recorded the deaths of Paul and perhaps Peter if he knew about them. Without the result of Paul’s forthcoming trial before the emperor, Acts has appeared to many as truncated—though there could be many reasons for the author stopping where he does. The omission of the apostles’ martyrdoms is normally seen as meaning either that Luke’s audience already knew what fate had befallen Paul and Peter, or else—and more likely—that his purpose was not to write Paul’s biography but to show the spread of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome, which by Acts 28 he had already done.

Lukan authorship of both works has largely been affirmed across church history and in modern scholarship, but treating these two books as a literary unity with a coherent theology is a relatively recent phenomenon, starting with Henry Cadbury’s monograph of 1927 which first introduced the phrase ‘Luke-Acts’ into scholarly parlance.

First, the evidence garnered from the prologues in Luke 1.1–4 and Acts 1.1–2 signifies that we have two parts of the one work. Second, the gospel of Luke is constructed specifically to prepare the way for Acts by omitting materials from Mark (like those about gentile inclusion) which are set out in Acts, while also foreshadowing several themes that will be developed later, such as the holy spirit, discipleship, the scope of salvation, and Jewish hostility to the gospel. Third, it is hard to go past the observation that there are deliberate parallels developed between Jesus, Peter, and Paul in terms of proclamation and miracles performed. Fourth, at the macro-level, Luke-Acts is united in its depiction of the single purpose of God. As Joel Green puts it:

Luke’s agenda is not to write the story of Jesus, followed by the story of the early church . . . Rather, his design is to write the story of the continuation and fulfillment of God’s project—a story that embraces both the work of Jesus and of the followers of Jesus after his ascension. From start to finish, Luke–Acts brings to the fore one narrative aim, the one aim of God.

Luke’s motives for writing his two-volume work were clearly complex. Among the many scholarly proposals are: to catechize gentile converts; to chronicle the church’s mission; to defend Paul at his trial; to attempt a synthesis of Jewish and Pauline Christianities, resulting in an ‘early Catholicism’; to account for the delay of Jesus’ return by periodizing history into ‘salvation history’; to commend Christians to pagan onlookers as a strange but peaceful sect while indicting the Jews as incendiary rabble-rousers; to legitimate Christians as God’s people; to respond to criticism of Paul from the Jewish Diaspora and from Jewish-Christian groups; to justify the division between Christianity and Judaism; to refute, albeit indirectly, the heresies of Docetism and Gnosticism; to exonerate Jesus while giving an account of the church as the ideal collegium; or, more simply and perhaps naively, to explain how Christianity spread from Jerusalem to Rome.

Luke’s motives for writing his two-volume work were clearly complex. Among the many scholarly proposals are: to catechize gentile converts; to chronicle the church’s mission; to defend Paul at his trial; to attempt a synthesis of Jewish and Pauline Christianities, resulting in an ‘early Catholicism’; to account for the delay of Jesus’ return by periodizing history into ‘salvation history’; to commend Christians to pagan onlookers as a strange but peaceful sect while indicting the Jews as incendiary rabble-rousers; to legitimate Christians as God’s people; to respond to criticism of Paul from the Jewish Diaspora and from Jewish-Christian groups; to justify the division between Christianity and Judaism; to refute, albeit indirectly, the heresies of Docetism and Gnosticism; to exonerate Jesus while giving an account of the church as the ideal collegium; or, more simply and perhaps naively, to explain how Christianity spread from Jerusalem to Rome.

It is worth remembering that Luke was writing in a context where the Jewish people had for a long time been put in a special category by the Romans. As far as the Romans were concerned, the Jews were anti-social atheists. But they were not persecuted by Rome simply for being Jews; they had been granted the status of a permitted religion. Luke’s massive two-volume work can be read as claiming, among many other things, that this status ought now to belong to the Christians. They are the ones who have inherited the Jewish promises of salvation; they are the ones to whom accrues the status proper to a religion of great antiquity. They, time and again, are shown to be in the right, to be innocent, even when magistrates have pronounced them guilty: from Jesus on the cross, to the apostles before the Sanhedrin, to Paul (in Philippi, then before Agrippa and Festus, or, later, on the voyage to Rome), the Christians are declared to be innocent of the charges of sedition or subversion that are laid against them.

Thus, while Luke-Acts has several utilities, didactic, polemical, and evangelistic, it is principally an apologetic work. Luke’s gospel extols and exonerates Jesus, while Acts presents Paul as a divinely chosen agent, a faithful herald of Jesus Christ, warmly received by Jewish Christian leaders like James, slandered and menaced by Jews, and treated unfairly by Roman officials. In Luke’s narration, the church is radical but harmless, the proper heirs of Judaism’s religious heritage. Luke engages in a form of ethnic reasoning that legitimates the multi-ethnic churches as God’s new-covenant people. In the end, Christians retain what pagans respected about Judaism (antiquity, homogeneity, monotheism, and ethics), while jettisoning what pagans found unattractive about Judaism (ethnically based social separation and strange customs). There is more to Acts than this, but not less.

All the material above is quoted directly from “The New Testament In Its World,” by NT Wright and Mike Bird, SPCK publishing, 2019