Embedded in the first century, alive for our own: recent research on Luke's Gospel.

It is stimulating and provocative to have vast amounts of information readily at hand about every sort of topic. Yet, this information age in which we live can become downright daunting. How do we sort through that information to find its significance for the calling of preaching, teaching, and imagining God's dynamic presence among us?

Even when we narrow our focus to preaching and teaching based on Luke's Gospel, we are confronted with an enormous amount of detailed analysis of everything from carob pods to the standard vocabulary of friendship in the ancient world. Japanese New Testament scholar Hisako Kinukawa has identified part of our task very well: "The social, cultural, political, economic, and religious reconstruction of the times when the texts were edited, when the stories were told, and when the incidents took place must be done carefully and continuously." (1) Given the massive size of this agenda and the equally massive information to be uncovered and analyzed in regard to each part of it, Kinukawa's next statement is painfully true: "It seems, however, that it is far beyond my capacity to do all the research on my own."

Indeed, it is beyond any single person's capacity to keep up even with the research done by others! Learning comes from the efforts of an ever-larger team of players.

Two kinds of interpretive questions

Looking over the landscape of Lucan studies from the past five to ten years suggests that scholars have been pursuing two basic sets of questions. One set deals with the words, images, and rhetoric of an ancient Greek text written in a world with assumptions and knowledge vastly different from our own. How was the story of Jesus perceived as good news in that world? How was this good news described? A second set of questions is about connecting the world of the earliest Christians and our own. How does a better understanding of the ancient text sharpen implications for our own interpretation? Susan Garrett points out the "social and cultural chasm that separates us from the authors and first readers of ancient texts. The remarks about ancient medical and philosophical assumptions about femininity and sexual abstinence draw attention to this stunning gap." (2) The more one learns about those early texts, the more challenging it is to understand their authority in our own time.

Joel Green and Luke Timothy Johnson, for instance, have written excellent commentaries on Luke's Gospel (Green in 1997 and Johnson in 1991), and both have more recently written about the interpretive process. (3) Green and Johnson insist that the meaning of a text does not and cannot abide only in the time of a text's origin. We all trust that Scripture texts continue to speak among us. Many scholars write of being drawn into the world of the text, where we are re-formed by the powerful envisioning of God's realm. To the extent that we are drawn into the "world of the text," historical study (including literary and rhetorical analysis) must be done. Green points out that a "critically engaged reading of the text would account for ... the cultural embeddedness of all language (rather than assuming that all people everywhere and at all times construed their cultural life-worlds as we do)...." (4)

Embedded in the first century

Luke's Gospel generally is read with The Acts of the Apostles in view. Although there is disagreement about the genre of both Luke and Acts, it usually is accepted that both were written by the same person. If Luke is the "interpreter of Israel," (5) Jesus' engagement with Israel in Luke is likely to be coherent with the story of Israel as it moves on in Acts. How might the complex portrayal of "Israel" and the Jews in Acts lead us to nuance our portrayals of Pharisees and Sadducees in the Gospel?

A second area much examined is the study of how Luke's Gospel is embedded in the Greco-Roman world--its traditions, social arrangements, politics, and the like. Such names as Loveday Alexander, Marianne Bonz. David Balch, Richard Pervo, Vernon Robbins, and Ronald Hock come to mind. (6) A third area of study has to do with the connections between Luke and other "interpreters of Israel" such as Philo and Josephus. Gregory Sterling has been eager to read Luke as deeply embedded in the world(s) of Hellenistic Judaism, as portrayed by Philo and others. Green, David Moessner, and many others pursue Luke's embeddedness in the Hellenistic Judaism of the Septuagint.

Ancient fiction/romance novels

Scholars recently have turned to ancient fiction for a renewed picture of the social world of the first century and the ways in which it was described for readers. Hock has been working with ancient Greek novels since the early 1990s. In a 1998 essay Hock argues that ancient novels, usually referred to as romances because of plots that revolve around the difficulties of love, "provide the reader with a remarkably detailed, comprehensive, and coherent account of the social, economic, and religious institutions of the people and regions that witnessed the spread of Christianity into the Greek East of the Early Roman Empire." (7) These novels were read throughout the ancient world. In telling stories about men and women of their time and place, they present plausible and satisfying pictures of that world, including its religious life, household and civic arrangements, and the kinds of speech conventions that took place at all sorts of events.

Such pieces offer many clues about the New Testament world, including the Gospel of Luke, which also makes assumptions about "everyday" behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and practices. The parables show that Jesus also used everyday circumstances to tell a story about God. Where and how what we read is everyday life becomes critical in knowing how Luke wants us to see God's activity as similar to or an extension of the everyday or utterly different from it. In Luke Jesus interacts with all kinds of people who are involved in their everyday activities. Jesus' speech or action surprises folks, causes them to wonder who he is, and leads to a reconsideration of what is really going on in the world. The ancient novels help us to understand what exactly was surprising about Jesus' speech or action.

Hock asks how reading ancient romances might help in understanding Luke's parable of the Good Samaritan (10:30-37). This parable, unique to Luke, has been interpreted with great care and attention to detail over the millennia of its existence. Much loved and familiar even in the world outside the church as a description of selfless assistance to one's neighbor in need, the story has been approached from literary, historical, and doctrinal perspectives, some of which demand allegory to make sense. Hock asks how this story might be understood if it comes from the same world that read, heard, preserved, and handed on the romances. He notes that the time and space spent on the Samaritan is much more than is spent on anyone else in the story. When he reads it with the plots and vocabulary of those romances in mind, he finds many fresh and new connections. Let me outline a few of his key insights.

Rereading Lucan parables alongside ancient novels

This parable is about the highly valued ancient quality of philanthropia, love of humankind. Philanthropia, for which another word was mercy (eleeos and cognate forms), was much thought about in the ancient world, not simply in regard to giving great sums of money. Careful attention to the ancient novels leads one to see that the Samaritan's behavior is a conventional manifestation of philanthropia whose value does not require the degree of enmity between Jews and Samaritans posited by some scholars. Do countless generations of sermons about Jews and Samaritans as hostile entities shape contemporary Christians who hear in this parable adumbrations of tensions between Jews and Palestinians?

Equally interesting is the way that piety toward God and toward the neighbor is the standard ancient way of "describing a good person." (8) Luke's Gospel moves in a broad Mediterranean context and shows us Jesus emphasizing concrete ways of being "good." To be philanthropic in the first century would be to "accept a limited number of responsibilities toward an unlimited number of people." (9) As Hock points out, philanthropia in the ancient world would have been a kind of mirror image to friendship, or philia, in which one owes unlimited responsibility to a very limited number of people. Luke and the other New Testament writers make use of both concepts to talk about the kinds of relationships that exist among people and between humankind and God.

We are back at that point made by Kinukawa: No one alone can make a definitive interpretation. The work of translating, editing, and publishing the ancient novels has been of relatively recent vintage. Some of it was accomplished by the work of literary and historical scholars of the classics, who are not theologians at all. Yet these resources let us come fresh to our New Testament texts. Again, I find encouragement when there is overlap between stories of Jesus and the worldview of his near contemporaries. There is a ring of authenticity about the Gospels and this preacher/teacher/prophet/Son who emerges from them. There is also the freedom from having to make a case for Jesus as absolutely unique. Instead we are invited to see how Jesus, embedded in the language, the concepts, the systems of his time, evokes the work and ways of God in terms that people can grasp.

Hock also treats Luke's parable of the father with two sons (Luke 15:11-32) in light of the features of ancient novels. (10) As in the example of the Good Samaritan, Hock reviews the difficulties of interpreting this parable over the last two thousand years. In our time parables generally are imagined to use the everyday world and its situations to make some point about the life of discipleship or the activity of God.

Hock identifies the way in which parables were deemed to function in their own time, using "familiar events in some area of everyday life ... to clarify and confirm claims being made about another area of life." (11) He discovers that the events in the parable of the prodigal son are really much more conventional than many had believed. He finds that the behavior of the father in hastening to welcome home one believed lost or dead is not surprising, unheard of, or undignified. Many interpreters of Luke's parable have found its center in the eager reception of the son by the father. They have seen that as so highly unlikely and unacceptable among humans that it must be identified with the reception of sinners by God, whose love undoes human convention. While this is a good thing to say about God, it is not an accurate thing to say about human fathers in the first century. (12)

Hock sees this parable as turning on the "social event of 'getting back.'" The parable then is not about crisis in the family, broken relationships, or a terrible loss of honor for the father, all interpretations that many thoughtful New Testament scholars have suggested. Instead, the parable is about the joyful response of God rather than about the character of God versus the character of sinful humans. Because the response of joy at "getting back" what had been deemed lost is the thrust of the parables of the lost coin and the lost sheep, the joy of God at "getting back" one deemed lost is the central point of this parable. In such an interpretation, one is not constrained by reference to customs no longer in sway, to ideas of Jewish sources, or tenuous literary allusions to other scriptural stories of two brothers. The parable becomes more straightforward. It also raises the interesting point that we may, indeed must, imagine some things about God on the basis of our human experiences.

What other "team" members bring to interpretation

Interpretations that use ancient fiction to make the world of Luke's text more familiar to us work well when someone else on our "team" of interpreters does the research. For those of us whose calling is to lead others into the Scriptures that shape our faith and back out again into our everyday, the real challenges are to know whom to trust, to bring our own best critical thinking to the methodologies used, and to be honest about the gap between Luke's world and our own.

When it comes to work on Luke, there are important modes of interpretation in addition to the use of ancient fiction, all of which highlight interesting facets of the Gospel's embeddedness in its context. Most ancient novels, for example, do not deal with Jewish characters and Jewish life. Were Jews socially invisible, not important enough to be included in novels that have survived for us? Visibility in the written descriptions of the sociopolitical world tell us much more about the writers, readers, and preservers in the ancient world than they do about the groups' lives. While it is true that Jews would have held many conventions and assumptions with non-Jews in the centuries after Alexander, and while we know about some obvious differences between Jews and non-Jews, are there things we miss because of a dearth of "everyday" information about Jewish life?

Some scholars have turned to Jewish "novels" such as Tobit, Joseph and Aseneth, 1-4 Maccabees, Susanna, or even Judith to see how Jews told their own stories of the ways of God and the demands of discipleship. Such stories may be especially useful in helping us understand two aspects of Luke's Gospel: the demands and rewards of discipleship or service of God and the hopes characteristic of Jewish life. It is highly salutary to read friendly witnesses to Jewish life and theology, as opposed to some of the polemical positions within the Gospel, positions often taken as historical "truth" by some contemporary hearers.

A second area, not different but certainly distinct from working with ancient novels, is that of attending to the genre of Luke's Gospel as a form of ancient history writing. History is variably defined by such writers as Gregory Sterling and Marianne Palmer Bonz, who typify the broad range of possibilities that might fall under the rubric "history." Bonz is interested in Luke-Acts as a "foundational epic" similar in desired effect if not in exact form to the Aeneid, the foundational epic of Rome, written by Virgil to connect the Augustan dynasty to divine intervention during the Trojan War. (13) Her thesis is suggestive of how Luke and Acts as a two-volume work (the Aeneid is also divided into two parts) might be imagined to function in a Greco-Roman world. Sterling, on the other hand, turns our attention to Philo: "I think that the Philonic corpus is the single most important body of material from Second Temple Judaism for our understanding of the development of Christianity in the first and second centuries." (14) It is not that any of the Gospel writers or Paul know or consciously imitate Philo but rather that Philo's project of making sense of Jewish Scripture for Jews (and perhaps others) who lived in a predominantly non-Jewish world is like the project of the early believers in Jesus.

David Balch has begun to probe the ways in which Luke's (hi)story of Jesus was embedded in the visual culture of the time. (15) Balch's work reminds us that literacy in the first century was very low; artistic depictions of myths and stories were prevalent throughout the Mediterranean world. How might one who knew and saw the story of Isis and Osiris, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, or the death of Hector on a wall, a vase, a drinking cup, or a piece of armor come to appreciate the story of the death of Jesus? Balch seeks to identify some of the concepts within which a first-century audience would have imagined the theological importance of Jesus. This is precisely the work carried out by contemporary preachers and teachers, who also face a visual culture whose symbols are powerful and difficult to keep up with. Artistic renderings of themes found in Luke's Gospel (and throughout the New Testament), particularly in regard to Jesus' death and resurrection, is a relatively new approach for the time period of the New Testament.

This has been a brief look at some of the particulars of recent research into the Gospel of Luke. There has been a turn toward a humble reimagining of the culture in which this Gospel was embedded, with a hope of discerning how and why Luke's story was good news, a cause for joy, hope, and transformation of people's lives. Such approaches are humble because the focus of each particular work must be somewhat narrow. As these approaches overlap one another, some of the richness of the conceptual life of Luke's Gospel and its audience is revealed. Likewise, some of the great differences between Luke's day and ours become clear.

Scholars argue about the relative importance of the world "behind the text"--Luke's world, the world(s) of Luke's audience(s), the world of Jesus, the world of the early church--and the world "in front of the text"--that created by the text and the contemporary reader/hearer. (16) The world created by the text must resemble the world behind the text, or it would have been unintelligible to its reader. In order for us to be caught up in this world in such a way that it can reshape our own, we must work harder than our ancient forebears to discern its assumptions. Otherwise, we will substitute our own assumptions, based on millennia of having been taught "right" answers about God's activity in Jesus. Such seeing requires many voices who will consider each other's questions and answers, methods and sources, as ways to know the God of our forebears more fully in our own time.

Sarah Henrich

Luther Seminary 

1. Hisako Kinukawa, "Response," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 20.1 (Spring 2004): 117.

2. Susan R. Garrett, The Christian Century 115 (December 16, 1998): 1225.

3. Joel Green, "Scripture and Theology, Failed Experiments, Fresh Perspectives" Interpretation 56:1 (January 2002), 5-20; Joel Green, What About the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002). Johnson has gone on to work on Acts and the letter of James but has also written a strong response to historical Jesus research, Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999). He also has written on the work of biblical scholars, The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) and the creed as a hermeneutical rubric for Christians: The Creed, What Christians Believe and How It Matters (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

4. Green, "Scripture and Theology," 19.

5. A rubric to describe the project in which the first volume is Jesus and the Heritage of Israel: Luke's Narrative Claim on Israel's Legacy, ed. David Moessner and David Tiede (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), to cover the work of the Society of Biblical Literature Luke-Acts Seminar).

6. For a variety of essays by these authors and others see Ancient Rhetoric and Early Christian Narrative, ed. Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance, and Judith Perkins (Atlanta: Scholars, 1998).

7. Ronald F. Hock, "Why New Testament Scholars Should Read Ancient Novels," in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative (Atlanta: Scholars, 1998), 123.

8. Hock, "Ancient Novels, 137.

9. Hock points out the areas of responsibility as (1) greeting everyone, (2) aiding anyone who is unfortunate, and (3) being gregarious. "Ancient Novels," 132-33, 137.

10. Hock, "Romancing the Parables of Jesus," Perspectives in Religious Studies 29.1 (Spring 2002): 11-37.

11. Hock, "Romancing the Parables," 37.

12. Carole LaHurd, in "Recovering the Lost Women in Luke 15," Biblical Theology Bulletin 24.2 (1994): 66-76, also argues that portraying the father as radically unconventional in the interpretation of this parable is not consistent with information she gleaned from women in the contemporary Middle East. This counters the self-descrip-tion given by males whom Kenneth Bailey interviewed and is supported by Hock's analysis of the ancient romance novels.

13. Marianne Palmer Bonz, The Past as Legacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000).

14. Gregory Sterling, "The Significance of Philo of Alexandria for New Testament Study," Perspectives in Religious Studies 30:3 (Fall, 2003), 252.

15. David Balch, "The Suffering of Isis/Io and Paul's Portrait of Christ Crucified (Gal 3:1): Frescoes in Pompeian and Roman houses and the temple of Isis in Pompei," Journal of Religion 83:1 (January 2003), 24-35.

16. A recent example is J. Severino Croatto, "Jesus, prophet like Elijah, and prophet-teacher like Moses in Luke-Acts," Journal of Biblical Literature 124:3 (Fall 2005), 451-65.