Jesus the Savior of the World:

The Gospel according to Luke  

Luke is the last of the Synoptic Gospels. Although the anonymous composer of the Gospel of Luke perhaps doesn't do as much damage to the historical Jesus as Matthew seems to have done, still Luke modifies his sources to present his own vision of Jesus the man in much the same way. Luke is a Greek Christian writer living after the 70 holocaust who turns his attention to the necessity of presenting Christianity to the Greco-Roman world. But did Luke, as did Matthew, go too far in modifying his information on Jesus? Is the Jesus that Luke and Matthew present in their Gospels even remotely related to the historical Jesus? We are able to seek answers to these critically important questions thanks to the amazing coincidence that we happen to have the documents of two early Christian writers, one Greek Christian and one Jewish Christian, whom we are calling Luke and Matthew respectively, each of whom--without the knowledge of the other--was doing the same thing at the same time and using the same major sources. By separating out the elements added to the tradition by these two anonymous editors, we can obtain a better view of what the historical Jesus may have looked like.

Read Carefully and Consider the Implications for our study:

• What to Expect, p. 121

• Pages 121-123, especially the part on the Comparative Method,
  be familiar with all methodologies used thus far for studying individual gospels

Major Themes: pp. 123-138

• The Preface to Luke's Gospel, Luke 1:1-4

  1 Inasmuch as many have undertaken
  to set in order a narrative of those things
  which have been fulfilled among us,
  2 just as those who from the beginning
  were eyewitnesses and ministers
  of the word delivered them to us,
  3 it seemed good to me also, having had
  perfect understanding of all things from the very first,
  to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus,
  4 that you may know the certainty
  of those things in which you were instructed.
   

  • What were the "many narratives" to which Luke had access
    other than Mark, Q, and L?
    Is Luke denigrating his sources by stating basically that he, Luke,
    who has a "perfect understanding of all things from the first,"
    is now going to give his readers "certainty", i.e., the truth,
    thus implying that his predecessors' accounts were somewhat less than true.
    Is he targeting Mark in particular?
     

  • Assuming that by "all things from the first" Luke means that he has
    perfect understanding of all the Jesus events from the beginning,
    How could this anonymous author, AKA Luke,
    claim to have such extensive knowledge about Jesus
    when he was actually twice removed from the historical Jesus?
    Luke's perspective is derived from Paul who also did not know Jesus.
    
     

• The Christmas Stories
   

  • Review my web page comparing the Nativity Stories of Luke and Matthew
     

  • Why did both Luke and Matt feel the need to create a pedigree for Jesus
    when that was not even a concern to the earliest writers,
    Paul, Mark, or the composers of Q, M, L?
    
    Are we again faced with another high profile example
    of the real historical Jesus being considered lacking by later Christians
    to the point that they would fabricate two independent nativity narratives
    to fill in what they considered to be gaps in Jesus' personal history?
     

• From Jew to Gentile:
   

  • Luke seems to be walking a fine line between focusing on:
     

    1. Jesus' Jewish background associated with Jerusalem and its Temple,

    2. the need to present his message appropriately to the Roman empire,
       given that Rome had just concluded a successful, devastating war
       against the Jews, leaving Judea destroyed and many Jews massacred.
       Obviously in this climate, any association with Judaism was negative.
        

  • Are these two purposes compatible at all?
    Why is Luke taking such pains to pursue this paradox?
     

• Luke's distinctive emphases
   

  • Work through our web page on how Luke modifies Mark
    to present Jesus both as a Jewish prophet and
    as a philosopher who would appeal to the Greco-Romans
     

  • Consider why Luke took pains to de-emphasize Jesus' death
    as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world,
    when that was precisely the major emphasis of Luke's supposed mentor, Paul.
    Is Luke reinventing Paul in the same way that he is reinventing Jesus?
     

  • As a Christian living in the Roman empire in the 80's of the first century CE,
    Luke has to justify the fact that the expectation of the end of the world
    within a generation of Jesus' lifetime simply did not happen.
    
    Is Luke's tactic of delaying the expected end-time setting a bad precedent
    that has plagued Christians for the last two millenia to this day,
    forcing them to continuously and repeatedly move back the end of the world 
    and rationalizing why the most recent predictions did not materialize?
    Most recently, from the 1970's to the 1990's the terminal date was 2000;
    now in the first decade of the third millenium CE
    we are suddenly looking at 2012 as the projected date,
    and so on and so on and so on, etc., etc., etc.

   

• An Important Question:

Why is Luke, supposedly Paul's physician companion,
seemingly unaware of Paul's letters? (cf. 1 Timothy 5:18)

• Discrepancies in Luke's Accounts in Acts of Paul's Conversion

• Discrepancy between Paul's own account and Luke's accounts

• Discrepancy between Paul and Luke on Jesus' atoning death

Learn the Key Terms on p. 139 with special reference to their original context in the chapter