Gospel of Luke

I presented my paper, "THE REDISCOVERY OF CODEX BEZAE CANTABRIGIENSIS AND ITS SUBSEQUENT EFFECT ON THE RECEPTION OF LUKE 16:19-31" in room Central 214 of the Pontifical Gregorian University on Friday, July 05. My lecture was part of the Synoptic Gospels program unit (chairs: J. R. C. Cousland and John P. Harrison), which met for presentation at the 2019 International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in Rome, Italy (July 01-05, 2019). The Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Gregorian University were the host institutions.

Description:
The Synoptic Gospels, which have formed a coherent unit since antiquity, have played an important role in modern scholarship. This section provides an open forum for the presentation of papers, from a variety of perspectives and using a variety of methods, on these seminal religious texts.

Call for papers:
This year’s primary focus will be on the parables in the Synoptic tradition. The Synoptic Gospels Section will have three sessions: i) a session for invited papers only on the parables; ii) a general invitation for papers related to the parables in the synoptic tradition, with particular focus on matters of material culture and methodologies; and iii), a general invitation for papers on the Synoptic Gospels. There are plans to publish a selection of studies on the parables.

An introduction to conflations in the texts of New Testament documents - focusing upon, and challenging, Hort's proposals that conflations in Byzantine MSS' texts imply that the Byzantine Text is derivative of the Alexandrian and Western text-types.

The topic of the Jubilee is a significant one, both in size and importance.  In the present paper, I seek to trace its emergence and evolution in the course of Scripture, from Ararat to Sinai, Jericho to Judah, Naboth’s vineyard to Jeremiah’s field, and Nazareth to the new heavens and earth.  The Jubliee is, in a nutshell, a declarative act of restoration.  It is an eschatological peak in Israel’s calendar, and, although it is typically viewed as a priestly abstraction, it actually turns out to be reflected in the ebb and flow of Israel’s history.

In terms of its theological and cultic significance, the Jubilee is grounded in three important principles:  the perfection of God’s plans, the purity of God’s person, and the sovereignty of God over the earth.  The Jubilee cycle is first initiated in the late 15th cent. BC in the aftermath of Jericho’s fall, once the land of Canaan has been divided among the Israelites.  While the land of Israel is a microcosm of God’s new Creation, it is nevertheless part of a fallen world.  As such, it is subject to the normal process of decay, decline, and pollution, and must be ‘rebooted’ (in Yom Kippur style) every seven weeks of years in order to bring the land of Israel back into line with its divine blueprint.  Aside from such reboots, Israel would go the way of the world, as is depicted in Nebuchadnezzar’s colossus.  The land would become progressively polluted, disordered, and removed from Yahweh’s Edenic ideal, until it reached a point of total de-creation and returned to dust.  Grounded in the day of Atonement, the Jubilee provides an antidote to such entropic decline.  But, of course, a reboot can never advance Israel beyond her initial condition.  The notion of a Jubilee ‘cycle’ therefore seems inherently frustrated, plagued by a kind of Qoheleth-like futility.

In the NT, Jesus cranks the notion of a Jubilee up a notch.  For Jesus, the Jubilee is not merely a reset of Israel’s initial conditions;  it is a reversion of all Creation to its initial (Edenic) condition.  As such, Jesus’ Jubilee is inextricably bound up with the defeat of Satan and the release of Israel and the nations from Satan’s dominion.  It is set against the backdrop of a chaotic wilderness, a worldwide day of atonement, and a cosmic showdown with the world’s powers and principalities, all of which notions are latent in ‘the Nazarean pericope’ (Luke 4.16-21), and are inherently connected with the person of Melchizedek and the conclusion of the Jubilee cycle in Second Temple literature.

The Christmas Eve devotional essay, published by the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust (pages 83-85 in A Book of Days: Christmas Reflections from the Northwest, Steven G. W. Moore and Richard Ganz SJ, eds.; Franklin, TN: Seedbed Publishing, 2014)

Convocation Address at Bethel University, August 29, 2016 about recent troubles in Minnesota, particularly the shooting of Philando Castille, and our responsibility as followers of the Gospel. There is an audio link also available. After you click the link, it's the first one in the queue; fast-forward to 15:00:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/2016-2017-chapel-college-arts/id1148681753?mt=10

Spencer serves as professor of New Testament and biblical interpretation at Baptist Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. His monograph Salty Wives, Spirited Mothers, and Savvy Widows: Capable Women of Purpose and Persistence in Luke's Gospel (Eerdmans, 2012). He has also contributed a commentary on Acts in the Readings series (Bloomsbury1999), a volume on Luke and Acts in Abingdon’s Interpreting Biblical Texts Series (2011), Journeying through Acts: A Literary-Cultural Reading (Baker Academic, 2014) and the Song of Songs volume in the Song of Songs in the Wisdom Commentary Series (Michael Glazier, 2017). 

The book begins with twenty pages introduction defining Spencer’s methodology for the commentary and a brief introduction to his view of theological interpretation. Spencer is not interested in writing a compendium of previous work on Luke. He avoids the tedious repetition other commentaries. He strives toward a “rigorously sequential development, mindful of interpretive journey” (5). The commentary has very little interest in redaction criticism. Spencer is not concerned with how Luke handled his sources, rather he wants to let “Luke be Luke on his own terms” (6).

This outline builds on the foundation laid in The Christology of the Fourth Gospel, contributing also to my Bi-Optic Hypothesis, an overall theory of Johannine composition and the history of the Johannine situation, and the relation between history and theology in the Johannine tradition. It was presented as a short paper at the 2016 SNTS meetings in Montreal along with other handouts.

Summary:  In the present note, I discuss Jesus as ‘the root of Jesse’.  Isaiah 11.1’s reference to Jesus as a branch from the root of Jesse finds its fulfilment in the two Messianic ancestries recorded in Matthew and Luke.  In the aftermath of Jehoiachin’s curse, YHWH raises up a new Messianic ‘branch’ from Jesse’s roots, namely Jesus’ Lukan ancestry.  Keywords:  Jesus, Matthew 1, Luke 3, genealogies, Jesse, root, branch, Messiah, Isaiah.  Date:  Nov. 2019.

This paper (in Dutch) investigates the possibility that, for the first chapter(s) of his gospel, Luke reworked a source (either Hebrew or Aramaic) which had at its centre the birth of John the Baptist. It deals with questions as:
-was Zacharias, the father of John, murdered in the Temple?
-was Zacharias only mute or also deaf?
-was there an original annunciation to Elisabeth?
-why did Elisabeth hide herself and for whom?
-does the Visitatio go back to the story of an angel visiting Elisabeth?
-who sang the Magnificat: Mary or Elisabeth?
-can some details in the Protoevangelium of James (Infancy Gospel of James) be explained by the author being influenced by this hypothetical source about John the Baptist?

L'articolo approfondisce il personaggio di Abramo nel Vangelo secondo Luca.
Conclusioni: L’Abramo di Luca non è quello di Paolo, ma neanche – da molti punti di vista – quello di Marco o di Matteo, e neppure quello degli Atti. Pur essendo citato molte volte, nella maggior parte dei casi rimane sullo sfondo; da questo possiamo capire perché, nonostante la frequenza, non abbia attirato troppo gli interessi della ricerca biblica. Per farne un personaggio unico e importante bisogna semplificarne il ritratto; ma forse conviene accettare i limiti in cui l’ha posto l’evangelista. Fa la sua parte, e poi si ritira. Se a qualcuno dispiace questo suo ruolo fin troppo defilato, non ha che da attendere di continuare con il libro degli Atti, dove tornerà ad essere maggiormente sotto i riflettori in quanto destinatario di una promessa che si va compiendo.

The second feminist wave has led to a large scale search for traces of women's authorship, traditions, and leadership in ancient society. The aim was to reclaim women's past as a heritage, in order to support and motivate the struggle for women's liberation in modern society. This is especially true for the field of biblical exegesis and patristic studies, as the continued exclusion of women from church leadership had been motivated by the idea that women did not have any significant position in early Christianity. Although the search the presence of women in early Christianity was put on the agenda by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1983), it must be remembered that this search actually started during the first feminist wave, with a group of scholars in the German 'History of Religions School' assembled by Adolf Harnack  in the famous Kirchenväterkommission. In his book Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (1902), Harnack was able to establish a decisive role played by women in early Christian mission. But then, Harnack was a liberal protestant scholar who felt less restraint than his Roman Catholic counterpart Alfred Loisy, who kept relegating mainly domestic roles to women in the ancient world. In all of this, the Gospel of Luke seems to have been the eye of the storm, as this gospel does pay much attention to women, but in a rather ambiguous or paradoxical way.
While it is clear that the search for gender roles in Antiquity has from the outset been motivated by a liberal protestant wish for freedom on the one hand, versus a staunch catholic defence of established positions on the other, it is also clear that the concept of gender itself remained unquestioned, and was applied in an anachronistic, even parontocentric way. Gender remained a concept stemming from modernity, primarily based on biological sex. New Testament scholars, e.g. Conway (2008) have become increasingly uneasy about this and have attempted to describe the construction of gender in Antiquity in terms of virtuous behaviour, rather than sex. Following contemporary research in the field of classical studies, they have proposed a bipolar gradual scale between virtuous masculinity on the one hand and femininity on the other.
In my paper, I will argue that this behaviour based model falls short in giving account of the ambiguity described for Luke's Gospel. I will propose a far more nuanced model to describe the construction of gender in Antiquity, at least during early imperial rule. My model is based on Vitruvius, in which interpretation encountered the same problem as in the case of Luke, that is, a gender paradox, oscillating between 'hypermasculinity' (Milnor 2005) and 'low gender rhetoricity' (Williams 2016). I will argue that a close reading of Vitruvius is not only helpful to delineate the outlines of an ancient gender paradigm 'under construction,' but also helps to highlight a particular development within the construction of gender in which Luke takes part. Thus, I hope to demonstrate that a new heuristic model for gender in Antiquity suddenly and unexpectedly brings to the fore a development in the dealing with gender hitherto not clearly acknowledged, which helps to explain in its turn both the paradox described for Vitruvius and the ambiguity in Luke's Gospel.

El artículo presenta un estudio de la parábola del samaritano misericordioso (Lc 10,25-37) aplicado a las realidades eclesiales y sociales de América Latina. Se divide en dos partes. La primera
de ellas está destinada al estudio de la perícopa completa, esto es, incluyendo el diálogo inicial entre Jesús y el jurista. Busca detectar los elementos que apuntan a caracterizar el discipulado cristiano y aquellos que orientan la mirada del creyente en la dirección de quienes hoy están en la situación de la víctima de la parábola. La segunda parte desarrolla una reflexión en torno a las notas que se deducen de la perícopa para el discipulado en América Latina. Son cuatro pistas que iluminan y desafían la experiencia de fe e invitan a los creyentes a hacerse prójimos de aquellos pueblos e individuos tirados al borde del camino.

This article deals with the parabole of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10, 25-37) applied to the ecclesial and social realities in Latin America. It is divided in two parts. The first, studies the whole passage which includes the initial dialogue between Jesus and the jurist. It tries to detect the elements whose aim is to characterize the Christian discipleship and those who guide the believers´s approach towards those who are now in the victim´s position. The second part, develops a reflection around the accents coming out from a reading of the parabole for the discipleship in Latin America. We are speaking of four ways that shed light on the experience of faith and challenge it; they invite the believers to become neighbours of those peoples and individuals thrown at the edge of the road."

Luke-Acts demonstrates a theological concern with Jesus as Redeemer of the outcasts (whether they be within Israel or Gentiles), and a literary concern with Greco-Roman modes of presentation.  In both these respects, Luke-Acts is unique among the rest of the New Testament.  In this paper, I review the specific Greco-Roman literary techniques that Luke-Acts exploits, as well as evidences of its theological concerns.  Ultimately, in this paper I assert that the unique literary concern of Luke-Acts serves its unique theological concern: that is, the texts demonstrate Greco-Roman modes of artistic presentation, especially epic and epic history, in order to make a theological point about the universality of the Gospel message and the endless dominion of Jesus as King, as well as to present Christianity so as to be compelling to Gentiles.

A Katolikus Egyház Katekizmusa szerint „Szent Lukács evangéliuma kiemeli az imádság fontosságát Krisztus misztériumában” (§ 2600). Írásomban ezt az igazságot szeretném kicsit boncolgatni: kiemelni néhány érdekes pontot, hogy a meglátások gazdagítsák életünket.

In theological research of The Christian Community and in anthroposophical circles, there is a tendency to follow the chronology of John rather than the synoptics. Questioning this tendency initially, this paper follows research by Andrew Welburn, Emil Bock, Rudolf Steiner and others on Essenism and Gnosticism to understand the re-emergence of mystery initiations in Palestine before the christian era and the significance of initiation, death and resurrection for christianity, tracing the independent mystery traditions of each of the four gospels and ending cautiously in favour of the historical accuracy of the second half of John's gospel.

Luke 1:46–55 is both a beautiful hymn sung to glorify God and an interpretive puzzle. This text, widely known as the Magnificat, is one of several songs Luke uses at a crucial moment in the birth narratives in order for characters to explain the amazing ways in which God is moving. Luke includes it in his narrative to foreshadow the ministry of reversal Jesus will bring, first to Israel and eventually to all people. It is a praise hymn made up of a combination of OT allusions—more specifically, allusions to the Greek translation of the OT commonly referred as the Septuagint and abbreviated LXX. What follows is a study of the LXX allusions that combine to make up this praise hymn—allusions which have the cumulative effect of presenting Mary as a key character in the continuation of God’s OT promises and plan.

In this presidential address, I outline a history of pentecostal/charismatic reception. I explore different ways that pentecostal/charismatic believers have received, appropriated, and used Acts 8 throughout our history. I propose that a reception of more than one hundred years of pentecostal musings over Acts 8 provides a snapshot of our extended pentecostal family. I suggest up front that this family history exposes pentecostal/ charismatic notions about the nature of biblical interpretation. I conclude with general observations from my research and suggest further implications for students and scholars interested in reception history.

The aim of the article is to examine the role of the Holy Spirit in the mission of the Church in the view of the author of the Acts of the Apostles. First, the specificity of Luke’s pneumatology (Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles) was presented in comparison with other synoptics and Paul’s approach to this subject. In comparison with Mathew and Mark, Luke’s teaching about the Holy Spirit is much more developed. The difference between Paul’s and Luke’s pneumatology (in particular Acts) is that the Apostle of Nations presents mainly the work of the Holy Spirit in the believers, whereas Luke demonstrates Holy Spirit in actions through believer’s in the mission of the Church. This activity applies especially to three areas: giving God’s power to serve in the Church, inspiring and directing evangelization, strengthening the Church and encouraging it. At the end of the article the similarities between the teaching on the Holy Spirit in the Acts and in the Gospel according to John.

Only a select few scholars in the history of New Testament research have achieved the level of stature that Adolf Harnack enjoyed in the eyes of the academic guild of his day. Harnack's importance is often measured with regard to his historical-theological works on church history, the history of doctrine, and the essence of Christianity as defined within the paradigm of classical liberalism. The impact of his scholarship, however, was not limited to these areas of focus. He also made substantial contributions to New Testament research, not least to Lukan studies. In the first half of this essay, I describe the various areas of Harnack's scholarly endeavors within the context of his life, major influences, and academic career. This sets the stage for the second half of this essay where, having situated Harnack's contributions to Lukan scholarship within the context of his life and intellectual environment, I will present the content and arguments in his major works on the Third Gospel and book of Acts to critically assess their strengths and weaknesses and gauge their enduring value.

En hébreu comme en araméen, le premier mot du Magnificat (Luc 1, 46-55) – Μεγαλύνει en grec, Magnificat en latin – est construit à partir de la racine GDL (גדל) tout comme l’épithète araméenne Megaddela (מגדלא) qui signifie “la Magnifiée” et qui renvoie à la mère de Jésus.

James Edwards previously contributed the volume on Mark to the Pillar New Testament Commentary. It is unusual for a commentary series to assigned two Synoptic Gospels to a single scholar. What is more, Edwards did not write the Acts commentary in the series, David G. Peterson did in 2009. This allows Edwards to read Luke without having a second commentary on Acts in mind. As a result, Luke nor Luke is not merely a prologue for Acts.

El episodio se sitúa dentro del esquema que Lucas desarrolla en su narración de la infancia de Jesús, donde se insertan de modo paralelo los hechos referidos al Bautista y a Jesús, destacando siempre la superioridad del Mesías respecto a su precursor. Para María, el rechazo a Jesús se convertirá en una espada que atravesará su corazón,
quedando de ese modo totalmente unidos los destinos del hijo y de la madre.

Das Neue Testament erzählt auf facettenreiche Weise über Maria. Allerdings nimmt Maria in den neutestamentlichen Schriften keineswegs einen so großen Raum ein, wie man es aufgrund ihrer Bedeutung als Mutter Jesu vielleicht erwarten würde. Irritierend gering ist gar das Interesse des ältesten der Evangelien, des Markusevangehums, an der Figur der Mutter Jesu. Andererseits ha-ben einige der neutestamentlichen Erzählmotive eine immense Wirkungsgeschichte in der Theologie-, Kirchen-und Kunstge-schichte entfaltet, so dass das Neue Testament heute kaum mehr ohne die Brille der späteren Entwicklungen gelesen werden kann. An prominenter Stelle ist dabei na-türlich die Erzählung von der Verkündigung an Maria (Lk 1,26-38) zu nennen, der diese Ausstellung gewidmet ist und die wie kaum eine andere neutestamentliche Erzählung spätere Marienbilder geprägt hat.-Doch wie kommt es vom Desinteresse des Markusevangeliums an Maria zu der Sorgfalt, mit der sich das Lukasevangelium der Mutter Jesu zuwendet? Und wie passen diese Bilder zusammen? Müssen sie über-haupt zusammenpassen? Begeben wir uns also zunächst auf einen Streifzug durch die neutestamentlichen Erwähnungen der Mutter Jesu, um uns dann in einem zweiten Schritt etwas genauer der Erzählung über die Verkündigung an Maria zuzuwenden.