[Dialogue] 5-27-10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXIV: Introducing Luke

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Thursday May 27, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part XXIV: Introducing Luke

By the time the third gospel, the one we call Luke, was written, history had moved to the last years of the 9th decade at the earliest and quite possibly to the early years of the 10th decade. The Christian movement had journeyed beyond its earlier traumas and tensions and was now concerned about making a case for its legitimacy in the Roman Empire. I date Luke between 89 and 93, though with all proposed dating there is debate on both ends. This gospel, however, does reflect Christianity's transition out of Judaism and toward to the Gentile world. The community for which Luke's gospel was written appears to have been made up primarily of dispersed Jews, who no longer followed their traditions in a rigid pattern and, as a consequence, are beginning to attract a rising tide of converts from the Gentile world. These Gentile proselytes, as they came to be called, had little dedication to or interest in the cultic practices of circumcision, kosher dietary rules and unfamiliar liturgical practices such as a 24-hour vigil around Shavuot or Pentecost and the eight-day celebrations of the Harvest Festival known as Sukkoth. They were not intent on discarding or losing the meaning of these holy days, but they clearly were eager to reduce their place of importance and the hold they had once had on their lives.
The author of Luke is unknown, but the tradition has always identified this book with Luke the physician, who accompanied Paul and is mentioned in both Colossians 4:14 and in II Timothy 4:11. Please recall, however, that Colossians is disputed as to its being genuinely Pauline, with the weight of scholarship against it, while no New Testament scholar of significance would attribute II Timothy to the pen of Paul, so this identification is tenuous at best. What we do know about the author of the gospel of Luke, and the same person clearly wrote the book of Acts as Volume II of his gospel, is that in all probability he was born a Gentile and had been drawn first into the ethical monotheism that marked Judaism. He appears to have actually converted to Judaism and to have joined the synagogue through which he moved into Christianity. He may well have been a convert of Paul's, at least he has clearly identified himself with Paul's point of view and he champions it in both the gospel and the book of Acts.
The internal data that point us to these conclusions are plentiful. First, there is the genealogy of Luke in chapter three, which, quite unlike the genealogy in Matthew, carries the ancestry of Jesus back not just to Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, but to Adam, who would have been understood in the world view of that day as the father of the whole human race, which would include the Gentiles. Also in Luke's genealogy it needs to be noted that while he ties Jesus to King David, he does not carry that lineage through the royal lines of the kings of the Southern Kingdom as Matthew does, but suggests that the line ran not from David to Solomon but from David to Nathan. Biblical sources tell us of no son of David named Nathan, but David had many wives so he might have had many sons whose names we do not know. Where Luke got the name Nathan or why he settled on it is hard to say, but the moral hero of the story of David and Bathsheba was a prophet named Nathan, about whom I have written before. In other places, Luke appears to borrow names from Old Testament characters if it suits the message he is trying to articulate, so the connection with Nathan, the prophet, might be a good guess. We also know that Luke was not impressed with royalty or with magi, as they both get de-emphasized in this gospel.
In other notes that may give us insight into Luke's values, we note that this is the first gospel, and thus the first place in the Bible, ever to mention the Samaritans, and Luke does so with sensitivity and inclusiveness. Only Luke, for example, tells us the parable of the "Good Samaritan." That is just one more indication that his community has moved beyond the Jewish point of view. Later in the book of Acts (chapter two), Luke emphasizes anew the universal theme in his narrative when he suggests that when the Holy Spirit fell on the gathered Christian community. He is quite pointed in noting that Pentecost was a worldwide event in which the Spirit fell not only on the Jews but on the peoples of the world, who then proclaimed the gospel in whatever language those hearing spoke. To make sure that his readers understood this point, he named those who were present. They were: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Egypt and Rome (Acts 3:4-10). Clearly Luke envisioned a Christianity loosed from the ethnic limits of Judaism and propelled into being a universal faith.
We note also that the author of this gospel makes no claim to his ever having been an eye witness, but rather mentions the research that he has done, which enabled him to produce this work. He says in his preamble that "many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of the things which are surely believed among us, even as they delivered them to us, which from the beginning were eye witnesses and servants of the word (Luke 1:1-5)." We can now be certain that Mark was one of these sources since Luke reproduces in his gospel about half of Mark. Many scholars also suggest that Luke and Matthew both had a common source made up of a collection of Jesus sayings from which they both quote frequently and almost identically. This popular hypothesis requires the existence of a now lost book to which the title Q has been attached. There are some other scholars, a minority, who dismiss the Q hypothesis and assert instead that Luke also had Matthew in front of him when he wrote and that, while he preferred Mark, he did use a number of Matthew's additions to Mark and that is what created the similarities between Luke and Matthew that are attributed to Q. While the majority of scholars still follow the Q hypothesis, I for one have never been convinced of it. It is not important to enter that debate here; I merely state it as a way of keeping the argument open.
Luke also introduces a number of things into the developing Christian story that have not to our knowledge been there before. The first one is the account of the birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1). It is a fascinating story from many angles, but it is clearly not history. It reminds me of a song popular in my teenage years entitled, "Anything you can do, I can do better." John is born to post-menopausal parents. That is a wonder, but it pales into insignificance in the light of the story of Jesus being born to a virgin. When the birth of John occurs, the neighbors gather to celebrate. When Jesus was born, however, it was not neighbors, but angels who come crashing through the midnight sky to celebrate his arrival. Clearly, when Luke wrote, there was still some tension between the followers of Jesus and the followers of John the Baptist. That is why there is such a concentrated effort in all the gospels to assert that John the Baptist, who was clearly the first of th e two on the scene, knew that he was subservient to Jesus: "He must increase, I must decrease." Luke pushes this to the extreme by having the fetus of John the Baptist in the womb of Elizabeth leap to salute the fetus of Jesus in the womb of Mary (1:39-45). In this narrative, Luke appears to have borrowed a story from Genesis and applied it to his narrative (see Gen. 25:12-23). In both stories, a baby leaps in the womb of its mother. In the Genesis story, it is Rebekah, Isaac's wife, who is pregnant with twins. As these twins struggle in Rebekah's womb, she seeks the counsel of an oracle to determine the meaning of this leaping only to learn from the oracle that the older son (Esau) would ultimately serve the younger son (Jacob). In Luke's story the babies are not twins, but Luke does make them kin — perhaps cousins — but the meaning is the same, the older boy, John, will serve the younger boy, Jesus.
The custom of taking material from familiar Old Testament sources, such as the book of Genesis to tell the Jesus story, is discernable in other places. In Luke's narrative about the birth of John, he says that the Baptist's parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, conceived him when they were both post-menopausal. That motif was clearly borrowed from the story of Abraham and Sarah, who did the same thing when Isaac was born. The names of John the Baptist's parents were also, in all probability, plucked from Old Testament sources. Luke will portray John the Baptist not as Elijah, but as "the voice crying in the wilderness," a phrase that comes from the book of Malachi. The immediate predecessor to the book of Malachi in the Bible was the book of Zechariah, so Luke uses that name for the father or immediate predecessor of John the Baptist. Identifying the source of the name Elizabeth for John's mother is more difficult. There is only one other Elizabeth in the Bible and she is the wife of Aaron, the brother of Moses and the sister of Miriam. Elizabeth, written as Elisheba in Hebrew, and Miriam (written as Mary in Greek) would thus be sisters in law and thus their children would be first cousins. Only Luke implies kinship between Jesus and John and I believe that he accomplishes this by his creative use of names drawn from the story of Moses and his siblings.
As we look more deeply into Luke's unique way of telling the Jesus story, we will see again and again that Luke's purpose is to interpret Jesus in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures not to recreate him historically. Unless we understand this clearly and thus free our minds from the shackling literalism that distorts the modern ability to study the scriptures, we will never be able to hear the powerful message of Luke. This new vision also introduces into the study of the Bible a playful kind of speculation that leads us deeper and deeper into its truth. As our consideration of Luke moves on that will become clearer and even more obvious. 

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Lilly, via the Internet, writes:
I have a friend who belongs to the Jehovah's Witness Church. In a conversation about Jesus, I told her that nobody knows exactly the day and the year he was born. Then she asked why is our calendar based on his birth if we don't now exactly the year? I have to admit I did not know when and how the decision was made to count the years the way we do. Could you explain? Thank you.
Lilly, via the Internet, writes:
I have a friend who belongs to the Jehovah's Witness Church. In a conversation about Jesus, I told her that nobody knows exactly the day and the year he was born. Then she asked why is our calendar based on his birth if we don't now exactly the year? I have to admit I did not know when and how the decision was made to count the years the way we do. Could you explain? Thank you.



Dear Lilly,
What makes your friend think that our calendar is based on Jesus' birth? It is based on twelve lunar cycles with other days added to give us enough time to measure the earth's journey around the sun, which means that our rotating planet tilts to the northern hemisphere in our summer and to the southern hemisphere in their winter.
In the fourth century of the Christian era, when Christianity became established in the Roman Empire, there was an effort to change the way history was counted from the founding of the city of Rome to the birth of Jesus. They did not have the knowledge or the ability to count the years exactly, but they came remarkably close. The best guess today as to when Jesus was born is 4 BCE, but even that is based on the accuracy of the detail in the biblical narratives of Jesus' birth that his birth came during but near the end of King Herod's life and reign. We know from secular records that Herod died in 4 BCE.
The identification of the birth of Jesus with the 25th of December is not based on history, but rather on the fact that Christians chose the festival called Saturnalia on which to celebrate his birthday. Even that was not universal, as the Eastern part of the Christian Church celebrated January 6 as the birthday of Jesus. Trying to reach agreement, the western church made January 6 the Feast of the Epiphany and then by counting the days between December 25 and January 6 they came up with the "Twelve Days of Christmas," which allowed my true love to give me gifts for twelve days. All of that is tradition, none of it is history.
So you and your friend in Jehovah's Witness have lots to discuss. 

– John Shelby Spong






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