Chapter 82 of 404

CHAPTER 6 - Luke-Acts as History

CHAPTER 6

Luke-Acts as History

“. . . having acquired thorough knowledge I decided to compose carefully for you an orderly narrative from its beginning, honorable Theophilus, so that you may be fully assured about the matters in which you have been instructed.”

LUKE 1:3-4¹

“The reasons for regarding Luke-Acts as a History are obvious and, to most scholars, compelling.”

LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON²

“[Luke] is not just an ‘edifying writer’, but a historian and theologian who needs to be taken seriously. His account always remains within the limits of what was considered reliable by the standards of antiquity. That means that the author’s assurance in Luke 1:3 is more than mere convention; it contains a real theological and historical programme, though this cannot be measured by the standards of a modern critical historian.”

MARTIN HENGEL³

We have treated the Gospels as biographies, but one Gospel invites a somewhat different approach, an approach that illustrates the often fine line between biography and history. Luke’s Gospel is indeed a biography, but it is part of a two-volume work (Luke-Acts) that when taken together cannot easily be defined as biography.⁴

Although the two volumes may differ somewhat in genre,⁵ the narrative unity of the two works⁶ would invite any attentive auditors to hear them together. Many scholars suggest that Luke may combine elements of two genres,⁷ especially in this case the related genres of history and biography. While taken by itself the Gospel is biography, as part of Luke’s two-volume work the Gospel becomes a biographic component in a larger history. Ancient auditors would not find such a combination difficult to comprehend; authors of multivolume histories could devote an entire volume or section to a particularly prominent character.⁸ Luke’s biography of Jesus is thus inseparable from his larger historical work.

Just as most scholars today recognize the Gospels as biographies, the dominant view concerning Acts today, earlier argued by Lukan scholars such as Martin Dibelius and Henry Cadbury,⁹ is that it is a work of ancient historiography. ¹⁰ Luke Timothy Johnson in the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that most scholars today accept this assignment of genre for Luke-Acts as a whole.¹¹ Indeed, Hengel and Schwemer contend that those who deny Luke-Acts as acceptable first-century historiography need to read more ancient historiography “and less hypercritical and scholastic secondary literature.”¹²

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