Chapter 88 of 404

Confirmation (Lk 1:4)

That Luke’s research serves a primarily confirmatory purpose (1:4) suggests that Luke in the end does not arrive at conclusions far distant from his sources.¹⁰¹ Ancient rhetoricians often appealed to common knowledge to make a point; though this information may have sometimes been gossip, it seems unlikely that it was typically simply a rhetorical deception.¹⁰² Appeals to common knowledge suggest that the knowledge was in fact widespread; hence that what Luke reports in his Gospel (and, to a lesser extent, in Acts) was already in wide circulation at the time of his writing, probably within the lifetime of some who had known Jesus’ public ministry.

Thus many stories Luke includes in his Gospel (as well as many that he did not) were probably widely disseminated among many churches. The early churches throughout the Empire were already informally networked long before Luke wrote, and certainly long before the more explicit network of bishops we recognize by the early second century. In Mediterranean antiquity in general, travelers regularly carried news from one location to another;¹⁰³ whenever one learned of someone traveling near a place where one had friends, one might prepare and send a letter.¹⁰⁴

Clearly already in the third decade of the Christian movement, many churches knew what was happening with churches in other cities (Rom 1:8; 1 Cor 11:16; 14:33; 1 Thess 1:7-9), and even shared letters (Col 4:16). Missionaries could speak of some churches to others (Rom 15:26; 2 Cor 8:1-5; 9:2-4; Phil 4:16; 1 Thess 2:14-16) and send personal news by other workers (Eph 6:21-22; Col 4:7-9). Urban Christians traveled (1 Cor 16:10, 12, 17; Phil 2:30; 4:18), carrying letters (Rom 16:1-2; Phil 2:25). They also relocated to other places (Rom 16:3, 5; perhaps 16:6-15 passim) and sent greetings to other churches (Rom 16:21-23; 1 Cor 16:19; Phil 4:22; Col 4:10-15).¹⁰⁵ Pauline scholarship works from a more objective basis for understanding early Christianity than some of the hypotheses circulated in sectors of Gospels scholarship. While different locations might have their own struggles or theological emphases, the idea that the early, geographically distinct Christian communities were theologically and socially isolated from one another (e.g., a “Q” community with a non-messianic, Cynic Jesus) is simply a fiction created by modern scholarship.

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