 In this course, we're going to be looking at the Gospel according to St. Luke. What sort of a book is it? What's it trying to do? Well, to answer that question, who better than Luke himself? Because in his own introduction to the book, this is what he says. Many people have undertaken to draw up an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled in our midst. He doesn't yet say what events these are, but that will become apparent. It's a kind of a nice grand literary opening. He goes on, It has been handed down to us by the original eyewitnesses and stewards of the word. So, most excellent Theophilus, since I had traced the course of all of it scrupulously from the start, I thought it a good idea to write an orderly account for you so that you may have secure knowledge about the matters in which you have been instructed. Well, you may say, who is Theophilus? And the answer, frustratingly, is we don't know. It may be a fictitious person, a kind of general dedication. Theophilus could mean a lover of God. It may be that Luke is gesturing towards a wide audience beyond the borders of Judaism to the Gentile world, where there were many who were seeking to be lovers of God and were drawn into the Jewish narrative and story and the scriptural world. Or maybe Theophilus is an actual person, maybe a high official, and Luke is dedicating his work to him. He pops up again at the beginning of Acts, which is Luke's second volume. And really, one has to consider Luke and Acts together, though we won't be able to do that during this course. But what this tells us is that Luke is taking care to stand back and say, now, there's a lot of stuff going on. People have written about these events. He doesn't actually name Jesus himself until verse 31 of this chapter. So there's a while to go before we even get the name. But Luke knows that Theophilus knows where we're going and what it's all going to be about. And so Luke is telling us that this is a kind of a life of Jesus, but within the whole purview of the larger events which are going on at the time. The Jewish story, the story of Israel, the story of Israel's God, and what this God has done and is doing and will do. And Luke, we often say, is a historian. He tells us that he's basing his work on sources. I've often said to students when teaching this stuff that Luke explains he's used oral and written sources. He's checked things out with the eyewitnesses and stewards of the word. That may be a technical term in early Christianity for people who in the different early Christian communities were regarded as a kind of safe pair of hands. This is somebody who really knows the story, who knows how to tell it. Luke has checked it out with people like that. And he's also checked things out with people who were there. It's not clear and most people think it in fact isn't the case that Luke had known Jesus himself. It's not impossible, but he may be somebody who's come into Christianity quite early on and has had the time and opportunity to go around and check things out. We won't be able to get too much into detail, but those who think, as I do, that Luke was a companion of Paul on some of his travels have as one possible hypothesis that when Paul was in prison in Caesarea, awaiting the hearing which would eventually send him on the ship all the way to Rome and to Caesar, that Luke may have had the leisure during those two years to go around and check things out. And it may be that his gospel is the fruit of that research. But anyway, he tells us that other people have done this sort of thing before. Many have undertaken to draw up an orderly account of the events. So Luke knows not just of one other gospel, but he implies several. Of course, we have in the New Testament Matthew and Mark and John as well as Luke. Hardly anyone thinks that Luke knew John, although I have heard people try to suggest bits of a theory like that. Almost everybody thinks that Luke used Mark. And indeed, when we put Luke and Mark side by side and map them out, we can see how he has used Mark. He has had a lot of material of his own which isn't in Mark, and then he cuts in and follows Mark quite closely, though usually abbreviating the Mark and passages, and then he goes back to his own material again. And we can see that in detail in passage after passage, until finally everything comes rushing together in the story of Jesus last days in Jerusalem and his crucifixion when there's so much overlap between the different versions that it's hard to tell who used what. And along with that question of Luke using Mark, many people think still that Luke and Matthew had access to another source or a combination of sources, which scholars down the years have referred to by the letter Q, which stands for the German feller, which means source. And so the old theory was that Luke had Mark on the one hand and this mythical hypothetical document called Q on the other, Q being the bits which Luke and Matthew have in common, and that Luke has maybe adjusted Q a little bit like he's adjusted Mark here and there, and that maybe Matthew has adjusted Q as well. I, however, in common with many scholars today, take a different view, and that is that Luke almost certainly had access to Matthew. There are some today indeed who argue, went the other way, that Matthew had access to Luke and the fact that very senior distinguished scholars can take both those views tells us that we shouldn't be too dogmatic about that. And in this course, I'm not going to assume one particular relationship between Luke and Matthew, but I am going to assume, as I say with most, that Luke has used Mark and that again and again we can see Luke's particular emphasis, not only in his own special material, but in the way he has used Mark. But the point is he's used oral and written sources and if we know anything about oral culture in a time like Luke's, it's pretty clear that once people started telling stories about Jesus in communities from Jerusalem all the way north to Antioch and maybe south towards Egypt as well and maybe out into the wider world, then there were many, many, many stories and versions of stories around and Luke has quite deliberately, as he says, tidied them up and presented them in an orderly fashion. When did this happen and does that matter? Well, some people have dated Luke very late into the 90s or even some into the second century. Some have dated Luke as early as the mid-60s which would fit with the idea that he had been writing this Gospel while Paul was in prison in Caesarea. Does it matter? Not a great deal. What we know about the early Roman Empire, particularly the end of Julius Caesar and then the reign of Augustus and then the reign of Tiberius which is covering the time when Jesus was born and Tiberius, Jesus' public ministry. What we know about that, we know from four ancient Roman sources, Tacitus, Suetonius, Velaeus Paterculus and Diocasius. Now, Tacitus was writing around 100 or so AD. In other words, a good century and more after the time of Augustus. Suetonius likewise. Suetonius lived to about 122 AD so he was writing in the early second century. Velaeus Paterculus was a contemporary of Tacitus, a contemporary of Tiberius but Diocasius was even later. He lived from the middle of the second century to early in the third century but he had splendid information and nobody today says, oh, you can't trust Diocasius because he's writing two and a half centuries later after the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus. No, we say these are the main sources and when we look at them together they make excellent sense of Augustus, Tiberius and so on. And likewise, Josephus, the great Jewish historian who is writing in the second half of the first century, nobody says that just because he's writing 100 years after the reign of Herod the Great, therefore we can't trust him to tell us about Herod the Great. No, we say he's one of the primary sources. Most of what we know about Herod the Great comes to us from Josephus. So the idea which some people still cherish that you have to date the sources really early in order to be sure that they're accurate or if you say that they're really quite late this means that they're all fuzzy and irrelevant and it's all made up later. That's a completely false perception and we shouldn't get hung up therefore on the question of dating which in any case is not part of the New Testament and those of us who have a high view of the New Testament can read it cheerfully without finding any particular specific information about when Luke or Acts was written. I think as I say that it's quite likely that Luke itself was written around the time of Paul's imprisonment in Caesarea and that then Acts was written not that long afterwards quite possibly for use in Paul's forthcoming trial in Rome since again and again in Acts what Luke says is or rather he gets Gentile rulers to say towards the end of his story that Paul is innocent, he's not doing anything wrong he is not guilty of the charges laid against him and indeed as we shall see later that is one of the themes which dominates quite a bit of Luke's writing the sense that this story is the story of good and upright and righteous people who are following God, the God of Israel in all the commandments and ordinances that he's set out who are loyal to the traditions who are faithfully following through on the covenant God made with Abraham or rather that it's God through them who is faithfully following through on that covenant in the orderly events which have taken place. So what is Luke doing throughout this book? He is explaining not only that this is the story of Jesus this is a book which is roughly in the genre which in the Hellenistic world would be called a Bios a life when Roman in Latin a vita that is what we would say roughly a biography not necessarily like a modern biography but the life of a particular individual here Luke lays out the conception and birth of Jesus and then the crucial events from when he was roughly 30 years old through to his death and then his resurrection and indeed ascension so this is no ordinary Bios but it's likewise a Bios with a difference in the sense that Luke is telling the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of the story of Israel again and again in the opening chapters we'll see this clearly that what is about to happen and then what is happening is the thing which scripture had always pointed to the fulfillment of the long narrative the long dark winding narrative it isn't the case as some have imagined that this is a sort of progressive revelation that the story was getting lighter and lighter and lighter until finally the sun arose as it were no this has been a strange and dark narrative because Luke's story is not just about mercy and grace but it's also about warning and judgment and the two go side by side step by step throughout the book with Jesus himself both articulating that mercy and that judgment and then himself going ahead as it were and embodying it but if then the fulfillment of the scriptures is one of Luke's major themes which he emphasizes again and again and particularly in the final chapter in chapter 24 one of the themes which goes with that is the temple the story begins in the temple with Zechariah who is to become the father of John the Baptist and it ends right at the end of chapter 24 with the disciples returning from the mount of the ascension and being continually in the temple praising God Luke wants to tell the story in such a way that it has a temple feel about it because the temple is where heaven and earth come together and though Jesus issues severe warnings against the temple in Jerusalem there is a sense that Israel's history and the idea of God coming to dwell in the midst of Israel in the temple and before that of course in the tabernacle in the wilderness this is what is now fulfilled in Jesus and then as he says in Acts by the Spirit so it's not just a matter of this is a bit of Jewish backdrop the temple adds the theological depth to the whole narrative that God promised to dwell with his people and that promise made to David and then through Solomon when the temple was built a thousand years earlier this promise is now coming to a whole fresh fulfillment in Jesus and then by his spirit and because God is coming to dwell in the midst God is coming to dwell as king and the theme of God's kingdom is huge therefore Luke as of course it is for the other gospels as well but Luke has demarcated it quite carefully there is a sense as elsewhere that the kingdom is already here because Jesus says if I by the finger of God cast out demons then God's kingdom has come upon you in other words what Jesus himself is doing is the royal power of God let loose in the world but equally on the night he is betrayed Jesus says to his followers I won't drink again from the fruit of the vine until I drink it new with you in the kingdom of God in other words there is a sense in which Jesus death and resurrection make real in a new way what was inaugurated fleetingly almost secretly in Jesus public career itself so that the idea of the kingdom and the idea of the temple are hovering over the whole of Luke's narrative and as he sets it out it isn't just orderly events this is what happened next this is what happened next and so on again and again Luke is explaining that this is the fulfillment of scripture the fulfillment of God's purpose in and through the temple the fulfillment of God's desire to come into his own world to become king of the world though this is a very Jewish idea the idea of God becoming king an idea which goes back to the Psalms and to Daniel and to Isaiah and even further back than those nevertheless part of the whole point of the kingdom of God in those scriptural texts is that this is not simply something for Israel not simply something for the physical descendants of Abraham it's something which is designed to spread throughout and indeed to bring life to the whole world so that Luke's purpose again and again is to say this is how the story of Israel was fulfilled in order that then God would become king of the whole world Luke is quite careful many have pointed out in his gospel not to anticipate too much what's going to happen in acts when the Gentiles do get to hear and to everyone's astonishment Gentiles come to faith and are incorporated into this increasing and large family which remains the family which God promised to Abraham in the gospel itself this remains a matter of promise we don't get many Gentiles actually coming into contact with Jesus during the course of the gospel itself but that is the plan and when people have talked about whether Luke is a Gentile gospel or a Jewish gospel that often just misses the point we don't know for sure whether Luke was himself Jewish or non-Jewish but the point is he is plugging into this great scriptural narrative in which it was always God's purpose that when Israel's history reached where it was supposed to reach then finally the Gentiles would come in on the blessing and would be drawn into that in that moment of fulfillment and so that is the larger story that Luke is telling why is he telling it this way what's he trying to do well many including myself have suggested parallels between Luke and the Jewish historian Josephus who I mentioned before Josephus is writing after the terrible Jewish war the Roman Jewish war of 66 to 70 AD climaxing in the destruction of the temple in 70 itself and Josephus is trying to explain both to his Jewish readers and to Gentiles to his Roman audience listening in that these things were terrible and they happened because of the wickedness of some of the Jewish people but that actually the Jews and their traditions were a great and noble historical line which ought still to be respected and in a sense Luke is doing a similar thing at a time when maybe certainly in the 60s in Rome Christians were persecuted after the great fire of Rome in 64 particularly but Luke and others are saying that those who follow Jesus are part of this historical line they are part of the people of the creator God part of the family whom God has chosen and sent out into the world to be the light of the world so Luke is explaining already in the way he is producing this orderly account of the events concerning Jesus what this movement is all about in order to say to anyone watching whether they are part of the movement whether they are Jewish, whether they are Roman or whoever this is who we are it's a presentation not only of Jesus but of Jesus' followers designed to be pondered over and wondered at by the whole rest of the world so this is what we are in for and in the next session we will start off where Luke starts off with a priest in the temple who is very puzzled by the news of what's now going to happen