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James Tissot, Saint Luke (Saint Luc), Brooklyn Museum

LUKE–ACTS (Draft) .

Luke–Acts is the name usually given by Biblical scholars to the combined works of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles found in the New Testament. Together, these two books make up the largest part of the New Testament (28% percent of the whole) and describe the formation of Christianity from the birth of Jesus through the ministry of the Apostles. Luke–Acts should be seen as a single historical work, in which the first part details the life of Jesus, while the second records the events of First Century Palestine that led to the creation of Christianity. By "ancient standards", Luke–Acts was an "outstanding" history.

Date and Authorship

The Early Church Fathers were unanimous in their belief that Luke–Acts was written by Luke, a companion of Paul. Luke was a well educated Greek-speaking Christian, who wrote primarily for Gentile churches. The conventional date for the writing of his history of the Early Church is some time after the fall of Jerusalem between 80–90 CE.

Luke may have been the first Christian historian who modeled his work on Josephus. Luke uses very similar techniques to assert the presence of the church as a reality in the Graeco-Roman world and claim its right to exist in that context, as a political, social and religious entity. Also both Luke and Josephus emerge from the same cultural background, Hellenistic Judaism affirming the Jewish origins of the church.

Composition

Theophilos commissioned Luke to write an extensive history of the early Church. Being a rich, distinguished and well-educated patron of the Christianity, Theophilos could be relied upon to provide for Luke's needs. These would include scrolls of the Septuagint, as well Hebrew and Aramaic speaking scribes to travel with him to various synagogues collecting information, and source material. Also, there were Greek scribes to write down the Gospel as Luke dictated it.

Communication in the early church was slow but effective. A historian of Luke's magnitude would have access to more material than modern scholars can envisage. These sources would have been both oral and written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek.

The famous "We" passages

A 3rd-century AD Greek papyrus of the Gospel of Luke

Luke–Acts is a history of early Christianity based mainly on Koine Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic primary sources. However, in Acts 16 the the writing style changes from that of an editor to that of an eyewitness. The account shifts from the third person "they" to the first person "we". Chapter 16 gives an account of the Gentile mission led by St Paul and is the first of the famous 'we' passages. These begin when Paul was in Troas, a Roman colonia, that is, a city which had been settled with veterans from the Roman army. Troas was in the north-west of Asia Minor, and there Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia urging him 'come across into Macedonia and help us' (Acts 16.9). Luke's account continues:

“ ...now when he had seen the vision, we immediately sought to go out to Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to evangelize them. Having set sail from Troas, we made a straight run to Samothrace, and on the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia, and a colonia. Now we stayed in this city for some days ”

This places Luke in Apostle Paul's party at a major centre of the Pauline mission, in the year 49 CE. Scholars agree that Luke was with Paul's party when his narrative uses 'we', and not the rest of the time. Thus Luke–Acts was based on major primary sources with intermittent eyewitness accounts.

Semitisms in Luke

A Semitism is a Greek word or phrase, that can best be understood as the result of a prior Semitic (Hebrew or Aramaic) exemplar. The publication of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, along with variety of other Hebrew and Aramaic documents composed in ancient times have have given scholars a great understanding of historical script from the era of Jesus.

First, notwithstanding that Luke/Acts was written in Koine Greek, it attributes some Aramaic words to Jesus. Furthermore by studying the translation of the text, we can get at the Semitic source behind Luke. For example, when Luke says:

“ But woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue and every herb and pass over justice and the love of God. It was necessary to do the latter and not pass over the former. ”

Matthew's version of the herbs to be tithed (Mt. 23.23), shows that 'rue' was a mistranslation from the Aramaic. Since Matthew has 'dill', we can see what has gone wrong. The Aramaic for dill was four letters written as sh-b-th-ā: Luke misread it as sh-b-r-ā, 'rue', (i.e. Syrian rue) This is just one letter different, an easy mistake.

Another example of mistranslation from the Aramaic is the following:

“ Some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, “Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.”

Jesus replied, “Go and tell this fox, Look! I am casting out demons and performing healings to-day and tomorrow, and on the third I am perfected."

”

This reference to Herod Antipas as a 'fox' has led scholars to describe King Herod as cunning, for foxes were commonly thought of in the Greek world as cunning. This does not however make good historical sense, since Herod Antipas is not otherwise known to have been particularly cunning.

Moreover, Jesus' Aramaic word ta'alā, also means 'jackal', and there were more jackals than foxes in Israel. Also, there was no standard Greek word for 'jackal', because there were no jackals in Greece. We may therefore conclude that Jesus described Herod "as a jackal".

That makes perfect polemical sense! The jackal was a noisy, unclean nuisance of an animal, a predator which hunted in packs. This is a beautiful description of one member of the pack of Herods, none of them genuinely observant Jews. Many of them were ruthless rulers who worked with packs of supporters to hunt down and kill their opponents. Therefore, the recovery of Jesus' original word ta'alā helps fit this saying "into its original cultural context".

Summary

Scholars agree that regarding the historicity of Jesus, Luke-Acts is extremely important. Evaluating the historical worth of the Lukan material involves various considerations. Often this scholarship interlocks in different ways; making it impossible to treat them separately. It is almost universally agreed that Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts were written by the same person. He was familiar with Judea, and had knowledge of independent sources many of them Semitic. Moreover, Luke had access to the sayings of the Jesus of history not recorded otherwise. Furthermore, Luke preserves important historical material from the first century that would have been lost.

Luke-Acts was the culmination of many years' work by a committed Christian scholar who collected the traditions about Jesus. There can be little doubt that Luke was an "outstanding historian by ancient standards, and he had access to a wide variety of sources" making Luke-Acts a major historical work about Jesus giving us important insight into the formation of Christianity.