Luke-Acts

For a concise summary go to Dr. Bart Ehrman’s post The Gospel of Luke in a Nutshell, January 29, 2025. See the Italicized extracts below.

Luke is often considered the most “gentile” of our gospels, both because of its distinctive portrayal of Jesus in terms familiar to ancient pagan readers and because it stresses that the gospel was divinely intended to go to the non-Jews, an emphasis even more central in the book of Acts, the second, companion, volume written by the same author, “Luke”.

More than the other Gospels, this account portrays Jesus in ways that would resonate with readers familiar with the stories of other “divine men” in Greek and Roman pagan traditions, who were sometimes also said to have been born through the union of a god and a mortal, who were religious prodigies, who could heal the sick, control the elements, cast out demons, and raise the dead, and who at the end of their lives were exalted to the heavenly realm to dwell with the gods.

At the same time, Luke’s Jesus is completely Jewish and is in particular portrayed as one of the prophets sent from God.  In fact, he is the final prophet.  His birth is reminiscent of the births of prophets in the Hebrew Bible such as Samuel (Luke 1-2; see 1 Samuel 1-2); his mother celebrates his birth in words very similar to those of Samuel’s mother (Luke 2:1-10; 1 Samuel 1:46-55); he begins his ministry by reading the prophet Isaiah and claiming he is the one Isaiah predicted who will now proclaim the prophetic message (Luke 4:16-30); he does miracles that closely resemble those of the prophets (see the raising of the son of the widow from Zarephath in Luke 7:11-17, which is very close to Elijah’s raising of the son of the widow of Nain in 1 Kings 17:17-24); he is therefore proclaimed to be a “great prophet (Luke 7:16); he suffers rejection like the prophets (cf. Jeremiah); he indicates that he must go to Jerusalem to die because that’s what happens to all the prophets (Luke 13:32-34).  All these passages are unique to Luke among our Gospels.

God will indeed come and judge the nation.  As in the earlier Gospels, Jesus predicts that God will destroy Jerusalem and its temple, leading to the arrival of the cosmic judge of the earth, the Son of Man, and the kingdom of God (Luke 21).  More than the other Gospels, though, Luke emphasizes that the realities of the kingdom can already be seen in Jesus’ ministry: he already brings healing to the sick and demon-possessed, raises the dead, and reveals the divine life of love that all will experience who enter into that kingdom.  Those who follow Jesus can already find the kingdom among them (Luke 17:20-21).

Luke 17:20-21 – Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

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Mikeal Parsons – Who Wrote the Gospel of Luke? BR 2001 *** This file is in my DropBox of this great paper that presents a lot of information about the writer and his times.

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Luke 4:18–19 – Jesus reading Isaiah in the Synagogue

NRSV – He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.

ESV – Jesus opens the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and reads, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19, ESV).

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ISRAEL AND THE PLAN OF GOD – Luke’s Understanding of the Future of Israel by JAMES D. TABOR, Ph.D. in DropBox.

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From Wikipedia’s Gospel of Luke here. *** Formatting it into a list is mine.

Even what Luke does say about Christ is ambiguous or even contradictory.^[44] For example,

• according to Luke 2:11 Jesus was the Christ at his birth, but in Acts 2:36 he becomes Christ at the resurrection, while in Acts 3:20 it seems his messiahship is active only at the parousia, the “second coming“; similarly, in
• Luke 2:11 he is the Saviour from birth, but in Acts 5:31^[45] he is made Saviour at the resurrection; and
• he is born the Son of God in Luke 1:32–35,^[46] but becomes the Son of God at the resurrection according to Acts 13:33.^[47][48] 

Many of these differences may be due to scribal error, but others are argued to be deliberate alterations to doctrinally unacceptable passages, or the introduction by scribes of “proofs” for their favourite theological tenets.^[49]

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Geographic Errors in Luke

Luke makes mistakes in two different respects. In the ancient world, there were settlements that are called polis, which is a city. A city in the ancient world is not only a settlement with a certain kind of population size but a city also in the ancient world is assumed to have certain kinds of amenities: a stadium, a theater, an Agora that is a central public space and so forth.  Luke has a tendency to call many places in the interior of Palestine polis, the cities, where we’re pretty sure that they never were cities. Jerusalem might qualify as a city  Tiberius and Sepphoris would perhaps qualify as a city but when you say that Capernaum is a city or Nazareth is a city or Nain [a village located in Galilee, near Mount Tabo] is a city that’s a misnomer these aren’t cities in any kind of technical sense so that’s the first kind of difficulty that one encounters and then another difficulty perhaps the most obvious one is in about chapter nine. [See post on this site titled All Cities Towns and villages are Ir.]

In Luke 9, Jesus starts moving south from the area of Galilee on his trip towards Jerusalem. In literary terms, this is called the Travel section of Luke, where Luke uses the literary trope of Jesus on the way to Jerusalem and a number of things happen as he travels.  At chapter 10, Jesus is already south but you have the woes against the Galilean cities of Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin. Now he hasn’t been near there for several chapters. If one were looking at a map and asking why is he attacking these Galilean towns where he’s no longer in Galilee. wouldn’t it make more sense to have the attack on the Galilean towns say back in chapter seven. Well that’s not where he puts it: he puts it in chapter 10.

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Acts

The Dark Age of Earliest Christianity, 

By James Tabor – June 16, 2021. opening paragraphs extracted below.

Most of my readers know that the anonymous author of the writing we refer to as the “Gospel of Luke,” in fact, wrote a second volume to his work–known to us today as the “Acts of the Apostles.”

The author refers to himself in the first person in the opening of both parts of this two-volume writing (Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1), as well as inserting a first person narrative, sometimes called the “We Source,” in three places: Acts 16:10-18; 20:4-21:19; and 27:1-28:30. Scholars are divided as to whether these first person references originate from the author himself–or are pulled in from a travel narrative available to him. It would seem obvious that whoever wrote this work intended the reader to believe the former, so that the author is presenting himself as present and traveling with Paul.

Joseph Tyson has an exceptionally clear and balanced presentation of the various arguments for an early (early 60s CE in Paul’s lifetime), intermediate (80-90 CE) and a late date (110-120),  in his article archived at Bible & Interpretations, see “When and Why Was the Acts of the Apostles Written?”  

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When and Why Were the Acts of the Apostles Written? ***

By Joseph B. Tyson, Professor emeritus of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University, April 2011

The range of proposed dates for Acts is quite wide, from c. 60 CE-150 CE. Within this range of dates, three are prominent in the scholarly literature: an early, an intermediate, and a late date.

See my page for Marcion where there are paragraphs from his paper that Acts is in part a “challenge” of Marcion. Tyson contends that as Acts challenges Marcion “point by point” then it has to have been written after Marcion.

Note James Tabor’s positive comment as Comment No. 1 about Tyson’s article.

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Theophilus in the Bible: Who Was Theophilus in Luke and Acts?

Written by Joshua Schachterle, Ph.D written: on September 21st, 2024 and published on Bart Ehrman’s blog here. Talking points extracted from his work is as follows.

• Theophilus was a common Greek name in the 1st century CE and meant either “friend of God” or “beloved by God.” 
• Bart Ehrman is to have said “this preface, written in what is certainly the most polished Greek of any of the Synoptic Gospels, signals that his book is meant to be a serious piece of ancient historical writing.”
• One theory that has proliferated over time says that since Theophilus means “friend of God” or even “lover of God” in Greek, perhaps the author of Luke-Acts was merely addressing his writing to a Christian community or even all Christians.
• Some say…perhaps Theophilus was Paul’s lawyer, or the High Priest in the Temple. … There is zero evidence tying someone named Theophilus to Paul’s trial, and while there may have been a High Priest named Theophilus, he was High Priest decades before the writing of Luke-Acts.

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Here is the handout to Lecture 15 from Mark Goodacre’s course on BSA titled Mysteries of the Synoptics.

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The “We Passages” in Acts at The Gnostic Archive by M. David Litwa, PhD. Scholar recommended by Markos ____ of BSA.

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Bart Ehrman’s Course at BSA: The Genius of the Acts of the Apostles

From Lecture 1:

Theme: History? Judas as a Case Study. His death is told in Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18-19.

• Similarities between our two accounts
  • Judas Dies In Jerusalem
  • Connected with a Field of Blood
  • Purchased with the Betrayal Fee
• Differences that matter
  • What Happened to the Money?  (Returned?  Used?)
  • Who Bought the Field?  (Priests? Judas?)
  • Which Way Did He Fall? (Feet first?  Head First?)
  • How Did He Die? (Hanging?  Spilling intestines?)
  • Why Is It Called the Field of Blood? (Blood Money?  Blood?)
• Realities?
  • Matthew could be right and Acts wrong
  • Acts could be right and Matthew wrong
  • They could both be wrong
  • They cannot both be right