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Literature and History of New Testament Times

[158] <h2>LESSON XXIX</h2> <h3>A GREEK HISTORIAN'S ACCOUNT OF JESUS</h3> <h4>The Gospel According to Luke</h4> The purpose of the Gospel of Luke was, the author says in his prologue, that Theophilus might know the certainty concerning the things wherein he had been instructed. These words involve recognition of a fundamental need of the Church, which is to-day often ignored. After interest in Christianity has been aroused, after faith has been awakened, the Christian feels the need of a deeper intellectual grounding of the faith that is in him. This feeling is perfectly legitimate; it should not be stifled; the expression of it should not be treated necessarily as sinful doubt. The treatment of these natural questionings is one of the most important problems that faces the teachers of the present course. We are dealing with young men and women of maturing minds, many of whom can no longer be satisfied with the unthinking faith of childhood. If Christianity is to remain permanently a force in their lives it must be related to their entire intellectual equipment; it must be exhibited as a reasonable thing, which is consistent with a sane and healthy view of the world. In other words, we are dealing with the problem of religious doubt, which is almost an inevitable stage in the development of intelligent Christians of the present day. Undoubtedly the problem is often very unwisely handled. By hearing every natural expression of their doubt unmercifully decried as rebellion against the Word of God, many intelligent young people are being driven into hopeless estrangement from the Church. It is useless to try to bully people into faith. Instead, we ought to learn the method of the Third Gospel. Very possibly Luke was facing the very same problem that is before us teachers to-day—very possibly Theophilus, to whom the Gospel and The Acts were dedicated, was a young man who had grown up in the Church and could now no longer be satisfied with the vague and unsystematic instruction that had been given him in childhood. At any rate, whether he was a young man grown up[159] in the Church, or a recent convert, or merely a Gentile interested in Christianity, he was a person of intellectual interests, and those interests are treated by the evangelist not with contempt but with the utmost sympathy. The Gospel was written in order that Theophilus might "know the certainty" of those things wherein he had been instructed. That might be regarded as the motto for the entire course of study which we have undertaken this year. It should be our aim to lay before young people of the Church the certainty of the things wherein they have been instructed—to enable them to substitute for the unreasoning faith of childhood the profound convictions of full-grown men and women. Moreover, exactly like the author of the Third Gospel, we are endeavoring to accomplish this aim, not by argument, but by an orderly presentation of "those matters which have been fulfilled among us." A simple historical presentation of the facts upon which Christianity is founded is the surest safeguard of Christian faith. <h5>1. THE PROLOGUE</h5> Alone among the Synoptists Luke gives his readers some direct information about the methods of his work. Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1,2. This information, which was barely touched upon in the Student's Text Book, must here be considered somewhat more in detail. (1) Luke Not an Eyewitness from the Beginning.—From the prologue to the Gospel, Luke 1:1-4, it appears, in the first place, that Luke was not an eyewitness of the events that he narrates—at least he was not an eyewitness "from the beginning." (2) His Predecessors.—In the second place, it appears that he had had predecessors in his task of writing an account of early Christian history. Apparently, however, none of these previous works were produced by an apostle or by an eyewitness of the earthly ministry of Jesus. The previous writers, like Luke himself, were dependent upon the testimony of the eyewitnesses. The Gospel of Matthew, therefore, since it was written by an apostle, was not one of the works to which reference is made. This conclusion is amply confirmed by a comparison of Matthew with Luke. Evidently, at least, the two are entirely independent. If Luke refers to the First Gospel in the prologue, at any rate he made no use of it. (3) Was Mark One of the Predecessors?—The Gospel of Mark, on the contrary, answers to the description of the previous works. It was written not by an eyewitness, but by one who listened to eyewitnesses.[160] Perhaps, therefore, it was one of the many works to which Luke refers. If so, it may well have been used by Luke in the preparation of his own Gospel. This supposition is by no means excluded by a comparison of the two books. As a matter of fact, the great majority of modern scholars suppose that the writer of the Third Gospel made use of the Gospel of Mark. All that can here be asserted is that this view, though not required by what Luke says in his prologue, is perfectly consistent with it. (4) Luke's Attitude Toward the Predecessors.—It should be observed that Luke attaches no blame whatever to the efforts of his forerunners. When he says that they had "taken in hand" or "attempted" to write accounts of certain things, he does not imply in the slightest that their attempts had been unsuccessful. He means simply to justify his own procedure by a reference to what had already been done. "My effort at writing an account of the origin of Christianity," he says in effect, "is no strange, unheard-of thing. I have had many predecessors." Such a reference to the work of predecessors was in antiquity a common literary form. At the very beginning of his work, Luke displays the effects of his Greek literary training. Of course, however, although Luke attaches no blame to his predecessors, he would not have undertaken a new work if he had thought that the old satisfied all needs. Evidently he hoped to accomplish by his own book something that his predecessors had not accomplished or had accomplished only in part. (5) The Subject of the Gospel.—Finally, therefore, Luke informs his readers what his own peculiar methods and purposes were. The main subject of the Gospel is not described with any definiteness in Luke 1:1-4, but it appears in the retrospect at the beginning of the second work. There the subject of the Gospel is designated as "all that Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day in which he was received up, after that he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen." Acts 1:1,2. The subject of the Gospel, in other words, was the earthly life of Jesus. (6) Completeness of the Narrative.—In treating this subject, Luke had striven, he says, Luke 1:3, first of all for completeness. In his investigations he had followed all things from the beginning. This feature appears plainly in the Gospel. Instead of beginning as Mark does, with the public ministry of Jesus, Luke first gives an account of the birth and infancy, and not content with that, he[161] goes back even to events preceding the birth not only of Jesus, but also of his forerunner. (7) Accuracy.—In the second place, Luke says that he had striven after accuracy. Here again the Gospel justifies the claim of its author. The effort after precision may be seen perhaps especially in such a passage as Luke 3:1,2, where there is an elaborate dating of the beginning of John the Baptist's ministry. (8) Orderly Arrangement.—The effort at orderly arrangement, which forms a third part of the claim which the author makes, was, especially in the Gospel, limited by the material that was at hand. Evidently in Palestine in the early period, the memory of the earthly ministry of Jesus was preserved not in a connected narrative, but in isolated anecdotes. It was impossible, therefore, even for a historian like Luke to maintain a chronological arrangement throughout; where chronological arrangement was impossible he was obliged to be satisfied with an arrangement according to logical affinities. This logical method of arrangement, however, is not resorted to by Luke so much as by Matthew; and for considerable sections of his narrative he was able to gratify his historian's desire for recounting events in the order in which they happened. (9) Luke a Historian.—Detailed examination of the prologue should not be allowed to obscure the outstanding fact that the sum of what Luke here attests is a genuine historical aim and method in the composition of his work. Of course, history in Luke's mind did not exist for its own sake. The Gospel of Luke is not a mere scientific dissertation. On the contrary, the history which is narrated was to the author a thing of supreme value. But it was valuable only because it was true. There is not the slightest evidence that Luke was a bad historian because he was a good Christian. On the contrary, he was a Christian just because he was a historian. In the case of Jesus, knowledge of the real facts is the surest way to adoration. (10) Is Luke 1:1-4 a Prologue to both the Gospel and The Acts?—The first four verses of the Gospel of Luke may be taken as a prologue either to the Gospel alone or else to the entire work, including both the Gospel and The Acts. The latter view, since the subject is described in v. 1 only in very broad terms, is not to be rashly rejected. No doubt, however, in the prologue Luke was thinking especially of the former part of the work—the part for which he was dependent altogether upon the testimony of others. The first verses of The Acts link the two parts close together.[162] Their connection has been obscured by the traditional arrangement of our New Testament books. But that arrangement is altogether advisable. The former part of the Lucan work certainly belongs among the Gospels; and of the Gospels the Gospel of John must certainly be placed last, as being supplementary to the others. <h5>2. TYPICAL PASSAGES</h5> The characteristics of the Gospel of Luke may perhaps be presented more vividly than by the general description in the Student's Text Book, by an examination of a few typical passages. The two such passages which we shall choose somewhat at random, are the narrative of the birth and infancy in Luke 1:5 to 2:52, and the parable of the Prodigal Son. Ch. 15:11-32. Both of these are without any parallel in the other Gospels. Matthew provides an infancy narrative, but it is concerned for the most part with events different from those that appear in Luke. (1) The Narrative of the Birth and Infancy.—It has often been observed that the characteristic Greek sentence of the prologue, Luke 1:1-4, is immediately followed by the most strongly Hebraistic passage in the New Testament. The Semitic style of Luke 1:5 to 2:52 becomes explicable only if Luke was here making use of Palestinian sources, either oral or written. This conclusion is confirmed by the whole spirit and substance of the narrative. In this narrative as clearly as anywhere else in the New Testament we find ourselves transplanted to Palestinian soil. The early date of the narrative is as evident as its Jewish Christian and Palestinian character. There is here no reference to concrete events in the later history of the Church. Messianic prophecy appears in its Old Testament form uncolored by the details of the fulfillment. Evidently this narrative is no product of the Church's fancy, but genuine history told in the very forms of speech which were natural to those who participated in it. The first two chapters of Luke are in spirit really a bit of the Old Testament continued to the very threshold of the New. These chapters contain the poetry of the New Testament, which has taken deep hold of the heart and fancy of the Church. In this section of his Gospel, Luke shows himself to be a genuine historian. A biographer is not satisfied with narrating the public life of his hero, but prefaces to his work some account of the family, and of the birth and childhood. So our understanding of the ministry of Jesus becomes far deeper when we know that he grew[163] up among the simple, devout folk who are described in the first two chapters of Luke. The picture of Mary in these chapters, painted with an exquisite delicacy of touch, throws a flood of light upon the earthly life of the Son of Man. Beauty of detail, however, must not be allowed to obscure the central fact. The culmination of the narrative, undoubtedly, is to be found in the stupendous mystery of Luke 1:34,35. Far from being an excrescence in the narrative, as it has sometimes been represented in an age of rampant naturalism, the supernatural conception of Jesus is the very keystone of the arch. In this central fact, Matthew and Luke, totally independent as they are, are perfectly agreed. By this fact Jesus is represented, more clearly perhaps than by anything else, as not a product of the world but a Saviour come from without. (2) The Prodigal Son.—The parable of the Prodigal Son, simple though it is, has often been sadly misinterpreted. It has been thought to mean, for example, that God pardons sin on the basis simply of human repentance without the necessity of the divine sacrifice. All such interpretations are wide of the mark. The parable is not meant to teach how God pardons sin, but only the fact that he does pardon it with joy, and that we ought to share in his joy. Misinterpretation of the parable has come from the ignoring of its occasion. The key to the interpretation is given in Luke 15:1,2. Jesus was receiving publicans and sinners. Instead of rejoicing at the salvation of these poor, degraded sons of Abraham, the Pharisees murmured. In rebuke, Jesus spoke three parables. One of them, the parable of the Lost Sheep, is reported also by Matthew, ch. 18:12-14; but the last two, the parables of the Lost Coin and of the Prodigal Son, appear only in Luke. The teaching of all three of these parables is exactly the same. The imagery varies, but the application is constant. That application may be expressed very simply: "God rejoices at the salvation of a sinner; if, therefore, you are really sons of God, you will rejoice too." In the parable of the Prodigal Son, however, the application is forced home more poignantly than in either of the other two. In that parable alone among the three, the Pharisees could see—in the elder brother—a direct representation of themselves. The incident of the elder brother, sometimes regarded as a mere detail, really introduces the main point of the parable. Everything[164] else leads up to that. The wonderful description of the joy of the father at the prodigal's home-coming is all intended as a contrast to the churlish jealousy of the brother. The elder brother was as far as possible from sharing in the father's joy. That showed that he was no true son. Though he lived under the father's roof, he had no real inward share in the father's life. So it was with the Pharisees. They lived in the Father's house; they were, as we should say, members of the Church. But when salvation, in the person of Jesus, had at last come to the poor, sinful outcasts of the people, the Pharisees drew aside. God rejoiced when the publicans crowded in to Jesus; but the Pharisees held back. That showed that after all they were not, as they thought, true sons of God. If they had been, they would have shared God's feeling. It should be noticed that the parable ends with an invitation. The elder brother is not harshly rebuked by the father, but tenderly urged to come in still. Will the invitation be accepted? The question is not answered; and there lies the crowning beauty of the parable. The Pharisees are still given a chance. Will they still share the joy of God at the return of his lost children? They must answer the question for themselves. And we, too, have the same question to answer. If we are really children of God, then we shall not despise the outcasts and the sinners, but shall rejoice with him at their salvation. The parable is characteristic of the Gospel of Luke. Of course, Luke did not compose it. Nothing in the Gospels bears more indisputably the marks of Jesus' teaching. But from the rich store of Palestinian tradition Luke sought out those things which displayed sympathy for the downtrodden and the sick and the sinful. It was an inestimable service to the Church. Shall we heed the message? God rejoices at the salvation of a sinner. Shall we be sharers in his holy joy? <hr class="tb" /> In the Library.—Davis, "Dictionary of the Bible": Purves (edited), article on "Luke." M'Clymont, "The New Testament and Its Writers," pp. 27-32. Stevens and Burton, "A Harmony of the Gospels." Ellicott, "A New Testament Commentary for English Readers," vol. i: Plumptre, "The Gospel According to St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke," pp. 235-365. Zahn, "Introduction to the New Testament," vol. iii, pp. 1-173. The last-named work is intended primarily for those who have some knowledge of Greek, but can also be used by others. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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