Source-critical studies in Luke-Acts: Implications for understanding Luke, the Evangelist

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship recognises Luke's Gospel and Acts of the Apostles as two volumes of Luke's one book. This has greatly improved understanding of Luke's literary contribution to Jesus‟ story. One gulf yet impedes better knowledge of Luke's contribution. For some two centuries now, majority of scholars adopt either the Two-Document Hypothesis or the Two-Gospel Hypothesis in explaining the composition of Luke's Gospel. Observably, the Two-Document Hypothesis ignores, and to some degree, the Two-Gospel Hypothesis glosses over Luke's rhetorical concerns and narrative goal in writing, which is central to any utterance. This paper examines the usefulness of these approaches and then presents an alternative one. It argues that a more informed understanding of Luke-Acts, while valuing the author's sources, should focus on Luke's narrative techniques in his two-volume book. The paper employs a language-in-life-situation hermeneutic (name of the theorist), focusing on Luke's use of the oral Gospel he internalised during his kerygma performance, to demonstrate how an author's use of his sources in a literature is dialogically governed by his rhetorical goal and his ability to manage his sources. The study centres on Luke's first volume as a paradigm.

Keywords: Source-criticism, Scribality, Intertextuality, Oral performance, Dialogical discourse