A Boundary Crossing Message
What Luke's Preface Teaches Us About the Mission of the Church and the Memory of Jesus
Hello Reader!
I’ve been a little quiet the last couple of weeks as I’ve been finishing out the Fall Quarter at Northern Seminary. This essay is an excerpt from a paper I wrote from my Gospel and Acts class I just wrapped up under the teaching of the excellent Matthew Bates. I hope you find it helpful.
Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. 2 They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples.* 3 Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write an accurate account for you, most honorable Theophilus, 4 so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught.
Luke 1:1-4
Though seemingly small and perfunctory, the first four verses of Luke offer incredible insight into the early church tradition of Jesus and, especially, how that tradition was rapidly carried across cultural boundaries. If one learns to wait patiently with the text, informed by the broad strokes of scholarship, what emerges is a lasting memory of the first disciples’ beloved master. In what follows, a study of Luke’s prologue will demonstrate how the witnesses to Jesus’ life handed down, not just vague stories, but a living Tradition shaped by their lives with Jesus, akin to the great Greco-Roman schools of the day, and came to be written down, at least in Luke’s account, out of necessity for a “boundary crossing” movement.
Understanding Luke’s prologue, as the preface to both Luke and Acts,[1] emphasizes the “boundary crossing” that prompted Luke to write in the form that he did. It is easy to look back on the gospels with assumptions that the stories and teachings of Jesus would eventually be written down. That is not necessarily a given however, as the focus of the earliest believers was first and foremost missional (Acts 1:8).
Written accounts were not the primary way that the mission of the early church was carried out, at least not at first. Rather, a living memory of Jesus was passed on through other means.[2] This memory of Jesus was formed at breathtaking speed as it crossed the Roman Empire. It would be a mere 30 years before the movement had a community in the capital itself.[3] This “rapidity of Christianity’s growth had real implications for the memory of Jesus,” writes Luke Timothy Johnson.[4]
These implications included a new boundary-crossing context, particularly in urban centers that were completely different from the small villages of Jesus’ own ministry. Thus, instead of Aramaic which was likely spoken by Jesus, the memory of Jesus, including his own words, would almost exclusively be spoken and written in Greek from that time on. Since losing the nuance of certain words through translation is inevitable, one should not assume that the exact words of the historical Jesus are given in the text that Luke writes.[5] Yet it can still be said to tell us exactly the kinds of things that Jesus did, taught and how he commanded his disciples to live.
This boundary crossing was not limited to the language, but also the style in which the gospel would be written. According to Joel Green, Luke’s prologue was of such a technical nature that it pulled readers in from the broader Greco-Roman world in a familiar way, preparing them to enter a world they were not familiar with, and recognize this writing as part of a living tradition that Luke was passing down.[6] Loveday Alexander notes the distinct difference between Luke 1:1-4 and the rest of the text, offering this as a clear sign that Luke’s prologue is in the style of what she terms, the “scientific tradition.”[7]
The scientific tradition included a broad range of disciplines from medicine to mathematics, rhetoric to history. No matter the subject type, a preface was included that helped prepare the student of that subject to receive the teaching of the master of that field. Significant to all of these technical writings, was that they were writings decidedly not for public use,[8] but rather were for “insider” reading to aid instruction based on factual information.[9]
Thus, Alexander concludes that while the gospel of Luke functions as biographical history, it is history written with the intent to create a “school text.” That is, they are, “not elementary, watered down textbooks in the modern sense, but the written deposit of the technē, the distillation of the teaching of a school or a craft tradition as it was passed down from one generation to another.”[10] Therefore, Luke was passing on a living Tradition from one generation to the next in the same way writers of other “scientific texts” from well-known philosophers and mathematicians would have with, “direct personal contact from master to disciple.”[11]
If this is the case, then the “eyewitnesses” (Lk 1:2) of which Luke speaks would have been passing on the direct testimony of their life with Jesus to Luke as Richard Bauckham has argued.[12] One should not think of this eyewitness testimony as verbatim, Bauckham says, “but in a way that is substantially faithful to how the eyewitnesses themselves told it.”[13] Contrary to modern history where un-biased narrative is preferred, though never truly achieved, Bauckham points to the work of Samuel Byrskog who argues that the best practice of Luke’s time was to have eyewitnesses with living memories of events and, even better, be immersed in the events themselves in order to properly interpret what has occurred.[14]
Though Bauckham notes there are some valid critiques of Byrskog’s argument,[15] he later develops the argument himself in several ways. In one instance he considers the Bishop Papias’ own preference for receiving information from a “living and surviving voice,” referring not to a longstanding oral tradition but to direct reception from those who had witnessed these events.[16] This aligns with what Green notes about the term used for “eyewitnesses” as a technical term meant to emphasize the process of handing down a Tradition from the very beginning of the movement. What is more, the “handing down” could have taken both oral and written forms, such as notes or other documents.[17] In any case, the implication is it was handed to Luke directly from those who were with Jesus.
With the demise of the authenticity criteria, memories of the “eyewitnesses” have been received with much more openness, though to varying degrees. For example, James Dunn, using memory theory, seeks to learn what kind of “impression” Jesus made on the disciples.[18] “What we are confronted with in the Gospels,” Dunn insists, “is not the top layer (last edition) of a series of increasingly impenetrable layers, but the living tradition of Christian celebration which takes us with surprising immediacy to the heart of the first memories of Jesus.”[19] The “immediacy” with which the gospels take us to the historical Jesus is not at all far fetched when considering other first century documents do something similar.
Though not eyewitness accounts, Josephus, Tacitus, and likely a confused reference by Suetonius,[20] just to name a few, leave us no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was a significant teacher and left behind a growing movement that carried on his teaching and practices. Even more significant, Dunn notes, are the writings of the apostle Paul, namely 1 Corinthians and Galatians, which demonstrate a clear and consistent tradition handed down by eyewitnesses within the first decade of Jesus’ own life.[21]
This way of thinking about eyewitnesses points to a tenacious living Tradition that, as we have already seen, is attested to in the technical nature of Luke 1:1-4 as a preface in keeping with the great schools of the day. Further, the Tradition remained consistent among those who practiced it as seen by Paul and witnessed to by other contemporary writers. Thus as Luke begins to write his narrative account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we have, to use Dunn’s words, an “immediate” sense of who Jesus was historically.
Attestation to eyewitnesses aside, nothing seems to dim Luke’s insistence that what he offers to Theophilus, and to us, is anything other than an “orderly sequence” (Lk 1:3) of what has been happening “among us” for the last thirty, or so, years. While language and culture have changed exact wording and prompted Luke to provide an account in a decidedly Greco-Roman fashion, the account of what Jesus has done and the way of life that Jesus called his disciples to live has not changed. While not verbatim, Luke’s preface tells us that the memory of the historical Jesus is preserved in the sense that who Jesus was, the kinds of things Jesus did, and how Jesus wants disciples to live can be discerned from the text and transmitted across cultural boundaries.
[1] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, Repr., The new international commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 20), 9–10.
[2] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 115–133. Johnson highlights that within community, preaching, worship and teaching for the common life were vital to shaping this living memory.
[3] Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, 114.
[4] Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, 114.
[5] Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, 114.
[6] Green, The Gospel of Luke, 34.
[7] Loveday Alexander, “Luke’s Preface in the Context of Greek Preface-Writing,” Novum Testamentum 28, no. 1 (1986): 56–57.
[8] Alexander, “Luke’s Preface in the Context of Greek Preface-Writing,” 57.
[9] Alexander, “Luke’s Preface in the Context of Greek Preface-Writing,” 61.
[10] Alexander, “Luke’s Preface in the Context of Greek Preface-Writing,” 69.
[11] Alexander, “Luke’s Preface in the Context of Greek Preface-Writing,” 71.
[12] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd Ed: The Gospels As Eyewitness Testimony (Chicago, UNITED STATES: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 20–21, accessed November 24, 2024, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/dtl/detail.action?docID=4857043.
[13] Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd Ed, 21.
[14] Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd Ed, 23.
[15] Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd Ed, 25.
[16] Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd Ed, 31–32.
[17] Green, The Gospel of Luke, 40.
[18] Rebekah Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies: A Survey of Recent Research, ed. Scot McKnight and Nijay K. Gupta (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 145.
[19] James D. G. Dunn, Christianity in the Making. Volume 1: Jesus Remembered, Paperback edition. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019), 201.
[20] Dunn, Christianity in the Making. Volume 1, 126–127.
[21] Dunn, Christianity in the Making. Volume 1, 127.
great article and SO COOL you're studying under Matthew Bates!