Luke and Acts

Luke and Acts together run to about a quarter of the New Testament, more than the thirteen letters attributed to Paul combined. They are almost certainly one work. Acts 1:1 calls the gospel the first book and addresses the same Theophilus; the ascension is narrated at the end of the first and again at the start of the second, which is how ancient multi-volume works joined their halves; the vocabulary and style run continuously; and the second volume systematically completes patterns begun in the first. Henry Cadbury's The Making of Luke-Acts in 1927 made the case and gave us the hyphenated name that has been standard ever since.

The architecture is deliberate and it repays noticing. Luke's gospel moves relentlessly toward Jerusalem; from 9:51, when he resolutely sets out for Jerusalem, the journey occupies about ten chapters. Acts begins in Jerusalem and moves outward on the programme stated in 1:8, to Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, ending with Paul in Rome proclaiming the kingdom boldly and freely. The gospel begins in the temple with a priest and ends with the disciples in the temple praising God. The two volumes together make one arc: the story comes in to the centre and then goes out to the world.

Parallels between the volumes are too many to be accidental. Both begin with the Spirit coming and a mission announced. Peter heals a lame man, and so does Paul. Both raise someone from the dead. Stephen dies with words close to those of Jesus on the cross, asking that the sin not be held against his killers and committing his spirit. Paul's last journey is a series of trials before Jewish and Roman authorities, with a Herod involved, exactly as Jesus' was. Luke is showing that what happened to the master is happening to the servants, and that the Spirit who was on Jesus is now on the church.

The unity has been challenged, and the challenge is worth knowing. Mikeal Parsons and Richard Pervo argued in 1993 that scholars had slid from one author to one work, and that the two books may differ in genre, in theological emphasis, and in the audience they address. They also pointed out that the church has never in practice read them as one, since the canon separates them with John. The majority still treats them as a single project, but the objection has forced more careful statements of what unity is being claimed.

Luke 1:1-4 is one long, carefully balanced Greek sentence, in a register noticeably more formal than anything that follows it. That shift is itself a signal: the writer is announcing his genre before he starts, in the manner of the age. Ancient prefaces did a standard set of jobs, naming predecessors, stating the author's qualification, naming a dedicatee and stating the purpose, and this one does all four.

Read what it actually claims. Many have already undertaken to compose an account, diegesis. What they composed rests on what the initial eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed down. Luke has carefully investigated everything from the beginning (the Greek words are akribos, accurately, and anothen, which can mean from the beginning, from the first, or from above), and writes an orderly account, kathexes, so that Theophilus may know the certainty, asphaleia, of the things he has been taught. That is a claim to have done work on sources, and a claim that the result can bear weight. It is not a claim to have been present, and Luke does not make one.

Two of the words are argued over. Parakoloutheo, which the BSB renders carefully investigated, can mean to investigate, to follow closely, to keep up with, or to have been in close touch with events as they happened; which sense is meant determines whether Luke is claiming research or a degree of participation. The BSB has chosen the research sense in its English, and a reader who leans on that English alone has not seen the other side of the argument. Kathexes, orderly, need not mean chronological, and given Luke's own rearrangements it probably does not; an orderly account may mean one arranged so as to be followed and understood.

The comparison question matters for how much weight the preface carries. It is often said that Luke writes like Thucydides or Polybius, which would place him among the serious historians. Loveday Alexander's detailed study in 1993 argued that the closest parallels are not the great historians at all but the prefaces of technical and scientific treatises, works on medicine, engineering and mathematics, which share the short compass, the personal address to a named individual and the emphasis on accuracy and usefulness. If she is right, Luke is claiming competence and care in a craftsman's register rather than aligning himself with the high historiographical tradition. That is still a claim to be checked against evidence, and it may be a more modest and more testable one.

One further feature belongs here. Beginning at Acts 16:10 and in three later stretches, the narrative switches from they to we without explanation. The traditional reading is that the author was present for those legs of the journey, which is the natural sense and which supports the ancient identification of him with the Luke named in Colossians 4:14 and Philemon 24. Others argue that the we is a stylistic convention in ancient sea-voyage narratives, or a source the author incorporated without smoothing. The convention theory has been criticised for resting on thin parallels; the source theory has been criticised for failing to explain why an author who edits everything else left the pronouns alone. It is unresolved, and it is one of the places where the history of Acts and the identity of its author touch directly.

Every gospel selects. What Luke selects for is unmistakable once you look for it, and he signals it in the first substantial speech in the book. Mary's song in 1:46-55 says that God has brought down rulers from their thrones and exalted the humble, has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. That is the programme, stated by a young peasant woman before Jesus is born.

The poor come next. Jesus' first public act in Luke is to read Isaiah 61 in the Nazareth synagogue and announce that it is fulfilled today: good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, the year of the Lord's favour. Luke's beatitudes in 6:20-26 say blessed are you who are poor, not poor in spirit, and they are followed by four woes that Matthew does not have, beginning with woe to you who are rich. Luke alone gives the rich fool, the rich man and Lazarus, the dishonest manager, and Zacchaeus giving half his possessions to the poor. Whether Luke means material poverty, or spiritual dependence, or the concrete situation of the destitute in the churches he knew, is debated, and the Greek word he uses, ptochos, denotes real beggary rather than modest means.

Women appear in Luke in numbers and in speaking roles that have no parallel in the other gospels. Elizabeth prophesies. Mary sings. Anna is named, given her tribe, her age and her habits, and identified as a prophetess. The widow of Nain, the woman who anoints his feet, the bent woman whom he calls a daughter of Abraham, the persistent widow before the judge, Mary and Martha, and in 8:1-3 a named group of women who funded the ministry out of their own means, are all Luke's alone or given by him at greater length. He also pairs parables by gender: a shepherd with a lost sheep and a woman with a lost coin, a man sowing mustard and a woman with leaven.

Outsiders run through both volumes. Simeon calls the child a light for revelation to the Gentiles in 2:32, which is early for that claim. Luke traces the genealogy back not to Abraham, as Matthew does, but to Adam. The good Samaritan and the one grateful leper who was a Samaritan are Luke's. Tax collectors appear repeatedly, and always sympathetically. Acts then makes the question of whether Gentiles can be included without first becoming Jews into one of its driving concerns, working it out through a vision in chapter 10, a council in chapter 15, and a journey that ends in Rome.

A caution against sentimentality is in order. Luke's concern for the poor comes with genuinely uncomfortable teaching about money that most churches in wealthy settings handle by softening it, and his concern for outsiders sits alongside sharp language about those who reject the message. He is not a modern liberal and reading him as one flattens him. What is true is that of the four gospels, his is the one that keeps putting the camera on people a first-century reader would not have expected to see in the frame.

Because Luke makes a historical claim, he can be checked, and he has been checked harder than any other New Testament writer. The honest report is that he comes out extremely well in some areas and faces serious unresolved problems in others, and a student should be able to state both without flinching. Start with what holds up. Luke names officials with titles that are correct, specific and easy to get wrong, because Roman provincial nomenclature varied by province and changed over time. He calls Sergius Paulus a proconsul of Cyprus in Acts 13:7, correct for a senatorial province. He calls the magistrates at Thessalonica politarchs in 17:6 (the Greek politarchas, which the BSB renders city officials), a rare title attested chiefly in Macedonian inscriptions and essentially unknown from literary sources, which made it look like an error to earlier critics until the inscriptions turned up. He calls Gallio proconsul of Achaia in 18:12, and an inscription from Delphi fixes Gallio's term to about AD 51 to 52, which gives the whole Pauline chronology its firmest anchor point. He calls the officials at Ephesus Asiarchs in 19:31 (the BSB has officials of the province of Asia), a title proper to the province of Asia. He calls Publius the first man of Malta in 28:7 (Greek protos tes nesou; the BSB has chief official of the island), a title attested there in inscriptions. He calls Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene in Luke 3:1, once thought an obvious blunder, and an inscription from Abila naming a Lysanias as tetrarch under Tiberius has weakened that charge without settling every detail. William Ramsay, who began his work in Asia Minor expecting Acts to be a late and unreliable composition, changed his mind on the strength of this kind of evidence, and Colin Hemer's study of 1989 assembled the case at length.

Now the census, which is the hardest case and the one every student will be asked about. Luke 2:1-2 says a decree of Augustus called for a census of the whole empire (oikoumene, the inhabited world) and that this was the first census while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and Luke 2:4 that Joseph went to Bethlehem because he was from the house and line of David. The difficulties are these. Publius Sulpicius Quirinius is known to have been legate of Syria from AD 6, and Josephus describes his census of Judaea in that year, which provoked the revolt of Judas the Galilean; that is the census Acts 5:37 itself refers to. But Matthew places the birth in the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC, and Luke 1:5 also puts the conception in the days of Herod. That leaves a gap of about ten years. Further, there is no evidence of an empire-wide census under Augustus, Roman censuses in client kingdoms were unusual while the client king lived, and Roman registration was normally by property and residence rather than by ancestral town, which makes the journey to Bethlehem hard to parallel.

The proposed solutions, with their weaknesses. The BSB, like most translations, reads prote in 2:2 as first (the first census), though its footnote offers This was the census before. Some translate it as before rather than first, giving a registration before Quirinius was governor; the grammar is possible and has been defended by competent Greek scholars, but most judge it strained. Some posit an earlier Syrian command for Quirinius, pointing to the Lapis Tiburtinus, a fragmentary Latin inscription describing a man who governed Syria twice, whose name does not survive; the identification with Quirinius was proposed by Mommsen and is not established. Some suggest a lengthy registration process begun earlier and completed under Quirinius, or that Quirinius held a special commission in the region before AD 6. Others accept that Luke, writing decades later, knew of a famous census associated with Quirinius and misdated it. That last option is held by many historians, including some who hold a high view of scripture, and it should be stated rather than suppressed. What no one can honestly say is that the problem has been solved to general satisfaction.

The census is not the only pressure point. In Acts 5:36-37 Gamaliel, speaking in the thirties, mentions Theudas and then Judas the Galilean as a later figure; Josephus places Theudas under the procurator Fadus in the mid forties, which would be after the speech, and Judas' revolt in AD 6, which would be earlier. Either Josephus is wrong, or there were two men named Theudas, or Luke has misplaced the reference. There is also the long-running question of how Acts 9, 11 and 15 fit with Paul's own account of his Jerusalem visits in Galatians 1 and 2, where the number and purpose of the visits are hard to line up. And Richard Pervo argued in 1987 that Acts belongs generically closer to the ancient novel than to historiography, reading the shipwrecks, prison escapes and crowd scenes as entertainment conventions. Critics answer that vivid narration is not fiction and that the novel parallels are loose.

The fair summary is this. On the things a historian can check most easily, titles, geography, local colour, sea routes and the political texture of the eastern provinces, Luke is accurate to a degree that surprised the scholars who set out to catch him. On several matters of chronology he presents problems that remain unresolved, and the census in chapter 2 is the sharpest of them. Both halves of that sentence are true, and a student who can only say one half has been given a course, not an education.