The New Testament by Theissen Gerd. Maloney Linda M

Author:Theissen, Gerd.,Maloney, Linda M. [Gerd Theissen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4514-0868-3
Publisher: Fortress Press (NBN)
Published: 2013-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles

This tendency to augment gospel writing through another writing was carried further in Luke’s Gospel. He expanded his depiction of Jesus’ activity not with a “teaching of the apostles,” as the Didache did for Matthew’s Gospel, but through his history of the apostles, later dubbed “the Acts of the Apostles.” In doing so he created something new in the growing literature of early Christianity, and with it a major problem: there was nothing controversial in depicting human beings as transmitters of a teaching authorized by God, as messengers and missionaries of Jesus, as was the case in the Didache. But it was a problem to depict human beings as active agents, as missionaries and miracle workers continuing the work of Jesus. There was the danger that human beings would become surrounded with an inadmissible divine aura and be placed on a level with Jesus, the son of God. Luke recognized this danger. No other author besides the author of the Johannine apocalypse so often criticizes human self-apotheosis.[10] He rejects not only the satanic invitation to attempt it in the temptation story (Luke 4:5-8), but also the blasphemous apotheosis of rulers and apostles (Acts 12:21-23; 14:8-20); he corrects the mistaken divinization of apostles (Acts 10:25-26; 16:25-34), and nevertheless he tolerates at the end of Acts an apotheosis of Paul in the people’s imagination when, on the basis of his miraculous rescue and his miracles, the people of Malta say that he is a god (Acts 28:1-6). Luke knows that people sense some truth when they affirm that the apostles have divine powers, but they are mistaken when they direct their worship to the apostles and not to the Lord who sent these apostles. But what kind of divine power is this? And what links these people to Jesus? What distinguishes them from him?

Luke resolves this problem by writing a history of Jesus and the apostles in which they are linked by the action of the Spirit and yet are separated by a periodization of the history of salvation. He wants to distinguish Jesus from the apostles and nevertheless to present their story as a continuing history!

The significance of the Spirit and the periodization of salvation history have previously been interpreted differently by exegetes: Hans Conzelmann reads the Lukan two-volume work as the expression of a theology of salvation history by means of which Luke offered an answer to the delay of the parousia and the lapse of time.[11] Luke, he says, replied with the concept of a three-part salvation history: Jesus comes not at the end of time, as Christians previously expected. Rather, he is the middle of time. With his passion begins the time of the church. Luke looks back, “historicizing,” at the “middle of time,” which is bounded on the one side by the prophets until (and including) John the Baptizer, on the other side by the time of the church. Its characteristic is that it is a Satan-free time in which Jesus is the sole bearer of the Spirit.

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