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Hello everybody, welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Rob Heaton for New Books and Biblical Studies, where I focus on new and exciting scholarship in New Testament and Early Christian Studies, which is the orbit of my own PhD. I'm delighted to be talking today with Joshua Paul Smith about his first monograph that takes on one of those taken for granted orthodoxies of Biblical studies that Luke, the third evangelist, writes from a non-Jewish perspective, or that he was a Gentile. It's a very interesting argument, and we'll get to the difficulties inherent to speaking coherently about an author for whom we really do not know much concretely.
But first, let me introduce my guest. Joshua Paul Smith earned his PhD from the University of Denver and the Isle of School of Theology in 2021, and presently teaches at Southeast Missouri State University. His research interests include literary and cognitive approaches to New Testament texts, as well as Jewish and Christian identity formation. He is currently working on a short book on Acts for a general audience, and conducting research on an article that applies social network analysis to named characters in Luke and Acts.
He serves as managing editor for the reviews of an Enoch seminar, publishing book reviews on a wide range of topics related to the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic origins. In his spare time, Joshua runs an artisan micro bakery called Woodland Hills Bread, together with his wife, Alyssa. And on top of all this, Joshua is joining us today from his home base in Cape Girard, Missouri to discuss the publication of Luke was not a Christian, with the subtitle of Reading the Third Gospel in Acts Within Judaism, and it was published by Brill earlier this year, 2024. So, Joshua, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the new book's network.
It's great to be with you, Rob. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And full disclosure for our listeners here, Joshua is not unknown to me because our time in the doctoral program at Eilip and the University of Denver overlaps substantially.
We had a few classes together, took a class together on Bead, which I think was near and dear to both of our hearts. And so, through this, I knew of his interest in Luke Acts without ever being aware of where his argument was going or that this was going to become his dissertation. So, it was a delight to read this book, this research that you've conducted that I knew nothing about, Joshua. That said, I want to start with your title, because maybe it'll jump out to people who see the podcast, and they're like, what is going on here?
Luke was not a Christian. I think it's partially self-referential to one of our fellow dissertation readers, which you can get into if you like, or, and it's also partially a critique of a scholarship about Luke's ethnic identity. It's partially what you call a technical argument about the terms that Luke uses on his own for the protagonists of his story, and also partially a comment upon a subject that I think is clear as mud historically, which is this idea of weather and wind, Judy is imparted to Christianity, such that we can distinguish one from the other before the third or fourth century, say. Can you tell us about all the factors that went into this title of your book in these various regards?
Yeah, I think the topic is clear as mud to me, still, too. A few things about the title. So, first, as you alluded to, it's really just kind of a cheeky homage to the book. Paul was not a Christian.
The original message of a misunderstood apostle by Pam Eisenbaum, who is one of my dissertation committee members, one of our faculty members that we worked under. Eisenbaum argues that Paul didn't set out to establish a new religion that was entirely separate from Judaism, but instead he saw himself as a Jewish apostle who experienced this revelation from the Jewish Messiah and was convinced that he had a Jewish message to proclaim to the Gentile nations of the world. So, in my book, I make a similar, although not entirely identical, argument about the author of Luke and Acts, but I thought it would be kind of a fun cheeky homage to one of our faculty. But second, and more important to the actual content of the book, I think it's crucial to reflect on what the term Christian meant in the first century and in the second century and beyond.
So, like Paul, the earliest Christians didn't see themselves as Christians in the sense of an identity that was distinct from Judaism, but instead they sort of carried on their day-to-day lives as Jews, Jews who were convinced that through Jesus of Nazareth, the God of Israel had sort of taken decisive action within human history to save and reconcile God's people, just as that same God had done countless times before in the Exodus and etc. So, this might be jumping a little bit ahead, but so the best textual evidence that we have suggests that the term Christian was first applied to this group by outsiders, and that it took several decades and kind of a growing religious movement that was made up of Gentiles with little or no connection to the movements Jewish roots, before these followers of Jesus took on the name Christian for themselves as sort of this new distinct separate identity. The term Christian only appears three times in the New Testament, two of those times are in Acts. It also appears in 1 Peter, chapter 4.
But the first time it appears in Acts 11, 26, and all Luke says there is that it was at Antioch where they were first called Christians, right? And then in Acts 26, 28, it's applied by King Herod Agrippa. So, in both of these cases, you have a term that is in anthropological terms, it's called an exonem. It's applied to a group by someone who is not a member of that group.
And as far as we know, Luke really gives no indication that Jesus' followers had adopted this term for themselves, let alone built some kind of an entirely new identity around it. Luke's preferred label for this movement is usually something like the followers of the way or something like that. But lastly, I think when I say that Luke was not a Christian, instead of just a cheeky, tile, or a semantic game, right? I'm really hoping that it gives readers an opportunity to think more about the way the term Christian is used today as well.
So, we live in a very different world than that of the first Christians. And there's this Gulf of like 2000 years of quote unquote Christian history, right, that separates modern readers from Jesus and his disciples. And I think that Gulf has been widened further by Christian acts of anti-Jewish prejudice and systematic violence in the past couple millennia, right? And I see in Luke's understanding of the historical past, Luke finds room for both Jewish and non-Jewish followers of Jesus to lay claim to this identity of the people of God, right?
Which is a term that I borrowed from some other scholars. But so you've got Jesus following Jews and non-Jesus following Jews who both have the opportunity to claim the title, the people of God, without one community sort of taking precedence or replacing the other. And so I think what I was hoping was that my book would serve as an occasion for folks for whom the term Christian is an integral part of their identity today might reconsider Luke's theological vision and maybe reflect on how Christianity today ended up straying so far from Luke's depiction in faith and practice. Very good.
Well, thanks for walking us through all of that, Joshua. And yes, so I'd rather you bring up the fact that in the book of Acts is the term Christian because it's one of only two New Testament texts that are two New Testament authors. That is that they reflect an awareness of the term, although Luke isn't using it liberally. He isn't using it for all the protagonists in his story.
He's just saying that it was an outsider term. And it's controversial for scholars to trace when this term, you know, takes on self-referential meaning. For example, Bruce Longnecker, I think about 10 years ago now said that there wasn't an inscription at Pompeii that had Christian in it, but it might have also been one of those talking about outsider sorts of things. And it's a controversial argument in and of itself.
So this claim that Luke is not a Christian. I wanted to replace it while I was reading with Luke was not a Gentile, but I also see the point that you're making by saying that he was not a Christian. But anyway, we're deep in the weeds of things, but I want to start at sort of a basic place for listeners who aren't kind of in Luke and Acts in the depth that you especially are or that scholars may be. Some people might be surprised, for example, to find out that Luke, this name is sort of ascribed by tradition to this author, and we as scholars continue to use it because we don't have any better idea what the author's actual name was.
But it becomes applied widely by Christians beginning the late second century and sort of thereafter as well. But we also have a difficult time upholding there being a historical Luke companion of Paul who wrote these two books. And yet it seems a pretty firm conclusion that Luke and acts are written or developed together as two volumes, one work, as some scholars suggest. Luke's Gospel, in addition to being the third in our present canonical order, is also apparently the third in the synoptic order.
So written after Mark and Matthew in most scholars' conceptions, I believe, in either the late first or early second century. So I say all this because I want you to lay out for us a little bit what we know or think we know about the date, the provenance, and the author of Luke and Acts, basically how you would self locate among these important questions that all scholars have to consider. And you know, say, well, my argument still works as so long as we don't, you know, attribute this to Marcian, for example, in the middle of the second century. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Luke is really interesting because, you know, we don't really have a whole lot of evidence of the text itself, but also an attribution of the text to someone named Luke, before the mid to late second centuries you mentioned so Justin Martyr in the mid second century quotes passages from the Gospel of Luke. But it's really tricky because he never actually identifies the title or the author of that text. So, you know, a lot of my thinking here has been informed by Andrew Gregory, who has written pretty extensively on sort of the textual transmission of Luke and Acts before and Irenaeus and Irenaeus is the first writer to explicitly identify the third gospel with someone named Luke and that's that's fairly late sometime around 175. The first time Luke is attached to the actual text of the gospel is P 75 or papyrus 75 in the early third century.
So probably around 200 to 250 of the common era. as far as I can tell Jerome is the first person to explicitly identify Luke as a Gentile proselyte. And he's Jerome's writing some time in the late fourth or early fifth century. So it's very drawn out this history of Luke and attribution, and there is just so little data before Irenaeus, just very little evidence to work with at all.
All that being said, I do think there's probably a reasonable case to be made that the traditional connection between the third gospel and someone named Luke isn't all that far-fetched, right? Luke is a pretty obscure figure, a pretty minor character in the grand scheme of things. So if you're going to, he's only mentioned a handful of times in the New Testament epistles. There's not a whole lot of tradition around him.
If you're going to whip up a name out of thin air to assign to a gospel, it's probably better to choose one with a little more authority that's situated a little closer to where the narrative action is, like I don't know, like Peter James Andrew, more recognizable names, right? And there is this fact that Luke and Acts have, although they're not attributed to someone named Luke until much later, they are never attributed to anybody other than Luke, right? Luke is pretty much the only name that gets attached to these two texts. As for, you know, when and where Luke and Acts were written, I know this is going to sound kind of strange.
Walking through a minefield here. Yeah, yeah. And I know this sounds strange, especially if you wrote a book claiming that Luke was Jewish, but I'm generally pretty skeptical about just how much we can know concretely about the historical authors of biblical texts. You know, there are some examples of, you know, a lot of scholars kind of follow Joseph Fitzmiers view that that Luke probably had ties to Antioch on the Arontas, right, which is in modern day Turkey.
And this has a little bit of support in the patristic tradition. So around the late third or fourth century, Luke starts getting labeled as an anti-arkeen for some reason. Not really exactly sure where that comes from, but it's possible that because the book of Acts places such an emphasis on the goings on in this area of Antioch, Syrian Antioch, that maybe some early patristic writers thought, oh, it's maybe common sense that Luke was from around this area. But generally, I don't have a very strong opinion on where the gospel was written.
Luke and Acts were written. As much as I use the term, Luke is from the Hellenistic diaspora. And when I use that term, I think it's weighted in favor of a cultural sense rather than a strictly geographic sense. So we're talking about, you know, culturally Greek or Greek-speaking Jews who are living just outside the land of Judea.
So with that kind of a broad definition, I think it leaves open, you know, leaves room for Luke to have been written in any number of places. You know, he's, some folks have said that he was writing in Rome, some folks have said that he was writing in Philippi. And I'm a little bit less interested in those kinds of questions as I am of the cultural question of like what perspective Luke was writing within. Very good.
I mean, I didn't sense that your argument was dependent upon a tendentius or a particular take on where Luke was from or when exactly he's writing. But I also didn't feel like you upset too much of the apple card of synoptic studies, which says that if Luke is writing around 90 or maybe a little bit thereafter, go ahead. Argument. And it's easy to get kind of into weeds with the question of chronology in a way that I am still trying to kind of work out in my own head, you know, because the, as I mentioned, at some point I believe in chapter, hold on, when was this?
Is it in chapter four? That there is quite, I mean, I acknowledge that there is quite a bit writing on the chronology of the composition of Luke and Acts because this has to do with what serves as a suitable point of comparison for Luke. There we go. So if Luke wrote the third gospel in Acts in the early second century, then writing's like Justin, Justin Martyrs' dialogue with Truffo, serves as a pretty reasonable point of comparison for language and rhetoric and the development of some sort of concrete Christian identity that is sort of opposed to a concrete Jewish identity, right?
Assuming that these are terms that have sort of coalesced into recognizable terms. And we should say something about the dialogue with Truffo in Justin Martyrs, that sort of an imagined dialogue written by Justin, who's a Christian philosopher of sorts, writing from Rome in the middle of the second century, who is using this imagined Jewish person Truffo as sort of the fall guy to explain why Christianity is a superior way of life, perhaps. Yeah, absolutely. And contrary to what I said earlier about the New Testament text being kind of ambivalent about this term Christian, by the time you get to Justin Martyr, there are the seeds of this very definitive, they call it the parting of the ways, right?
This parting between Jewish identity and Christian identity to the point where Justin is able to say, ah yes, we have this distinct Christian identity that is totally separate from a Jewish identity, Justin being a Gentile himself, a non-Jew. And this is really sort of the first seeds, the first inkling that you get in the development of the early Christian tradition that Judaism and Christianity were starting to begin this process of separation into distinct identities. And the argument that I make in the book is that it seems a little more likely that if Luke were written earlier, say in the late first century, that Luke was still probably enculturated within a Jewish context. So it probably raised and educated in a Jewish community.
But if Luke and Acts were written later closer to the time that Justin wrote the dialogue with Trifo, the likelihood increases that Luke could have been a Gentile that was highly educated, highly aware of interpretive techniques for reading and applying Israel's scriptures within a distinctly Christian context. So I've read quite a bit of the arguments on both sides, I've been reading a lot of Stephen Mason recently who argues that Luke relied and actually used Josephus's work in composing Luke and Acts, which would kind of bump Luke and Acts up to like, perhaps 125 or so. And I find his arguments really compelling, Stephen Mason's arguments really compelling. But at the same time, I also have a little bit of difficulty with how sort of disparate and sparse the actual evidence is.
The evidence that Stephen Mason points out is not central to the narrative of Luke and Acts. It's sort of in these weird random little supplementary passages that kind of flesh out the historical context a little bit. And there are only, I think, four major points that he references. But all that to say, I think the state of the discipline right now, the field of Luke Act studies is kind of in disarray at the moment, because we have people arguing for a much earlier Luke, and people arguing for a much later Luke, kind of at the same time.
Right. Yeah. I mean, there are arguments that Luke acts as data to the early 60s, I believe, versus someone like Marcus Vincent, who says that Luke acts in the orbit of Marcian so much later. So a lot of people opt for the middle ground of around the 90s, but then there's the argument of Josephus's do is she antiquities, which comes out in 94, so Luke would have to be after that if Luke uses it as a source.
Anyway, it's good to know that you as an insider in the field feel like it's in a bit of disarray, because that's also what it feels like to someone who dabbles a little bit. One more question, Joshua, before we get to the nitty-gritty of your argument, and it's a matter of how you came to this niche. I always like to hear what attracted scholars to what they make their baby and their dissertation and their subsequent research. Why Luke, instead of Marc, John Matthew, or one of the non-clinical gospels, why especially when you have selected Luke, does this question about his identity in a sense, stand out to you as worthy of the depth of research and writing that both the dissertation and revision required?
Sure, Rob, I think that's because Luke is objectively the best gospel. I've heard that argument before, but I'm not so sure. Tell me more. I've been interested in Luke for about 10 or 15 years now, and I think what originally drew me to Luke's gospel was the fact that more so than other gospels seems to be really concerned with things like justice for the poor, and Luke tends to give voice to people who wouldn't normally have a voice, like women's slaves, eunuchs, there are these characters that typically would not be considered worthy of a voice in the ancient world, and Luke lends a voice to these characters in a way that I think is at least seems relevant to where we are today, socially, culturally, but also my undergraduate training is in literary criticism, and for me personally, I found Luke to be sort of fertile ground for that kind of approach to a text.
Luke, I think, is very artfully written, and it's one of the most polished texts of the New Testament, which kind of says something right there, but in addition to being steeped in this this tradition of the stories of Israel's scriptures, I think Luke shows familiarity with classical rhetorical conventions that were popular with Greek writers of his day, right? So Luke knows how to persuade his audience, he knows how to draw them in and keep their attention, knows how to spinny on, as they say here in southeast Missouri, but in a way that, you know, you look at the author of the Gospel of Mark, and it's written in very sort of stilted, almost like it's a toddler's trying to tell you a story like, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, Luke sort of spends a little more time building out the art and structure of his narrative in a way that the other Gospel writers don't necessarily do, and so that's why I've always had kind of a soft spot in my heart for Luke. Wonderful. Let's dive into the argument that you make in your book now.
So some authors make a specific thesis difficult to find, but I think you're just front and center in the first sentence of the book, in fact, and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, but you write there on page one that I argue that evidence internal to Luke's Gospel and the ax of the Apostles strongly suggest that Luke was educated and cultivated, primarily within a Jewish setting. That's again on page one. So tell me if I'm wrong about that first of all, but since I think this will be an understandable thesis to anyone who's listened to the first, you know, 25, 30 minutes of us so far, I also want to bring in a secondary proposal that you make and defend in your second chapter, especially the first one after the introduction. You say that Luke is becoming remembered as a Gentile by other early Christians who were themselves Gentiles, non-Jews, that is, is understandable because they found this portrayal of Luke to be useful in their polemical and apologetic encounters with early Jewish thoughts.
So I think you're sort of thinking through this idea of, you know, Justin, differentiating himself from the imagined Jewish person, Trufo. But anyway, you seem to suggest that Super Sessionism happens in early Christianity, but it's not a feature of Luke's own perspective, but rather that of Christians who wanted to distinguish their beliefs from that of what they characterized as Judaism, essentially, which at that time becomes widely suspect to Roman society after the second Jewish Roman war. Is this all a fair characterization of your argument and do you want to say anything more about it? Yeah, I think so, yes.
So there's this interesting phenomenon that takes place as these two distinct religious identities start to emerge. And I think Boyarin has been a big influence here on my thinking that that in part, what began as one tradition separated into two and as they began this long slow process of separation, they tended to sharpen and define one another against each other. So, you know, there is this social theory that, you know, the best way to define who you are is to sort of point to the other person and say that you're not like them, right? And I think that's what's going on, especially when you get to, by the time you get to Justin Martyr in his dialogue with Trufo, Justin goes so far as to say that, you know, Israel's scriptures, they're not really the scriptures of the Jews.
They're quote unquote our scriptures as what fully appropriated from Judaism to Christianity at that point. Yeah, yeah. So, I think that's what part of where I'm heading with the discussion of Super Sessionism is that Luke occupies this really interesting sort of ambiguous narrative territory where once the early Christian movement becomes a majority Gentile movement, it's easier for Gentiles who have no connection to its Jewish or the Christian movements, Jewish origins are able to look at things that would typically be understood as sort of a criticism from within and start applying that as criticism from outside. So, you know, you mentioned we had a bead class together, a class of the funeral will bead.
And there's what got me to thinking about this particular process was here, you have an example of an Augustinian monk living in, you know, the furthest reaches of Northumbria in, you know, the like eight century. And he writes these these, he has these awful, just excoriating passages about quote unquote the Jews, but the guy never met a Jew in his entire life. He lived in a cloistered monastery in a part of the Roman Empire where Jewish communities would not become well established for a couple hundred more years. So, what exactly is going on in this process of beads reading of the scriptures?
Well, bead is reading patristic writers and the patristic writers are reading narratives that criticize a movement from within itself in the same way that there are critical passages in the Deuteronemistic history, that's a mouthful. Yes. Or what some authors have the Deuteronomic principle, I think, which is that the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, follows this series of cycles of Israel being called to live up to their covenantal promises to the Lord. They fail in that.
They become critical of themselves and they are called back into a restorative relationship with the Lord in that way. Those texts can appear to somebody from outside the tradition to be very critical of Jews, but they are written by Jews themselves or Israelites as the case would be. Sure. Very good.
So, let's turn to the second chapter of your book, which was a really interesting tour through patristic knowledge. And because we're on an audio podcast here, I feel like I have to just inform listeners how strongly my air quotes are around knowledge here, the knowledge that the patristic authors have about Luke. And this catalog culminates in a couple of charts that show just how disjointed and confused and multi vocal and able to say whatever kind of you wanted to say. Patristic testimony about Luke's identity really is.
And this chart might become exhibit one A for me to show students on how, why it's, you know, justifiable to treat claims of the church fathers with a little bit of skepticism because they don't always, you know, know full on what they're talking about. Can you walk us through a little bit of this Joshua, this, what the different patristic authors have to say about who Luke is? And you can accentuate whatever you'd like here, whether it's common themes or early claims or late coming ideas, as you said, Jerome is the first to point out or to make the claim that Luke is a Gentile proselyte, as you say. Or if there are any oddball assertions about Luke, I thought there were a few in there that just what where does this come from?
But perhaps it might be also worthwhile to end on a question of your own judgment. And that is, does anyone from antiquity preserve authentic data about our author Luke? Yeah, that's a great question. I will say so that the chart that you alluded to the table on page page 72 and 73 of my book, I so in chapter two, I tried to be as thorough and exhaustive as possible, because in a lot of ways I felt like I was missing something obvious.
So when I started writing, I wanted to look at, okay, well, where does the idea that Luke was a Gentile? Where does that idea come from? And by the time I got to the end of this sort of exhaustive, I think I went up through the maybe late fourth, early fifth century. I felt like I needed to organize the data in a little bit more of a convenient spread.
And pretty much the only thing that most of the early Christian, you know, patristic sources agree on is that somebody named Luke wrote the third gospel in Acts. And even then it's not, it's not entirely universal, right? There are a few outliers here and there. But yeah, we've got, you know, many of these early sources, they adhere to the more traditional view that that Luke was a companion or a disciple of Paul, some of them, but not all of them claim that he was a second generation Christian, which is actually kind of a contradiction against a few other sources that claim that Luke was actually one of the 72 or 72 apostles sent out by Jesus himself.
It was very interesting to me. So we're talking about Luke chapter 10, where in contrast to what Matthew does in having the 12, you know, go to the traditional land of Israel, there's either 70 or 72, they're not called apostles in Luke, but it's strongly hinted at that, you know, because they're sent out. And it's somewhat of a mirror of the table of nations and Genesis chapter 10, I believe you don't quote me on that. But anyway, go on, sorry, just do any thunder.
No, I appreciate the context. I actually, I kind of love Epiphanius is his discussion of Luke being among the 72, or actually, I believe it's in the, the apostles list of the, the title of the papyrus is called anonymous, or the manuscript is called anonymous, but there is an example of Luke being included among the 70 or 72 apostles being sent out. And Luke and Mark appear together in much of the early Christian tradition, the patristic tradition, which I think is interesting and kind of revealing because these are again two names that are not really central to the tradition, right there. They're, it's not like Peter, James, John, these are kind of people who are marginally connected.
So I think that's maybe one reason that Mark and Luke get paired together so often. But this early apostles list claims that Mark and Luke were both scandalized by Jesus as teaching on the, sort of the, the, anachronistically, we'd say like the real presence in the Eucharist, right, that Jesus said, you know, you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood. And so Mark and Luke were scandalized by this and ran off and had to be brought back into the fold by Peter, Mark had to be brought in by Peter and Luke had to be brought in by Paul, but which is probably a way of reconciling the fact that these are two individuals who are generally in the elsewhere in the tradition associated with second generation Christians as opposed to, you know, first generation. But even the, the Luke's death in his biography is in some cases he's, he dies kind of a peaceful, you know, it's like a falling asleep, right, dies very peacefully in in Beyosha.
In other cases, there's, there's one example where Luke is crucified on an olive tree, which is these, these interesting traditions that really give no indication of where they came from, but, but find their way into the patristic imagination. But by the time you get to Jerome in the, I think late fourth, early fifth century, you get even Jerome, Jerome contradicts himself a few times. So there are examples where, where Jerome, it kind of seems like Jerome believes that Luke could have been, could have been Jewish. And then other times that Jerome says, oh yeah, no, he was a Gentile proselyte.
He didn't know Hebrew. He didn't know anything. He was just some, some Gentile guy. So I created this chart to kind of illustrate, you know, visually, just how sporadic the early traditions about Luke and authorship actually were.
So to go back to the final question, there, does anyone preserve good data for us? Or, or are we kind of just grasping in the dark? Yeah, yeah. So I think, I think I'll go back to what I said earlier.
I think that, I mean, there's, there's probably some good reason for believing that the name Luke got connected to the third gospel and acts possibly. Maybe everybody's just reading Erenaeus and just copying what Erenaeus said. But given the sort of diversity of the later tradition, it sort of seems like this is the one constant that the name Luke is tied to these two texts. But beyond that, I think it's just really hard to say that any of any of these futuristic writers have a concrete reason for the, you know, as you said, the knowledge that they had of the Luke and biography.
You have almost, like I said, universally, third gospel and acts are written by someone named Luke. But beyond that, there's almost nothing that anybody agrees on that can't be attributed to a later author reading an earlier author. Right. Okay, so that perhaps explains something else that you do in this second chapter where you go through the New Testament texts that talk about either Lucas or Lucas, which we would pronounce as Lucius today, looking at the Latin as we do.
And also the, the patristic evidence as if these are sort of pillars, I guess, that scholarship leans on to say that Luke is a Gentile. So you spend a lot of time in the Colossians reference to, to Lucas, where, you know, he's said to be present with this author quote unquote Paul, whether he is or not is difficult to say. There's a lot of variables going on here because we most scholars don't think that, you know, that Paul wrote Colossians in the first place. So it's a difficult pillar to lean on if we were, you know, using it to say that, well, this is Luke, the author of the third gospel and acts.
So do you want to say anything more about the way that you spend time in the New Testament text that mentioned either Lucas or Lucas, and also the patristic evidence? Because I don't necessarily sense that when author, when modern scholars say that, you know, Luke is a Gentile or probably has gentile, the most gentile leanings of any author in the New Testament that they're especially leaning on, you know, Deuter of Pauline texts, that they're especially leaning on the garbled information that is transmitted by the patristic sources. But I feel like in, in your talking through where you were going with this, that it makes more sense that you spend so much time in Colossians, for example, when I don't see, you know, a fully, Francois Beauvant, sorry, or Richard Pervo or someone of their ilk leaning an argument that Luke is a Gentile on, on Colossians, for example. Oh, for sure.
Yeah. I think this is, so this is partly an assumption based on earlier generations of scholars, which I think earlier generations of scholars were also basing it on an assumption, the assumption of the patristic writers too, that when, I mean, if you ask, especially Christians, if you ask an average Christian sitting in Pew, what do you know about Luke? Chances are good. They'll say something like he was a Gentile physician.
Right. The summer very married to this idea that he was a physician. He was a doctor, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And so I think, again, not to beat a dead horse, but I think if you begin from the premise, okay, the early tradition, everybody believes that somebody named Luke wrote these two texts, then you have early readers who return to the texts of the New Testament to say, okay, well, what evidence do we have about this guy who supposedly wrote these two texts? And what they find is a handful of references to a Lucas or a Lucas in scattered throughout some of the Deutero-Polein epistles, and possibly some references to Lucius within the text of Acts itself.
I believe Joseph Fitzmeyer kind of was the most famous example of somebody who was taking seriously the suggestion that the Lucius of, I believe, Acts 13 could have been the author of Luke and Acts, Lucius of Cyrene, I believe. But if you begin with this premise, then it becomes okay. Yeah, what can we know about this author? And so early readers turn to Colossians 4, and at the end of Colossians 4, you have Paul, or someone claiming to be Paul, saying, look, heresarchus, my fellow prisoner greets you as does Marcus, the cousin of Barnabas.
And he says, also Jesus, who is called, Justice, greets you. And he says, these are the only ones of the circumcision among my coworkers for the Kingdom of God, and they have been a comfort to me. And then a few verses down, he says, oh, by the way, Luke, the beloved physician, and Demus greet you. And so I think the traditional line of argument has been, well, we know that Luke and Acts were written by somebody named Luke.
Colossians 4 mentions a beloved physician named Luke. But because the author of Colossians 4 says heresarchus, Marcus, and Justice are the only ones of the circumcision among my coworkers for the Kingdom of God. Therefore, when he later mentions Luke, that must mean that Luke is not among the circumcision, which then suggests that Luke would have been a Gentile. And this is something that early Christian readers and all the way through Jerome could have reasonably discerned from the text of the New Testament themselves with little other information other than the Gospel of Luke and Acts were written by someone named Luke.
This is something that you could reason yourself into. And I think what has happened over the last two millennia is that this has just become ingrained within scholarly thinking about Luke and Acts to the point that really when I set out to find an actual argument for Luke being a Gentile, I wanted to see what the evidence was for Luke being non-Jewish. And what I found instead was that a lot of people just sort of assert this, that Luke was a Gentile, Luke may have been a physician or what have you, but it's really more of just a widespread assumption. It's not really something that has ever been argued explicitly.
So I don't see very many explicit arguments for why Luke was a Gentile in particular. So then you transition from there from the Patricia evidence to unfolding your own argument about how we can actually know this as you call them the flesh and blood author who we continue to call Luke by convention, I suppose. And in a circumstance where we have no other reliable data about this author, you appeal to evidence in the text of Luke and Acts, but this sort of forces you to deal theoretically with a question that the 20th century post-structuralists also tell with and that biblical scholars appeal to in certain cases over the years. You're aware of the various limitations about discovering the author's intent, but you say through several idiomatic expressions that our access to an author is only really approximate rather than precise.
All this to say, what do you wish to highlight from these discussions about how much we can know an author by their textual remains and our access to who this author might have been and how they would have been raised in the ancient world? Yeah, that's a great question. So a lot of my, I believe it's the third chapter of the book deals with sort of authorship theory. Yes.
And specifically as outlined by these 20th century post- structuralists like Roland Bart and Misha Foucault. And I think Roland Bart came in in the mid 20th century into these discussions of literary criticism with kind of a wrecking ball and said, no, no, you can't actually know anything about the mind of the person who wrote a text. So there was this insistence that the text itself be sort of pride apart from the subjective mind from which that text came, which is not really a new idea. You know, Plato has a very similar criticism of the written word that once something is written down, it has the potential to become divorced from its original context and be made to say any number of things that might be completely at odds with what the person who wrote it actually intended.
So I think what happened subsequently, so after Roland Bart is that the idea that you can't know the mind of the author or the author's intent, it becomes a, there is a swing of the pendulum to sort of an overreaction against this idea that subjective human persons write texts, right? And I tend to think of texts as artifacts. And I think to a significant degree, those texts can be read and interpreted within a historical lens that might say something about the author, the cultural and social context of the person who wrote those texts. But when you go back and look at like Wim sat in Beardsley and Roland Bart and Misha Foucault, one of the most significant things that all of these sort of post structural thinkers were trying to say was that you can't separate the intent of the author from the text or rather you should, I should say, separate the intent of the author from the text itself.
So you can't know what the author intended. What Wim sat in Beardsley writing in the early 20th century said was that an author's intent should not be taken as an indication of the aesthetic value of the work. And from there, Bart kind of took this thesis and ran with it. And it became a flashpoint in mid to late 20th century literary criticism about what can we know, if anything, about the author from the text they produce, which is a major turn from 19th century romanticism, which sort of reduced the meaning of a text specifically to the author's context itself.
So like everything within a text has something to say about the author's personal biography. I think what I'm trying to do is offer a careful, maybe adjustment of these 20th century post structuralists who are critical of the subjective author. So I've been influenced by Sean Burke, who I believe is from University of Edinburgh, I believe, who has sort of tried to push back and say, no, no, texts are written by human beings, right? And there is still a subjective, there is a subject, there is a subject behind the writer, there is also a concrete historical situation behind the author, right, that we are all limited by our time and place and geography and things like that, that way on our understanding of the world around us.
And so I think since there was so little historical evidence outside the text of Leukenatz, as we've talked about earlier, I think the best way to proceed with an understanding of the position or the perspective of the author of Leukenatz is to look at the texts themselves, that if we're going to get a glimpse of the author of Leukenatz, it's going to be from within the text and not outside the text. Very good. And so in this light, I was, I thought it was curious, in a couple of places, you disavowed the relevance of redaction, critical studies on the Gospel of Luke. But I'm just thinking for a second, it's interesting to me that if Luke knows Matthew, which again is an assumption unto itself, and if both authors are thought of as Jewish, then we could possibly say something about the qualities of their Judaism, Luke versus Matthew, the degree to which they embrace the Gentile mission as part of Jesus' earthly ministry, for example.
I think you're at least sympathetic to the Pharisees, if you don't openly embrace it, you don't make it a tendentious thesis. So where does the Hesse-Dinstah confront redaction come from? And is this a possibility for future research to add to Luke's biography, so to speak? I think so, yes.
The issue for me with redaction criticism, I think, is that the evidence is so scant that it doesn't provide as much to work with. I think it's entirely legitimate, and to compare differences in the text of Luke and Mark and Matthew, I think that's great, and I do that several times in the book. But the difficulty with working with redaction, critical view, that posits Q or... Dispenses with it?
Or even like, I got, even in my own research, I got pretty far into the weeds with folks who posit special different recensions of L, this special source for Luke. Proto-L or L, but whatever you want to add to L. Exactly. At some point, you have to say, well, this is the text that we're working with.
And, but I do think there is a lot of fruitful work to be done on Luke and, on specifically Luke and redaction, right? That, for instance, Luke has this, Mark has this famous... Oh gosh. What is famously called the great omission, right?
Where quite a bit of Jesus' addressing the law gets sort of cut out, right? In Luke, Luke actually expands this understanding and says things like, Luke never reduces the Jewish law to sort of like one particular way of viewing things, right? He has, instead of Jesus summarizing the law, he has a lawyer, right? Summarize the law, but never says, all you have to do, all you have to know is XYZ.
He says that the law can be summarized in this way. But this is actually oddly enough a really common trait in early Jewish literature that almost as long as Jews have been writing about spiritual interpretation, they've also been finding ways, especially in the Hellenistic era, to summarize the requirements of the Mosaic law. So I think that's an interesting point, but then also in many cases, over and against Mark and Matthew, Luke seems to have a much stricter view of the law's requirements with respect to the law's ethical demands. And again, I think there's a good case to be made even with the example of like an anisense of Fira in acts.
I think that a lot of folks have trouble interpreting that passage, I think that it honestly goes back to Ezekiel, who says that economic sins are morally defiling and are punishable by death, right? So I think a lot of Luke's understanding of the events that he narrates is sort of filtered through this lens of Jewish law in a way that even Mark and Luke don't approach. So I think that's a helpful way to think about the role of redaction criticism within this conversation. That's actually a nice segue to talking about how Luke handles Israel's scriptures.
From the Pentateuch to the prophetic books, you say it makes it quite unlikely that we're dealing with a Gentile author here, someone who knows these books in great depth. And you say that whether he's fashioned as sort of a proselyte to Judaism or a godfear who's attached to a Diasworx synagogue, we don't really have good examples for a comparative person to the capability of Luke if he is fashioned as a Gentile author. So with his exegetical skill, and I think you say that this does not prove his Jewishness, but it tips you toward a assumption of Jewish until proven Gentile. Can you walk us through your argument in this chapter?
And especially I guess what you lean on to show Luke's exegetical skill and his adeptness with Israel's scriptures? Yeah, sure. That's the phrase Jewish until proven Gentile is I borrowed that from my friend Isaac Oliver. And I think it's helpful as a sort of grounding sort of orienting point for understanding, for reading Luke and Acts that I think when we approach texts, most of us, especially with text, religious texts like the New Testament, everybody has these sort of preconceived assumptions that they're bringing with them as they read.
And I think that Jewish until proven Gentile is a helpful way to orient the reader as they go in. If you imagine somebody reading Luke and Acts for the first time, one of the things that I find really interesting about Luke and Acts is the author's interpretation of Israel's scriptures. And sort of in contrast to like the Gospel of Matthew, where Matthew often uses these very wooden prophecy fulfillment phrases, like this was done to fulfill the blah, blah, blah, right? Something happens, Matthew says, this is to fulfill what this person said in Israel's scriptures.
Luke, at least the way I read Luke and Acts, I see a lot of more subtle illusions. This is where I've been influenced by echoes of scripture in the Gospels, right? By Richard Hayes. Richard Hayes, right?
Yeah. That Luke has much more subtle and artful literary illusions to these figures from the figures and events from the Old Testament from Israel's scriptures is the term that I use in the book. I think it's interesting also that Luke never, at least in the way I read Luke and Acts, is never especially critical of the law, especially the law of Moses. And he actually appears to believe that it is important that Jewish Christians continue abiding by Torah.
But I think a good example of where I part ways from other New Testament, Luke critics who see maybe some anti-Judaism in Luke is, say, the example of the story of Lazarus, right? I don't go into a full analysis of Luke's treatment of Jewish characters in Luke and Acts, but what I'm really interested in is sort of framing Luke's interpretation of Israel's scriptures against the backdrop of Second Temple Judaism. So there's this passage in Luke 10, right, about the story of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. For example, Amy Gillabean says, you know, by the end of the Gospel of Luke, it's only Jesus and his followers who are the real, the people who really attend to the scriptures, right?
That only the the Jesus' followers have the correct understanding of them. But she also points out, so according to Amy Gillabean, Abraham responds to the rich man's request, as the rich man is in Hades, right? And the rich man asks to send Lazarus to warn his family about this judgment, or whatever. Amy Gillabean says that that actually removes the importance of Jewish Torah from the role, but as I read the parable, Abraham's response to the rich man actually underscores the importance of Torah that it ignores, I think this perspective ignores the view that there is kind of an irony in the parable's conclusion that, you know, why would a spectral visit from beyond the grave change the minds of a rich man's family if they won't even listen to the the sort of scriptural authority of the prophets, right?
Luke holds the the texts of the Israel scripture in high regard, and he finds ways to weave the narrative of Israel's scriptures into his own. And I think that even goes for the case in Luke 4, which you mentioned earlier, I think you mentioned earlier of Jesus's inaugural sermon. I certainly had it in mind. Yeah, where, you know, Luke is really drawing on this, this, this image of Elijah and Elijah, Elijah and Elijah, right, right.
So Luke finds ways to weave Israel's scriptures into his own, into his own narrative in a way that is quite a bit more subtle than other gospel writers, for sure. And kind of segue, I guess this is a segue into the next chapter, but essentially, Luke does not have nearly the critical view of Jewish law that other gospel writers do, like even Matthew, who is often hailed as the most Jewish gospel writer, right? Luke, Luke, I see Luke as arguing that the Jewish law is still in effect, as it were. Let's move on to the next chapter, where you discuss the Jewish law and also sort of Jewish festival observance in Luke acts in a really interesting way.
And you say that Luke portrays these in sort of insider terms, and then you move on to the Jerusalem Council in Acts, chapter 15, which you portray as a means for Gentiles to keep a sensitivity toward moral purity codes and Judaism. So this reminded me kind of this collection of arguments in many ways of the arguments of input forth by the Paul within Judaism perspective of shifting to Paul's studies for a minute. And the comparison would be that Luke, like Paul, imagines Gentiles as being saved as Gentiles. You know, they don't have to duty eyes.
They don't become Jews first without, and they don't adopt these ritual signifiers of Judaism or the full extent of the Torah, whereas Luke, like Paul, still imagines a place for Torah among ethnic Jews. So it's not an abrogation or it's not a bypassing of Torah on mass, perhaps. So how should this perspective on Paul play into the development of your argument? I'm curious.
And do you want to share the insights that you brought at the table with Luke and the Jewish festivals, which seemed to me like a unique bit of your own research on how Luke portrays the festivals without naming them specifically, but also displays his knowledge of inner Judaism celebrations? Yeah, that's great. So when you look at the apostolic decree, the Jerusalem Council in Acts chapter 16, or rather 15, so right? Yeah.
I think it's 15, but ballpark. Yeah, around there. It's actually, I believe Luke references the sort of conclusions of the Jerusalem Council three different times throughout the remainder of the narrative. But the cause for the controversy is these these folks show up and claim that it's necessary for these Gentiles coming into the Christian movement.
They have to be circumcised according to the law Moses in order to be accepted as Christians. And so the question really is, do you have to become Jewish before you can become a Christian, before you can become a follower of Jesus? And so this creates quite a bit in Luke's understanding this creates quite a bit of controversy. So you have sort of a meeting of the minds in Jerusalem, where the outcome of the this conference is that, okay, well, if we want to call him quote unquote pure Gentiles, Gentiles who are really interested in this Jesus fellow but have no connection to or understanding of Judaism, these pure Gentiles, they don't have to follow the law of Moses, they don't have to be circumcised, they don't have to follow a kosher diet.
But the sort of minimum requirements that that these Gentile Christians must follow is that they have to renounce idol worship, they have to avoid sexual immorality. And they have to abstain from consuming blood or food that has been strangled. And all of these, each of these abstentions, I guess, all come from Levitical law that say, these are things that actually bring about a moral impurity and have the potential to defile the temple. And according to this, this theory of moral impurity, these things can defile even from a distance.
So if you're living out in the diaspora, you're living in Asia Minor, you're living elsewhere in the Greek speaking world, by if you were a Gentile Christian, no connection to Judaism by eating or consuming blood or eating food that's been strangled by engaging in sexual immorality by by worshiping idols, you run the risk of polluting the temple in Jerusalem from a distance, which in turn, according to the moral impurity code, the moral purity code that's outlined in Leviticus and elsewhere, in Israel's scriptures, this runs the risk of causing the divine presence to flee from the temple and from from Jerusalem, and possibly even cause the expulsion of of Judeans from from the land. So basically, what is agreed upon in the apostolic degree here is the sort of minimum requirements of the Mosaic law that Gentile Christians have to have to adhere to in order to be allowed to enter into this movement that that Luke believes to be the people of God. So that I think is the larger argument of chapter, oh my goodness, what chapter we on now? Five?
I believe it's five, yes. Go ahead. I guess I just wanted to ask again, if at all the Paul within Judaism perspective appealed to you to kind of bring that to Luke, you know, a Luke within Judaism perspective. Indirectly, I'd say, I'm not a Paul scholar, although I'm aware of the the Paul within Judaism school and have connected with some of those scholars, I think Matthew Tiesen, who has written extensively and I think would consider himself within the Paul within Judaism school.
His book, Jesus and the Forces of Death really informed this particular chapter of my work with. So Tiesen's work on Paul influenced his book on Jesus and Tiesen's book on Jesus influenced my work on Luke. So indirectly, I think I've been influenced by the Paul within Judaism school. But again, I think what is really interesting about Luke's Paul in especially, the way Luke characterizes Paul in Acts is that I think the argument can be made that the Luke and Paul is even more Jewish than the Paul of Paul's letters.
Luke is just absolutely meticulous in depicting a Paul who is very, very observant of the demands of Torah in a way that I'm not entirely sure that the historical Paul or the Paul of the Pauline epistles would have been himself, which to me is an interesting starting point for discussion, right? There's an interesting stress, but Luke takes Paul to Jerusalem and makes him bathe in certain ways and he has to observe all of the observances of Torah that perhaps Luke only knows through reading, rather than the historical Paul is what I'm getting at. Let's move to your last chapter, your sixth chapter, which features an embrace for you of cognitive linguistics. I thought this was interesting.
Basically, you're evaluating Luke's use of terms for ethnicity, non-Jewish and Jewish. So specifically the Greek taiethna, the nations, the Gentiles, which when coupled against Hui Yudayoi, constitutes sort of Jewish in-group versus out-group language for Jews and non-Jews. So what set you on this path to, I guess, cataloging these various references and what did you discover about the degree to which this emic use of ethna and ethnoi and its various counterparts reflects specifically Jewish linguistic customs of the first century? Yeah, so I've been, for quite some time, I've been interested in language and not, I mean, this was before I even began working on the dissertation, I've had an interest in how our minds, how language interacts with the human mind, like where it where language comes from, what it reveals about the human beings who use it.
And I was particularly struck by this question by the scholar named Marilyn Selman, who 30 years ago asked the question, well, if Luke is mainly interested in Gentiles and narrates his story from a Gentile perspective, why is he using this word Gentile or in Greek, it's, you know, tai, ethna or ethnos, right, which is somewhat but not totally co-extensive with our understanding of ethnicity, but was a Jewish term for non-Jews, right, the nations, which is usually the translation. If Luke is interested primarily in the Gentiles, why does he use this term Gentile, which is not something that has a whole lot of meaning outside of a Jewish context, like I don't go around identifying myself as not Jewish, which would be a weird thing, right, for somebody to do. Sure. The conversation gets a little more complicated when we refer back to the slow, again, that slow process of the development of the tradition and the separation of these two identities into distinct recognizable religions that we have, we now have Christianity and Judaism, especially with regard to Justin Martyr.
So what I tried to do in this chapter is look at the overlap between cognitive linguistics, how the human mind uses language, and I think what cognitive linguistics has shown in the past decade or so is that there are a few constants in the way language functions in human societies that, you know, previously it might have been folks might have believed that, you know, each context is entirely unique and different and the way people use language is going to be dependent specifically on that context in cognitive linguistics kind of assumes that there are a handful of sort of universal, I want to call them rules that that human language abides by norms, perhaps? Yes, yes, no matter what context a person happens to be a part of. So what I intended to do with this chapter is to say, okay, well, why one, I think the question Marilyn Salman's question still stands, like why is Luke using this term Gentile if he is himself from a non-Jewish context? Again, it gets a little more complicated when you look at someone like Justin Martyr who also uses the term Gentile.
So what I tried to do is look at the linguistic and the semantic domain, the range of meanings that the term Gentile might have in various contexts and in various literature of the within the early Christian movement and within early Judaism. And what I found was, after much deliberation, I found myself, I think this could have been a dissertation all on its own. It got to the point where, you know, this chapter was like 75 or 100 pages long and I was like, what am I doing here? But I think in the end, what I was trying to do was understand how Luke uses the term Gentile or ethnos and how maybe compare that to how other early Christian, but the artistic writers would have used the language as well.
So we know for a fact that Justin Martyr was not just a Gentile but was self-consciously a Gentile that took it as a matter of pride, that he was a Gentile and not Jewish. So what I wanted to do was look at how Luke uses the term and sort of compare it to the way, say, Justin Martyr uses the term. And what I found was that, you know, Luke rarely sees, Luke has kind of a somewhat typical Jewish view of the nations or of Gentiles. He connects the term Gentile with another term that is typically used in Jewish literature.
It's translated in the NRSV as lawless, people like people outside the law, people not having the law. So he associates the Gentiles with lawlessness. He depicts them, Luke depicts them as sort of grappling after power, struggling for political authority and domination. And there is a, not entirely, but somewhat negative understanding of what it means to be a non-Jew or a Gentile and ethnos in Luke's understanding.
But by contrast, if you look at, you know, as I said earlier, if you look at Justin Martyr, particularly in his dialogue with Trufo, which kind of became my, the point to which I returned throughout the book, what you find is that at least Justin Martyr finds a point of pride in being an ethnos, right, war run against being Jewish. Justin doesn't necessarily have the same connection of Gentiles with sinners as Luke does, for example, right? Right. Yeah, you have, there is an interesting example of, is in the Sermon of the Mount, where Matthew has, do not even Gentiles do the same, right?
Luke has, do not even sinners do the same. So the argument was sort of maybe traditionally, was, well, Luke wants to avoid using the language of Gentiles and associating Gentiles with negative activities, because Luke's audience is mostly Gentile. He wants to kind of soften the blow a little bit for Matthew. In reality, what I see is that reveals that in Luke's mind at least, there is some way in which Gentiles and sinners are synonymous for Luke to swap out the nouns that easily.
Luke has to have some implicit association of Gentiles with sinning. And again, there's not really that implicit assumption made in Justin's work. Luke takes for granted that Gentiles are generally perceived as idolaters, right? But for Justin, on the other hand, it's Jews who have a perclivity toward idolatry, right?
Looking back at the, Justin specifically looks at the example of the, the forging of the golden calf, right? As, ah, look, here, it's not Gentiles that have this tendency toward idolatry. It's, it's, it's Jews who tend to be idol worshipers, which is, I see it as like a dialectic against what is already appearing in early, early, classical Jewish, Hellenistic Jewish literature, right? That, that, that Gentiles are perceived to be idolaters.
But I think for me, the, the most important point is how Justin self-consciously identifies as a Gentile. And, and he explicitly says, you know, God has shown favor to the Gentiles and accepts our, he uses the, you know, the first person plural, he says, God accepts our sacrifices, speaking to Trufo more than yours, meaning the Jews. So, and so Justin latches onto this identity of this Gentile identity in a way that Luke never does. Luke tends to be a little more distanced from, from that, that concept.
And part of that is, you know, Luke himself, disappearing from the narrative, so to speak, even though we do have the we passages and acts, he's not, you know, sort of self-identifying as either a Jew or Gentile there, but whatever that, whatever those we passages may entail. Uh, Joshua, let's wrap up the book a little bit here. And I guess I'll say is that one thing that I take away from the experience is that scholars have perhaps gone too far in attributing Luke's identity to non-Judaism, which seems to me like a category error, transferring the recognition of Luke's, uh, but Luke and Christianity's Gentile orientation to an assumption about Luke himself, well, he must have been a Gentile. So, um, perhaps no longer can it be claimed without the substantiation that Luke was a Gentile, but at the same time, you know, Luke is kind of a unicorn in early Christian history, right?
He's the one that writes this, is sort of historiography of the early Christian movement, uh, which may be a way of smuggling in Paul as normative. He's doing a lot of things that no one else is doing. So, um, finding ready-made comparatives to Luke is a difficult proposition in the first place. You quoted a scholar at one point who said essentially that absence some direct evidence, it would be nearly impossible to distinguish between a first century text written by a Hellenistic Jew who favors the Gentile mission from a Gentile Godfear who, who's embraced of Jesus as Messiah is mediated through, you know, the diasporic synagogue.
But I also sense for you that to take an agnostic position on Luke's identity is not a satisfying compromise. So why not, uh, to conclude us and what sorts of practical implications do you take away from situating Luke within Judaism? Yeah, that's a great question. And I would maybe slightly adjust the view.
I think that as I've mentioned a few times, I think it's very different. It's very difficult to, uh, to be able to claim anything concretely about the historical author behind a text. I think, you know, with the caveat of whatever we come up with is going to be a, um, a scholarly construction and that it's going to be influenced just as much by, um, our modern context as readers as it is, uh, the ancient, the context of the ancient writer. Um, what I'm trying to, to push back against or offer a corrective against is the, the assumption that Luke was a Gentile.
Um, I think in, in reality, um, and this is still even the, the concept of Jewish identity, you know, we talked a lot about the concept of Christian identity and antiquity. The concept of Judaism or Jewish identity and antiquity is just as hotly debated right now, um, among scholars. Um, but I think, so what I'm about to say is, is you should take this with a grain of salt, right? But I think there is a sense in which, uh, it is difficult to distinguish, um, a Hellenistic Jew who was brought into, um, who was raised in a Jewish context, raised to, to, uh, read and interpret Torah and Israel scriptures versus, um, a, a highly educated Gentile who, who was, uh, well, the concept of Godfirors is also, um, in some ways, a scholarly construction that, um, is based on the text of Luke and Acts itself.
There's not a huge, uh, um, there's not a lot of evidence for this, this discrete category called Godfirors, um, in ancient literature. So in a lot of ways we're kind of, uh, using Luke and Acts to interpret Luke and Acts. Um, but, um, I think when it comes to the, the practical differences between someone who was raised in a Jewish context versus someone who was brought into and became a part of a Jewish context, I think there's a little functional difference. Um, although that, again, that's a big, I think, um, given the state of, of the present state of scholarship on, on Jewish identity in antiquity, but, um, going back to the, the agnostic position on Luke's identity, right?
I think what I'm pushing back against is the, the sort of what I see as an willingness to, so perhaps what I like to say is, uh, an optimistic epistemology, right? Uh, there's, um, there are very, uh, several modern scholars who have written since the, you know, the 19th century have written that there are a few things that we can know with certainty other than the fact that Luke was a Gentile Christian. And I think what I'm trying to do is push back against that a little bit and say like, wait a minute, why do you think that Luke was a Gentile Christian? Um, and is there actually, is there actual historical warrant for that?
Um, which is why, at the end of the day, when it comes to a sort of agnostic position, I think it's better to err on the side of Luke being, uh, within a Jewish milieu as, as, as, um, as it's better to err on that side for, for most of the texts of the New Testament, you know, as we're talking about, uh, mid to late first century, early second century texts, considering the fact that, um, Christianity and Judaism did not emerge as distinct identities until much later than we originally thought. It's always much better to err on the side of Luke was Jewish until proven Gentile, um, than it is to go in guns, blazing, saying, ah, this is that Luke was a Gentile and serve, I believe, as kind of a, which I think is a reading that has served as a warrant for, um, subsequent, um, supersessionist readings of, of the new, of all the New Testament texts, right? Not just Luke and that. Yeah.
Well, uh, Joshua, thanks so much for the time that you've taken to talk with us today. Uh, it's been a pleasure to speak with you. And, uh, you know, I also sense from reading your book and talking with you that your interest in Luke has not been entirely exhausted by this experience, which is always nice when you complete, you know, dissertation, revise it and you still have more to say, or more to research. Uh, I'm curious if you'd like to say a little bit more about where your research is headed next.
Yeah. So currently I'm working on an article with Anthony Ladun about, uh, applying social, uh, social network theory, uh, to the named characters in Luke and acts, uh, looking at how, uh, how Luke's named characters reference other texts of the New Testament and which, uh, what they might, what this might be able to say, what social network theory might be able to say to Luke's, uh, embeddedness within a particular network, right? Like, it does the way Luke references various, uh, persons within the New Testament say anything about his relationship to Paul, for example, the historical Paul. Um, what can that tell us?
And I'm also working on a short, uh, more popular level book on acts, which I would like to see as a bit of a distilled version of, of my, my current book, um, that is a little bit more appropriate for a general audience. Excellent. Well, we'll look forward to seeing both of those and maybe having you back on the new books network. But anyway, uh, thank you again, Joshua Paul Smith for your time today and this work of yours on Luke and ethnicity and acts and for, uh, again, being our guest on the new books network.
Thank you so much, again, uh, Dr. Smith's book is called Luke was not a Christian reading the third gospel and acts within Judaism and it's available now from Brill. Uh, I've been Rob Heaton, your host and New Testament and early Christian studies for new books and biblical studies. I'll be with you again on your next download.
But in the meantime, never stop questioning. Thank you. Bye.