Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism

Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism
Author: Joshua Paul Smith
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2023-12-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004684727

In this volume Joshua Paul Smith challenges the long-held assumption that Luke and Acts were written by a gentile, arguing instead that the author of these texts was educated and enculturated within a Second-Temple Jewish context. Advancing from a consciously interdisciplinary perspective, Smith considers the question of Lukan authorship from multiple fronts, including reception history and social memory theory, literary criticism, and the emerging discipline of cognitive sociolinguistics. The result is an alternative portrait of Luke the Evangelist, one who sees the mission to the gentiles not as a supersession of Jewish law and tradition, but rather as a fulfillment and expansion of Israel’s own salvation history.