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In order to understand Luke's political vision, we have first to understand the complex political situation in which Acts is written. This becomes clear in the trial of Paul, where Paul stands before a Roman tribunal but addresses a dispute arising within the Jewish community. Despite his protestations of innocence under Roman law, Paul's response embodies an inclusive political vision that is profoundly subversive of the imperial order. Keywords Acts, Luke, Paul, Roman Empire, Apologia, Political, Gospel, Introduction The question about Luke's political vision is generally posed in terms of his attitude to the dominant political reality of his day: the Roman Empire. Is Luke pro-Roman or [...]

It is no coincidence that the church in Luke's narrative bore the nickname 'The Way.' The Evangelist's 'mental map' of the early church's development is more fluid and open than the hierarchical model of later centuries., The perception that we need a map to understand Luke's history of the church is hardly new. Every Sunday School Bible has its map of the 'Missionary Journeys of Saint [...]

The presentation of the miraculous and supernatural in the narrative of Acts creates the presumption of a shared religious experience that makes it difficult to frame under the fact or fiction categories of Greek literature. The debate on Acts is compounded by the blurring of the distinctions between fact and fiction in the genre of history during the hellenistic and Roman periods. Acts' characters, setting and stories allude to distant lands which are usually allocated to fiction. However, it has a contemporary and realistic plot and, does not have the romantic closure of fiction novels.

Reinmuth's careful study (originally a Jena Habilitationsschrift) sets itself a double task. The first is to rescue Pseudo-Philo's work from a 'shadow existence' of unjust neglect on the part of [...]

The Major part of this study of the |publicans' of the synoptic tradition is devoted to an exhaustive analysis of the telonai of the Graeco-Roman world. Herrenbruck presents a wealth [...]

Faith is an important concept in early Christianity. But what did the word pistis (and its Latin equivalent fides) mean in the everyday language of Greeks and Romans? In her important study, Teresa Morgan rightly insists that we need to pay as much attention to the way words worked in the mentalité of the wider social world with which Christians were seeking to communicate as we do to the ways they are used in the New Testament. This article seeks to summarize Morgan’s understanding of pistis in the classical world and its impact on NT texts, focusing on the two major themes of pistis as relationship (believing/trusting in) and pistis as propositional belief (believing that). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women in the Acts of the Apostles. A Feminist Liberation Perspective. By Ivoni Richter Reimer. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Pp. xxvi + 302. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. ISBN 0 [...]

O Fearghail is primarily concerned with the thematic structures of Luke-Acts. The first four chapters of the Gospel are treated as a preparatory narrative introduction to the whole work, anticipating [...]

Focuses on the canonicity and the dilemmas of studying the texts of the Bible by Christians. Discussion on the need to rediscover the ability to read the canonic texts of the Bible in a creative way as a framework for engaging with questions of God and morality; Overview of the dilemmas of Biblical studies facing Christians; Cultural context of Biblical studies; Effect of the contextual separation between philology and performance on the study of the Bible.

Explores the works of the evangelist Luke about the history of the church, in an attempt to understand some of the patterns and conceptual structures implicit in his works. Motive for constructing mental maps; Factors to consider in analyzing Luke's narrative geography; Content of the mental map of patristic church historian Eusebius.

Asking the 'what if ?' questions of virtual history is a way of rubbing our noses in history's essential contingency—in the fact that things could have been different, that human choices (among other contingencies) actually matter. And of all history's contingencies, those of authorship seem—at least to those of us who are authors—the most precarious imaginable. With Luke we are dealing with an author who seems particularly sensitive to the delicate combinations of forces, both communal and individual, that hedge about the articulation of the word. Asking 'What if Luke had never met Theophilus?' is in the end an invitation to consider the possibility of the non-existence of Luke's Gospel and Acts. Can we imagine the New Testament without these two texts (which together make up 25% of its bulk)? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]