If the name of Hans Conzelmann is associated with the massive shift in Lukan studies characterizing the decades reaching from the 1950s to the publication of Joseph Fitzmyer’s two-volume commentary on the Third Gospel in the 1980s, any survey of more recent exploration of the Gospel of Luke would highlight the work of such scholars as Robert Tannehill and Luke Johnson on the literary side, and Halvor Moxnes and Philip Esler on the social-scientific. My own introduction to serious study of Luke coincided with this latter shift, marked by the waning of the hegemony of historical study (historical criticism, tradition criticism, redaction criticism, and the rest) and the blooming of so-called “newer” approaches (e.g., new literary criticism, narrative criticism, new historicism, and the like). At the time, even the idea of writing a commentary seemed to present too many problems of method and presentation; indeed, more than one person pronounced a plague on all commentary writing! My decision to undertake this project was grounded in my belief that those involved in the church’s ministry continue to be helped most by commentaries on whole books, written from the perspective of a fundamental reverence for the biblical text and from a position of critical engagement with academic biblical studies and active involvement in the life of the church. I also believed that discussion about method in the study of the Gospels need not lead necessarily into a cul-de-sac, and that recent innovations in method had as their natural outcome the possibility of making the Gospel of Luke and its message come even more alive for contemporary readers.
How I have navigated the sometimes difficult, always exciting waters of interpretive method will become clear to any who actually (!) read the Introduction. It will become equally clear that, in spite of the size of this volume, I have made no attempt to address the whole spectrum of questions that might possibly be put to the Gospel of Luke. This has never really been possible, and it is even less so today. This is not for me a cause of despair, but rather reason to rejoice, and to reflect on the multivalency of the Gospel, which can address in so many ways the diverse needs of the historic and global church.
A project of this magnitude is not brought to completion without a crowd of witnesses and participants. Above all, I want to record my gratitude for the encouragement and support of Pamela, Aaron, and Allison—my family; no doubt they will welcome the publication of this commentary as a harbinger of future conversations in our home that do not turn so quickly to Luke! I have benefited greatly from my students and research assistants Gilles Bekaert, Meagan Howland, Kevin Anderson, and Michael McKeever, and from many others who have participated in my various courses on the Third Gospel—first at New College Berkeley, then more recently at the American Baptist Seminary of the West and Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Much of my perspective on the Gospel of Luke has been developed in the context of sermons and seminars in local churches and conferences—especially among friends at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, Richmond, California, and at Redwood Christian Park, Boulder Creek, California. New College Berkeley and the American Baptist Seminary of the West each afforded me time for intensive work on the Gospel of Luke with sabbaticals. I am grateful to the University of Durham for appointing me as Visiting Fellow in the Department of Theology in Spring 1992, and especially to Jimmy and Meta Dunn for their numerous acts of hospitality during that period of study. My research was supported financially not only through these periods of sabbatical leave, but also through the Catholic Biblical Association, which awarded me a Young Scholar’s Fellowship for my project “Toward a Unified Hermeneutic: The Application of Discourse Theory and Sociological Analysis to the Gospel of Luke” (1991–92); and through the Graduate Theological Union, which provided research assistance and additional funding in the form of a Henry Mayo Newhall Fellowship for Student-Faculty Partnership, for the project “Luke-Acts and the Jewish People.” Of course, I am also grateful to Fred Bruce, who extended the initial invitation to me to contribute a commentary on the Gospel of Luke for the NICNT; and to his replacement as series editor, Gordon Fee, whose patience, encouragement, insight, and willingness to allow me to follow a different sort of interpretive path have been greatly appreciated.
Originally, the NICNT was to have used the American Revised Version (1901); this has since given way both to translations generated by the authors of the various commentaries and to the use of other translations. Not wishing to proliferate the number of translations, and in the hope of using a text that is readily available and widely used in churches, I have chosen to employ the NRSV in this commentary. For the most part, I have refrained from discussing text-critical alternatives, though from time to time I have indicated in my editing of the NRSV where my own thinking departs from the translation committee on both text-critical and translation issues.
JOEL B. GREEN
HOLY WEEK 1997