The Third Gospel for the First Time: Luke within the Context of Ancient Biography

If Luke’s first audience understood the Gospel as a biography, what would their experience of the text have been? This book invites the reader to accompany the first readers or hearers of Luke’s Gospel and to experience the narrative about the life of Jesus alongside them. It utilises Wolfgang Iser’s theory about reading and readers and focuses on gaps and vacancies in the text. The most important passages are Lk 2.41-51; 9.28-36 and 24.13-32. It also considers the audience’s previous knowledge, derived from the preaching recorded in the Book of Acts and from the narratives of the Septuagint, and explores the understanding of the human lifespan in ancient time in general. The audience would probably have been acquainted with Isocrates’ Evagoras, Xenophon’s Agesilaus and Philo’s De Vita Mosis. It must also be assumed that Luke’s first audience would have been sensitive to the development of genre current at that time. This book pays attention to similarities regarding themes and differences in narrative techniques and can serve as a thematic commentary on Luke’s Gospel. It also addresses the question: What is the use of genre classification for the exegetical tasks?