Kylie Crabbe

Two types of exegetical habits shape interpretations of Lukan eschatology: enduring assumptions when approaching the text that, in contrast to his synoptic siblings, Luke has removed eschatological interest in response to the delayed parousia; and recent tendencies to focus on genre and thus to compare Luke/Acts to (predominantly) non-Jewish Graeco-Roman historiographies, where themes of an eschatological character do not feature. This study takes a fresh approach, demonstrating the need to consider Luke’s text within its broader literary context, providing a rigorous methodology for cross-genre comparisons of themes which transcend generic boundaries, and ultimately reasserting the importance of Luke’s understanding of the end of history as it reshapes experience in the present.

“Either I’ll have you as a wife, as I had you before, or you must die!” So Andronicus yells at Drusiana, having locked her in a tomb for refusing to have sex with him, in the second-century Acts of John. Drusiana’s domestic setting houses a nested story of violence. Her husband’s abuse parallels that of a rival assailant, Callimachus, who in turn also involves Andronicus’s steward in his violent planning. After a brief overview of the passage, and consideration of its genre alongside other Greek novels and its use of comedy, this paper analyses the domestic setting’s violence through the portraits of these three male characters and Drusiana. I suggest intersectional dynamics support the text’s rehabilitation of the elite male characters and denunciation of the “unchangeable” steward, with implications also for understanding broader attitudes about marriage and sexual abuse in antiquity. In keeping with other portraits of sexual desire and violence elsewhere in the Acts of John, I argue the text conflates violence and desire in the interest of championing celibacy, which is idealised in a mixed message about the one named female character in this passage, Drusiana.

This article analyzes the second-century Acts of John 56–57, in which Antipatros seeks healing for his twin sons whom he claims he cannot support as he ages. I argue that this passage turns on a layered critique of Antipatros. First, the text censures medical commerce. Second, it uses his threat of murder, economic circumstances, and name to undermine Antipatros as both father and inquiring disciple. The episode thus leverages criticism of a character whose negative attitudes lead him to contemplate destruction of those with infirmities. However, it retains a mixed message: while the character of the apostle John comes to focus on the sons, the narrative silences them. Ultimately, the text emphasizes what the critique means for the flawed male, elite father, rather than the experience of the impaired sons. Such dynamics warrant close attention as we continue to expand our understanding of attitudes to disability in sources from antiquity.

Frühe Verfechter des “Parting of the ways”-Modells haben sich in verschiedener Weise auch auf die Apostelgeschichte bezogen, wogegen andere, die mit schärfer abgrenzenden Modellen zur Beschreibung der frühen Beziehungen zwischen Christen und Juden arbeiteten, Belege für eine feindselige Auseinanderentwicklung von Juden und Christen in der lukanischen Darstellung fanden. Der folgende Beitrag geht davon aus, dass sich einige Erzählfiguren in der Apostelgeschichte tatsächlich voneinander trennen. Er zeigt jedoch, dass diese Konflikte keine grundlegende, strukturelle Trennung bedeuten, ebenso wie auch die schroffe Trennung zwischen Paulus und Barnabas keinen generellen Traditionsbruch zwischen verschiedenen Richtungen der Jesusanhänger markiert. Nach der kurzen Diskussion einiger Hypothesen über die Historizität und die strukturelle Entwicklung des “Christentums” in Studien zur Apostelgeschichte wird als erstes die These aufgestellt, dass die auffällige Hybridität der Identität eingeführter Erzählfiguren zeigt, dass die vom Modell der “getrennten Wege” vorausgesetzte Binarität den Identitäten und Beziehungen in der Apostelgeschichte nicht gerecht wird. Im Anschluss daran werden weitere narrative Zielsetzungen untersucht, die sich aus Charakterisierungen und Konflikten in der Apostelgeschichte ergeben, etwa in Bezug auf die Auseinandersetzungen des Paulus mit eifersüchtigen “Juden aus der Asia”, sein Verlassen der Synagogen in Korinth und Ephesus sowie die gespaltene Reaktion der Versammlung der Juden in Rom. Nach einer Analyse der Zusammenkunft in Jerusalem, bei der die Tora-Praxis für Heiden diskutiert wird, kommt der Beitrag schließlich zu dem Schluss, dass die Untersuchung der Apostelgeschichte als literarisches Werk zeigt, dass die entscheidende Frage nicht diejenige nach einem Konflikt zwischen “Christen” und “Juden” ist, sondern diejenige nach der Einbeziehung der Heiden in das endzeitliche Gottesvolk.

The four (or five) kingdom paradigm is a way of playing with time. It offers a set of symbols for structuring history, explaining the past in relation to the present and future. This paper argues that writers who draw on this kingdom paradigm do so in order to address circumstances in their own times. Part one considers Hesiod’s Works and Days 106–201, and themes from it taken up in later (Augustan period) Latin texts. Part two turns to the Epistle of Barnabas as a recalibration of the tradition found in Daniel 7. The study shows that, in each text, the periods are reworked but the timing is reinterpreted, often to represent the writer’s time as the nadir of the entire schema (sometimes anticipating imminent reversal) or, rarely, as the final goal of the process. These writers variously use the paradigm to express judgement on their generation, offer hope, or even celebrate current triumph. Thus, the four/five-period schema allows the writers to play with broad sweeps of time. But the pattern it offers is a way of addressing the present, constantly recalibrated, but always “now.” Fully open access, see: https://brill.com/view/title/59157

For Josephus, unity is a virtue.  But this essay argues it is a virtue which he deploys in characteristically pragmatic fashion, frequently serving a rhetorical purpose in his presentation of Jewish groups in the passages in which it appears.  For instance, in Against Apion, Josephus claims unity characterises the Jewish people, arising from practices of shared remembrance of the law (Ag.Ap. 2.179-81).  Here in apologetic mode, he identifies the unity of the Hebrew people with the similar oneness of both God and temple (2.193).  By contrast, in the Jewish War, Josephus’s own character claims that it was the sin of disunity which originally resulted in Roman domination as a divine punishment (J.W. 5.396).  And, as his narrative of the loss of Jerusalem unfolds, he makes frequent references to disunity as a tragic contributor to the military defeat.  Although in keeping with the practical accounts of the causes of military failure in historiographies like that of Thucydides (cf. Thuc. 6.72), for Josephus the theme also serves a broader purpose of laying blame for Jerusalem’s destruction at the feet of the Jewish revolutionaries who led the people as a whole astray, as he exhorts renewed unity under (in many ways, he suggests, benevolent) Roman rule.  Thus, after outlining key passages in which the rhetoric of unity appears in Josephus’s texts (including in his description of the Jewish schools, especially that in J.W. 2, his re-presentation of stipulations of the law in Ant. 4, and the passages from Ag.Ap. 2 and J.W. 5 above), this essay discusses the role of unity and disunity in Josephus’s portraits of Jewish particularity amid other political and religious communities.  What emerges is a consistent preference for unity among Jewish groups as Josephus claims an ability to maintain peaceful co-existence with others, for the present time.

This thesis investigates how understandings of history in diverse texts of the Graeco-Roman period illuminate Lukan eschatology. Two strands of Lukan scholarship have contributed to an enduring tendency to underestimate the centrality of eschatology to Luke/Acts.  Hans Conzelmann’s thesis, that Luke focused on history rather than eschatology as a response to the parousia’s delay, has dominated Lukan scholarship since the mid-twentieth century, with concomitant assumptions about Luke’s politics and understanding of suffering.  Recent Lukan scholarship has centred instead on genre and rhetoric, examining Luke/Acts predominantly in relation to ancient texts deemed the same genre while overlooking themes (including those of an eschatological character) that these texts do not share.

This thesis offers a fresh approach.  It illuminates the inherent connections between Luke’s understanding of history and its end, and demonstrates significant ways in which Luke’s eschatological consciousness shapes key themes of his account.  By extending comparisons to a wider range of texts, this study overcomes two clear methodological shortfalls in current research: limiting comparisons of key themes to texts of similar genre, and separating non-Jewish from Jewish texts.  Having established the need for a new examination of Luke’s eschatology in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I set out the study’s method of comparing diverse texts on themes that cut across genres.  Chapters 3 to 6 then consider each key text and Luke/Acts in relation to a different aspect of their writers’ conceptions of history: the direction and shape of history; determinism and divine guidance; human culpability and freedom; and the present and the end of history.  The analysis shows that in every aspect of history examined, Luke/Acts shares significant features of the texts with which, because they do not share its genre, it is not normally compared.  Setting Luke/Acts in conversation with a broader range of texts highlights Luke’s periodised, teleological view of history and provides a nuanced picture of Luke’s understanding of divine and human agency, all of which is affected in fundamental ways by his portrayal of the present time already within the final period of history.  As a result, this study not only clarifies Lukan eschatology, but reaffirms the importance of eschatology for Lukan politics and theodicy.

This article argues that Lukan meal scenes are encounters which bring to life the invitation and challenge at the heart of Jesus’ proclamation in this Gospel. After a brief introduction to Greco-Roman and Old Testament influences, and the shape of Lukan meals, it outlines the central themes of Jesus’ proclamation as exemplified by both what Jesus says and the response he receives in the inauguration of his ministry at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30). In light of the key themes of acceptance, release and participation for both “insiders” and “outsiders”, the study then considers the meal scene in Luke 7:36-50 and draws conclusions about the challenge to transformation which takes place at Simon’s table. It concludes by briefly alluding to ways in which other Lukan meal scenes embody these themes in Jesus’ proclamation.

Informed by contemporary disability theory, recent studies have examined the frequent portraits of those with sensory and physical impairments in early Christian literature and criticized their ableist elements. This paper analyzes an episode from the second-century Acts of John (56-57), in which the character Antipatros asks for healing for his twin sons, whom he cannot support as he ages and plans to murder. The discussion builds on insights from these recent studies. However, it argues that the episode reveals an ancient text already engaged in a multi-layered critique of negative attitudes towards those with disabilities, when read in light of its literary and historical setting. First, the passage censures medical commerce, in a form familiar from other texts. Second, it exploits a series of ambiguities and negative characterizations in order to critique Antipatros and his request; I argue that his name, economic circumstances, and threat of murder undermine him as both father and inquiring disciple. The structure of the narrative supports the negative portrait, while leaving Antipatros’s ultimate choices ambiguous. By contrast, the apostle John consoles those whose presence in the story had been obscured, ultimately recasting the Lord “who always console[s] the downtrodden” as the one who redirects compassion towards the sons themselves.

With the publication of his doctoral dissertation, Die Mitte der Zeit in 1954 (English: The Theology of St Luke, 1960), Hans Conzelmann introduced an understanding of salvation history that has profoundly shaped Lukan studies.  This paper seeks to illuminate how his historical context significantly contributed to his interpretation, and to reassess enduring features of his hypothesis.  On Conzelmann’s account, Luke responded to the parousia’s delay by distancing his narrative from imminent eschatological expectation and focusing instead on the time of the church as a new salvation-historical period.  For Conzelmann, this separation of history from eschatology reflected the Evangelist’s distortion of the primitive kerygma.  While some features of Conzelmann’s schema of salvation history have lost currency and many have received forceful challenges, assumptions associated with the delayed parousia and a diminished emphasis on eschatology continue to lie behind significant strands of contemporary Lukan scholarship.  After noting the continuities and innovations of Conzelmann’s approach to Luke, this paper is divided into three major sections.  Firstly, I consider mid-twentieth century treatments of the nature of history.  Reflecting on wartime experience, numerous writers expressed deep suspicion about claims that meaning or divine providential care can be identified in the events of history.  Such approaches are perhaps exemplified by Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949) and his autobiographical writings about his experiences before and after 1933 (published 1986).  I argue that Conzelmann’s interpretive critique of Luke shares important features with other post-war reflections on history, and suggest that his account must be considered among these.  Secondly, I consider the immediate reception of Die Mitte der Zeit and ways in which interactions with Conzelmann’s work also reflect post-war concerns about salvation history.  The significance of Conzelmann’s contribution was immediately recognised.  Cadbury referenced pre-publication summaries from Conzelmann in support of his delayed parousia hypothesis (1956), and Dodd is reported to have commented, “I suspect we shall have to give (the Lukan writings) over, so to speak, to Conzelmann” (Talbert 1976: 383-4).  But responses like that of Cullmann (1962) demonstrate that the reception was far from uncritical.  And, though Käsemann suggested Pauline interpreters’ attitudes to salvation history demonstrated a reaction against the Third Reich’s ideology of history, I note that such questions arising from the context have not prompted a re-examination of Conzelmann’s approach to Luke.  The paper’s third section addresses key Lukan passages.  Noting the redaction-critical conclusions Conzelmann drew about Lk 21:5-36 and 22:69, I highlight the ways these stem from his assumptions about Luke’s schema of salvation history as a distortion of the original kerygma, and suggest an alternative reading that recognises the continuities between history and eschatology in Luke’s text.  Thus, by considering Conzelmann in his historical setting, alongside contemporaneous reflections on the nature of history in the war’s aftermath, this paper reappraises aspects of Conzelmann’s hypothesis that are still frequently assumed in Lukan studies and provides a new perspective from which to view Luke’s portrayal of history and eschatology.

This paper argues that the periodisation of history associated with Second Temple apocalypses illuminates the portrayal of martyrdom in two key (historiographical) texts: 2 Maccabees 6-7 and Acts 7.  It explores these texts alongside 4 Ezra, with special attention to the vision of the mourning woman and the eagle vision in 4 Ezra’s fourth and fifth episodes (4 Ezra 9:26-10:59; 11:1-12:39).  In recent studies, a focus on genre and rhetoric has limited attention to these kinds of cross-genre comparisons.  This is particularly evident in Acts scholarship (Sterling 1991; Rothschild 2004; Adams 2013; Uytanlet 2014; Shauf 2015), despite Todd Penner’s identification of the need for comparisons beyond historiographical texts in 2004.  Indeed, when it comes to treatments of history in Acts, the enduring influence of Hans Conzelmann’s (1954) hypothesis that Luke’s account reflects a separation of history from eschatology in light of concerns about the delay of the parousia imposes a further impediment for considering insights from apocalypses to illuminate Luke’s understanding of history.  However, I argue that not only those features which hint at motifs shared with apocalypses, such as Judas Maccabeus’s vision of the golden sword (2 Macc 15:15-16) and Stephen’s angelic appearance (Acts 6:15) and vision of the heavens opened (7:55-56), but elements of a view of history as periodised in both 2 Maccabees and Acts serve an important function in the texts’ martyrdom scenes.  This paper begins with a treatment of 4 Ezra 9-12, highlighting the ways in which periodisation and the concept of “the end” shapes the text’s treatment of both the woman’s mourning and Ezra’s own despair.  Turning to 2 Maccabees, I consider the ways in which the text extends a Deuteronomistic view of suffering to provide solace that suffering constitutes benevolent discipline before God’s people’s sins reach their “telos” (2 Macc 6:12-17), and the frame this provides for the promise of post-mortem reward asserted in the scene of the martyrdom of seven sons and another grieving mother (2 Macc 7).  Finally, my analysis of Acts 7 argues that the periodisation of history in 4 Ezra also illuminates Luke’s schema of history, but in this martyrdom context a new element is introduced: Stephen’s vision confirms that Jesus is already in place at the right of God (Acts 7:55-56; cf. Lk 22:69).  I suggest that for Luke, although suffering still continues (Acts 14:22), the final period at the end of history has already arrived, which grounds his portrayal of hope (cf. Acts 17:31).  Thus, for both 2 Maccabees 6-7 and Acts 7, elements of a periodised view of history, shared with apocalypses such as 4 Ezra, shape both their portrayals of martyrdom and the assurance provided for their readers.

This paper deals with two passages in which characters caution listeners against fighting God, the Jewish War (JW) 5.362-419 and Acts 5:12-42, in order to explore what these passages reveal about the writers’ understandings of divine and human action in history.  In the first passage, Josephus stands as a character in his own narrative and, in light of his revelation that the war represents God’s punishment by means of the Romans, passionately exhorts his fellow people to repent – to God and to Rome.  In the second, following the arrest of the apostles Gamaliel advises the Sanhedrin against action, reasoning that movements that do not enjoy divine support die out naturally, while those that do cannot be stopped. 

As a speech attributed to the implied author’s own character, the rhetorical frame of Josephus’s speech can be dealt with more quickly, however interpretation of Gamaliel’s voice in Acts has proven more contentious.  I argue that the use of irony reveals that the implied author shares Gamaliel’s views in relation to God’s providence, while simultaneously exposing Gamaliel’s response as inadequate.  Thus, both the JW and Acts affirm divine providence as an unstoppable force, but in other ways make allowances for human action.  Significantly, I argue, the writers present the human choice to align oneself with, or to oppose, divine providence as having eschatological consequences.  Indeed, although they place stress differently on divine judgement and invitation, both the JW and Acts present divine and human action in history in ways which reveal their understandings of the telos of that history.

Therefore, after outlining some relevant considerations of literary convention in Hellenistic historiography, I will discuss the passages from the JW and Acts in turn, with a particular focus on the rhetorical function of Gamaliel’s statement in the narrative of Acts.  Finally, I will comment on the implications for eschatology in Josephus and Luke/Acts.

Traditional criticisms levelled at Luke/Acts range from claims that Luke focuses on theologia gloriae at the expense of a theologia crucis, to assertions that he is apolitical (or, worse, advocates complicity with ruling authorities), or that he has removed any sense of imminence from eschatological expectations in order to address a crisis brought about by the parousia’s delay. Such criticisms have been countered in various ways. However, I argue that these concerns can also be addressed by attention to the underlying shape of history in Luke’s account.

This paper suggests that the focus on resurrection, presence of the Spirit, and the spatial location of Jesus at God’s right from the time of his ascension confirms that Luke understands that a new period of history has begun through Jesus’ resurrection. It argues that Luke’s understanding of history, as periodised, planned, and approaching a telos, is reminiscent of the understanding found in apocalypses. This builds on C. Kavin Rowe’s insight that Luke is “apocalyptic”1 but, through a systematic treatment of history in apocalypses, attempts a comparison that illuminates what this might mean in terms of Luke’s theological account of history.

In this paper I consider two apocalypses with historical reviews, 1 Enoch’s Animal Apocalypse and Daniel 7, identifying the temporal placement of key events in these histories. The location of the historical present is of particular interest, as a period of affliction of the righteous and enlightenment for a select group, which stands on the cusp of decisive divine action that will lead ultimately to restoration of the righteous. In comparing the schema of history in these texts to the understanding of key events of history in Luke/Acts, I note that Luke presumes a similar pattern, though with one crucial difference: the resurrection of Jesus is presented as the basis for assurance that the ultimate period has already begun.

Review of: 'Luke-Acts and Jewish Historiography: A Study on the Theology, Literature, and Ideology of Luke-Acts. By Samson Uytanlet. Pp. xviii + 327. (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2, 366.) Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. isbn 978 3 16 153090 6. Paper €84.' Journal of Theological Studies, 68.2: 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flx139