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СКАЧАТЬ ‘infants’ in Luke’s Gospel

      Luke’s Christological portrait of Jesus as a child sheds light on the evangelist’s alteration to Mark’s equivalent scene in which people bring children to Jesus for him to touch (Luke 18.15–17). There are two noteworthy features to Luke’s episode.

First, in Luke, those brought to Jesus are called brephos, a change from Mark’s paidion. It is Luke’s favoured term.25 Brephos refers to an infant, even a child before birth, and therefore a creature significantly much younger and physically more immature and fragile than Mark’s paidion.26 The political and cultural status of the brephos deepens the fragility and social exclusion of the infant implied in Mark’s paidion. Jesus’ attitude to them in Luke would highlight his compassion and outreach to the most insignificant of society – a theme consistent throughout the Gospel.

      The second feature in Luke’s story is the response of the disciples to these infants. If there is any ambiguity in Mark, Luke retains Mark’s ‘rebuke’ language, but it is solely directed to those bringing the brephos to Jesus. Jesus is not indignant at his disciples, as in Mark, but simply instructs with the same teaching found in Mark, reverting to the language of paidion: ‘whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child (paidion) will never enter it’ (Luke 18.17). Luke’s Jesus has no need to repeat this teaching. His disciples get it. They do not act with the same intense aggression as in Mark. Overall, Luke presents Jesus as welcoming the more socially fragile of society and the disciples as more receptive to those coming to Jesus. In a sense, Luke’s ‘cover-up’ of Mark begins here.

      The conviction of Jesus’ communion with God articulated in Jesus’ earliest boyhood years is repeated in his first words expressed as an adult. In his threefold temptation (Luke 4.1–13), Jesus counters Satan’s refrain (‘If you are God’s son’) testing Jesus’ fidelity to God with words drawn from Deuteronomy (Deut. 8.3; 6.13, 16; 10.20). Jesus’ communion with his God is solid and unwavering.

      The next words of Luke’s Jesus that follow are his programmatic declaration in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4.16–22). This outlines for Gospel auditors how his mission will unfold in the rest of the Gospel. Drawing on Isaiah, Jesus declares that he has come to bring release, healing and empowerment to the oppressed, captives and sightless. His mission is to reveal a God of hospitality to all who experience social and economic rejection. This insight lays out the primary criterion for a disciple that follows on from Jesus’ mission: disciples are invited to be witnesses of God’s hospitality and to enact it.

What for Mark is metanoia becomes for Luke hospitality.27 This expresses the nature of the God to whom Jesus witnesses as well as the foundational characteristic of the Lucan household. We have already seen something of this in Luke’s scene of Jesus welcoming the brephos. In a Greco-Roman world structured along hierarchical lines of economic and political convenience, a hospitable household characterized by friendship transcended socially defined boundaries. To outsiders, such a household could be interpreted as subversive. Luke’s agenda is to appeal to the wealthy members of the Jesus movement, a theme that suffuses the Gospel.28 The evangelist’s appeal shapes the Gospel’s elevated Christology and Jesus’ teaching on wealth and material ascetism. This agenda also explains the changed perspectives from Mark found in the Gospel as Luke’s construction of the Gospel’s portrait of Jesus emphasizes his dignity, cultural elegance and amicability. This further emerges in his interaction with his opponents.

      Jesus’ interchange with his opponents

Luke’s Jesus is incontestably without peer. This Christology appears in episodes in Luke where Jesus contests the opposition he experiences. The evangelist draws on and reshapes Mark’s equivalent scenes.29 A closer examination of these reveals Luke’s tendency to tone down the challenge–riposte cyclical strategy of agonistic contestation from the Gospel’s Marcan source. Three examples illustrate this.

First, when Jesus reads and interprets Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue to establish Luke’s Christology for the rest of the Gospel (Luke 4.16–30), the reaction is initially overwhelmingly positive: ‘All speak well of him and wondered at his gracious words’ (Luke 4.22). Only after his reinterpretation of the biblical tradition in terms of God’s hospitality and inclusivity of non-Jews does the tone of Jesus’ reception change (Luke 4.28–29). In Mark’s equivalent scene (Mark 6.1–6), there is no favourable disposition towards Jesus at all. It is heavily negative. His hearers take offence at him from the beginning (Mark 6.3). Mark concludes with the judgement on Jesus’ audience: he ‘marvelled because of their unbelief’ (Mark 6.6).30

      Second, Mark’s story of Jesus’ healing of a man with a withered hand (Mark 3.1–6) ends with a plan between religious and royal officials to ‘destroy’ (apollumi) Jesus. In Luke’s equivalent scene (Luke 6.6–11), this authoritarian coalition is absent. Rather, his observers are filled with annoyance and ‘discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus’ (Luke 6.11). Mark’s plot to ‘destroy’ Jesus is absent, replaced by a consultation about some unspecified action against him. His destruction, though available to Luke from Mark’s Gospel, is played down by his detractors. Their response, though negatively intentioned, is more benign than in Mark.

      Third, on the Temple Mount Jesus meets his theological opponents. They try again to test his allegiance to God and his attitude to Roman taxation. In Mark (Mark 12.13–17) an explicit alliance of religious and royal officials tries to ‘entrap him in his talk’ (Mark 12.13b). At the end of the attempted entrapment they are left in a state of amazement (Mark 12.17c). In Luke (Luke 20.20–26) the coalition of officials is absent. Unwilling to confront Jesus directly, they delegate spies to record what he says. At the end of the encounter, Luke notes their inability to catch him out. Instead, their amazement is heightened, and they are reduced to silence: ‘And they were not able in the presence of the people to trap him by what he said; and being amazed by his answers, they became silent’ (Luke 20.26).

      The verbal interchange between Jesus and his opponents is significantly reduced in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus is the authoritative and unquestionable teacher and prophet. This Christological impression continues into Luke’s passion narrative (Luke 22.1—24.53) as the evangelist also significantly softens, if not changes, Mark’s portrait of the abused, misunderstood and abandoned Jesus.

      Luke’s passion narrative

      The Lucan evangelist follows Mark’s basic narrative of Jesus’ suffering and death, but with noteworthy differences. First, Mark’s story of the unnamed woman’s prophetic and regal anointing of Jesus’ head (Mark 14.3–9) occurs earlier in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 7.36–50). Here it is a story of a sinner who anoints and washes Jesus’ feet with oil and tears and becomes a lesson on forgiveness. Luke has moved it away from an action focused on Jesus that reaffirms his identity to an episode earlier in the Gospel (Luke 7.36–50) in which Jesus acts and offers moral instruction. Here, Jesus is not the subject, as in Mark, but the agent. Second, Luke adds a faction fight into the Last Supper scene (Luke 22.24–27) and converts Mark’s Gethsemane scene of a struggling and soul-wrenched Jesus (Mark 14.32–38) into a prayer event in which Jesus calmly faces death comforted by God’s angelic presence (Luke 22.39–46). In Mark’s scene, Judas identifies Jesus to his captors with a kiss (Mark 14.45), and that act of intimacy becomes an act of betrayal. In Luke, Judas draws near to Jesus to kiss him (Luke 22.47), but there is no actual kiss. Instead, a violent act by one of Jesus’ disciples that removes the ear of a high priest’s slave with a sword becomes a moment of healing as Jesus touches the slave’s ear and heals him (Luke СКАЧАТЬ