Take & Read: New Testament

The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles have enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent New Testament research. One of the ongoing challenges raised by Luke-Acts is discerning the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The history of reception is filled with those who read Acts as representing the view that gentile Christians have displaced Israel as the people elected by God and that there is no hope for the salvation and final restoration of the Jewish people. Isaac Oliver, in Luke’s Jewish Eschatology: The National Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts (Oxford University Press), shows just how wrongheaded these readings of Luke-Acts are.

Oliver demonstrates how the hopes for Israel’s national restoration and salvation are raised in Luke’s infancy narrative and fulfilled in part, albeit in a surprising way, through God’s resurrection of Jesus as the Davidic Messiah. Nothing in Luke-Acts indicates that the anticipation for Israel’s restoration is overridden by unbelief, transferred to another people, or spiritualized. Although Jesus weeps over Jerusalem’s rejection of his message and delivers prophetic warnings, he is also frequently depicted as having an ongoing affectionate response to Jerusalem. While the Jewish people are by no means unified in their response to Paul’s gospel, Oliver argues that Luke maintains an eschatological expectation that God will intervene to extend full national salvation to Israel despite its momentary resistance to the gospel. Oliver doesn’t ask his readers to accept Luke’s vision, but he clearly shows that Luke-Acts never gives up hope for the Jewish people.

From a very different angle, Christopher Stroup also explores the relationship between Jewishness and Christian origins in Acts. The Christians Who Became Jews: Acts of the Apostles and Ethnicity in the Roman City (Yale University Press) utilizes archaeological and material constructions that memorialize ethnic and civic identities in ancient Roman cities to argue that Acts depicts Jewish ethnici­ty as variegated and hybrid. Acts engages in a form of ethnic reasoning to demonstrate how being a follower of Jesus is an appropriate and better way of being Jewish, Stroup argues.