Luke the Historian of Israels Legacy, Theologian of Israels Christ

David Moessner proposes a new understanding of the relation of Lukes second volume to his Gospel to open up a whole new reading of Lukes foundational contribution to the New Testament. For postmodern readers who find Acts a generic outlier, dangling tenuously somewhere between the mainland of the evangelists and the Peloponnese of Pauldiffused and confused and shunted to the backwaters of the New Testament by these signature corporaMoessner plunges his readers into the hermeneutical atmosphere of Greek narrative poetics and elaboration of multi-volume works to inhale the rhetorical swells that animate Lukes first readers in their engagement of his narrative. In this collection of twelve of his essays, re-contextualized and re-organized into five major topical movements, Moessner showcases multiple Hellenistic texts and rhetorical tropes to spotlight the various signals Luke provides his readers of the multiple ways his Acts will follow "all that Jesus began to do and to teach" (Acts 1:1) and, consequently, bring coherence to this dominant block of the New Testament that has long been split apart. By collapsing the world of Jesus into the words and deeds of his followers, Luke re-configures the significance of Israels "Christ" and the "Reign" of Israels God for all peoples and places to create a new account of Gospel Acts, discrete and distinctively different than the "narrative" of the "many" (Luke 1:1). Luke the Historian of Israels Legacy combines what no analysis of the Lukan writings has previously accomplished, integrating seamlessly two generically-estranged volumes into one new whole from the intent of the one composer. For Luke is the Hellenistic historian and simultaneously biblical theologian who arranges the one "plan of God" read from the script of the Jewish scripturesparts and whole, severally and togetheras the saving script for the whole world through Israels suffering and raised up "Christ," Jesus of Nazareth. In the introductions to each major theme of the essays, this noted scholar of the Lukan writings offers an epitome of the main features of Lukes theological thought, and, in a final Conclusions chapter, weaves together a comprehensive synthesis of this new reading of the whole.