The Unity of Luke—Acts: A Four-Bolted Hermeneutical Hinge

Abstract

Nearly every scholarly investigation of Luke—Acts today must address the question of unity. It is a hermeneutical hinge and the answer to the question has wide-ranging interpretive implications. The call to dissolve the unity of Luke and Acts—and the `hyphen' Cadbury inserted—focuses on four `bolts': (1) genre, (2) narrative, (3) theology, and (4) reception history. Despite far-reaching argument over the past twenty years favoring removal of the four `bolts', the hinge remains securely fastened. In addition, there is significant coalescence around certain issues such as the presence of an intermixing of genre types in Acts and an intertwining of the narrative and theological themes in Luke and Acts. And questions about unity have led to new avenues of exploration and the identification of trajectories that crisscross both volumes and tie them together.

The Lukan covenant concept: The basis of Israel�s mandate in Luke-Acts

“…Minear and Gaventa's observations are relevant not only for individual books but also for a collection of writings with subject matter demonstrably and deliberately in common (Frye 1990). The fact that scholarship perceives some form of literary connectedness, ranging from the trivial to the substantial, between Luke's gospel and Acts (see Bird 2007;Spencer 2007) suggests, according to Northrop Frye's logic, the existence of a text-based 'conceptual unity' governing these writings (Frye 1990:xii). Frye's analysis of the Bible's function in English literature has led him to reject the perception that the Bible is a grab-bag anthology in favour of the view that it is a source of a period's 'mythology' (nota bene Frye's definition of mythology) which expresses a meta-belief informed within a cultural and psychological context (Frye 1990:xii−xxiii, 31−52).…”