The Literary Unity of Luke-Acts: Questions of Style – a Task for Literary Critics

Abstract

Joseph Tyson's The Death of Jesus in Luke-Acts and Robert Tannehill's The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts, published in 1986, are good examples of the interpretive wealth being mined by scholars who are adopting literary-critical methods for approaching the Lukan writings. What most distinguishes these critics' approaches from older, more familiar ones is the claim that the Bible's historical narratives are imaginative re-enactments of history – thus, in form, more akin to fiction than to theology, biography, or history. Robert Alter called the Biblical stories ‘historicized fiction’, meaning in our case that the author of Luke and Acts employed the artifices of fiction-writing, among others, supplying feeling and motives and creating speeches and dialogue for his characters. Professors Tyson and Tannehill, and other literary scholars like them, are helping us better discern how these techniques were used in Luke and Acts, thus opening new windows to the characters, the way that the author ascribes intentions to them, the plot, themes, nuances, points of view, uses of irony, and word-plays and associations in the writings.