Lessons on the Road to Emmaus: Intertextual Connections between Luke-Acts and Israel’s Scriptures

General Intertextual Work

C. H. Dodd’s According to the Scriptures served as the starting point or exemplar for many discussions about NT intertextuality in the latter half of the twentieth century. Like many of his contemporaries, Dodd explored the early Christian kerygma, the supposed earliest strata of theology that could be excavated from the NT. Dodd’s project examined how the early Christian kerygma signified, while his contemporaries and predecessors focused on the kerygma’s various parts. He suggested that the NT regularly situated the kerygma in relation to the writings and prophecies of the OT, and it was in this web of signification that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus made sense (1952: 13). Dodd suggests that there were assumed connections between the OT and the kerygma that had been established early in the Christian community; the way certain passages from the OT are used in the same way by different NT authors suggests that a common tradition pervaded the early church (1952: 23, 61). These concretized ways of reading the OT in light of the gospel, which Dodd called ‘testimonia’, help us understand how early Christians made sense of Jesus’s life (1952: 115).

Somewhat ahead of his time, Dodd was knocking on a particular door that Richard B. Hays would open decades later. Dodd never used the term ‘metalepsis’—a theory popularized by Hays that asserts that a reference to another text drags not only the reference but the context of the reference along with it into the new text—or anything of the like; he simply did not have the categories. Dodd was operating in a time when ‘prooftexting’ was the dominant understanding of NT use of the OT. Prooftexting is the practice of quoting a predecessor text to prove a point without regard for its original context or meaning, á la apologetic arguing. For instance, a scholar who assumes prooftexting as ubiquitous in the NT would see Matthew’s quotation of Hosea 11:1 (Matt 2:15) as having no connection with the wider story of redemption, forbearance, and mercy in Hos 11:1–11; the quotation from Hosea is simply used to prove Jesus is God’s Son because Jesus went to Egypt as a baby. Dodd went against the current of his time by asserting that the NT authors used whole passages of the OT to flesh out the theological import of Jesus’s life (1952: 59, 61, 126-32). Dodd cleared the ground for later intertextual work that argues the NT quotations, allusions, and echoes bring meaning from the OT into new contexts.

Barnabas Lindars published the next major work on intertextuality, New Testament Apologetic. As the title might suggest, Lindars’s work followed the mainstream understanding of its day, namely, that the early church established intertextual connections between the OT and the Christian kerygma as it is concretized in the NT for primarily apologetic purposes (1961: 13, 19). Jumpstarted by the resurrection (and, secondarily, the passion) of Jesus and necessitated by Jewish attacks on Christian belief, the earliest intertextual connections made by the church were smithed into ‘an armoury, from which the appropriate weapon may be selected to be trained onto the target’ (1961: 19, 24, 29, 33). Lindars’s novel contribution to the academic thesis of apologetics dominating NT intertextuality is twofold. First, Lindars takes seriously Dodd’s insistence that these intertextual links were more substantial than simple prooftexts; his exegetical treatment seeks to understand how the OT quotations in their original context lend meaning to the NT and Christian dogma. Second, and more substantially, Lindars seeks to trace the development of Christian dogma via studying the intertextual allusions. By considering how OT texts are used or modified in given NT texts, Lindars hopes to uncover how Christian dogma developed. Employing form criticism, Lindars is forthright in describing his intertextual project in terms of textual ‘archaeological excavations’ (1961: 25, 29-30). Lindars’s ultimate goal is to move behind the text to trace how Christian dogma grew out of the triple roots of the OT, conviction of Jesus’s resurrection, and the polemical attacks of first-century Jews.

Despite several assumptions that seem problematic to current biblical studies (e.g., an assumption that the Jewish and Christian communities were distinct and separate at an early stage; an assumption that form criticism can help us unpeel layers of textual (and thus dogmatic) development; an assumption that the early church’s understanding of Jesus and his relationship to the OT was monolithic or uniform), Lindars’s work helpfully highlights a connection between the intertextual connections in the NT and the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Though he applied his methods to primarily behind-the-text concerns, his assumption that intertextuality was a means to situate Jesus in the story of Israel can and should be used in literary readings of the NT: How does a given quotation or allusion strengthen or modify the ties between the gospel and the Law and the Prophets?

Leonhard Goppelt’s doctoral thesis deserves high praise for its contributions to our understanding of intertextuality in the NT, but it is hard to pinpoint its influence chronologically in the scholarly discussion. Published in Germany the month Germany invaded Poland and began the Second World War, this book’s contributions did not make substantial inroads to English-speaking scholarship until decades later. Still, by the time Hays was writing his seminal Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, Goppelt’s work had been translated into English and taken firm root beyond his mother-tongue.

Goppelt asserted that the key to understanding how Jesus and the early church interpreted the OT was typology. By his definition, ‘Only historical facts … are material for typological interpretation…. [Given events in the narrative] are to be interpreted typologically only if they are considered to be divinely ordained representations or types of future realities that will be even greater or more complete’ (1982: 17-18). Jesus and the early church detected a profound relationship between Jesus and the prophets; they used direct quotes and allusions to the OT to emphasize Jesus’s own importance and dignity via typology (1982: 62). For instance, Zechariah’s prophecy of the shepherd struck and the sheep scattered (Zech 13:7) may have historically referred to the death of the king of Judah and the exile, but it served as a type for the death of the greater king: Jesus (1982: 88). Note that typology does not deny or abolish the ‘original’ meaning or referent (as some allegorical readings do), but it does point forward to a fuller meaning (1982: 52, 68).

Typology differs drastically from prophetic fulfillment. While a theory like Paul Schubert’s ‘proof-from-prophecy’ (discussed below) relies on prediction in the OT of events that come to pass in the NT, typology as Goppelt construes it is both more subtle and less reliant on the idea of foretelling. For example, Goppelt notes that the evangelists all use typology from the Psalms when giving import to Jesus’s death. He writes, ‘Did the evangelists interpret these statements about the righteous sufferer that are taken from the Psalms as direct prophecies or in some typological way? We cannot ask them this pointed question. Their only concern is that these statements from the Psalms were fulfilled in Jesus’ [sic] experience; they are not interested in what the poet had in mind originally…. There are no explicit statements that prophecy has been fulfilled, such as we might have expected, especially in Matthew; the passages are simply alluded to. The distress of the saint that is portrayed by the psalmist is fulfilled in Jesus’ (1982: 103). Goppelt concludes that typology is the NT authors’ dominant means of connecting the present redemptive history in Jesus with the prior redemptive history embedded in Israel’s Scriptures. The OT was not simply a collection of prooftexts for the NT authors, but rather a living word intended for their time (1982: 198-200).

Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul went beyond Dodd, Lindars, and Goppelt by examining more than simply quotations and typologies. Utilizing the work of literary critic John Hollander (Hollander 1981), Hays focused on detecting and explicating allusions (obvious intertextual references that are not verbatim citations) and echoes (subtler intertextual references that do not necessarily depend on authorial intent) in the writings of Paul (Hays 1989). Seven criteria—availability, volume, recurrence, thematic coherence, historical plausibility, history of interpretation, and satisfaction—serve to flush out these more subtle intertextual connections (1989: 29-32). These echoes and allusions ‘generate new meanings by linking the earlier text (Scripture) to the later (Paul’s discourse) in such a way as to produce unexpected correspondences, correspondences that suggest more than they assert’ (1989: 24). Hays’s utilization of echoes has little concern for Paul’s original audience or his ‘degree of self-awareness’ in creating the echoes; the focus is instead on the ‘rhetorical and semantic effects’ of the echoes for those who can detect them (1989: 19). Indeed, Hays deplores the idea of limiting his study to whether Paul intended the echoes he creates, as this might ‘impose a severe and arbitrary hermeneutical restriction’ (1981: 33). The point is to find allusions to the matrix of the OT—the literary waters in which Paul swam—and see what new meanings might be generated from the interactions of the original context (e.g., Hab 2:4) and the context of the allusion (Rom 1:17). This new meaning is generated by ‘metalepsis’, the theory that a reference to another text drags not only the reference but the reference’s whole context along with it into the new text.

Finding the allusions and explaining their effects in Paul’s texts reveal Paul’s own hermeneutic, claims Hays: ‘What Paul finds in Scripture, above all else, is a prefiguration of the church as the people of God…. Paul’s experience of the Christian community … shapes his reading of Scripture. In short, Paul operates with an ecclesiocentric hermeneutic’ (1989: 86, italics original). According to Hays, Paul works through the Scriptures to find correlation and continuity between Israel and the church. An interpretation addressed to the church may take precedence over an interpretation of the Scripture’s purported original intent, but ‘the Torah is neither superseded nor nullified but transformed into a witness of the gospel’ (1989: 157). In Hays’s view, Paul is still telling Israel’s story, now in light of the eschatological community that is the church.

Hays’s work became the new watermark in intertextual studies; those who come after almost inevitably use or refute Echoes in Paul in the pursuit of their own agenda (see Litwak 1998). Though Echoes in Paul put him on the map for intertextuality, he completed further work through the years that added yet more to the field. A short essay, ‘The Canonical Matrix of the Gospels’, laid the groundwork for larger subsequent projects. There, Hays notes that the Gospel writers interpreted the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus according to the categories and narratives in Israel’s Scriptures, the texts that shaped their symbolic world: ‘The Old Testament was the generative milieu for the gospels [sic], the original environment in which the first Christian traditions were conceived, formed and nurtured.… Because each of the four gospels … narrates the story of Jesus as the continuation and fulfillment of Israel’s story, the earliest accounts of Jesus must be understood within their original scriptural environment’ (2006: 53). Hays focuses on showing how the evangelists utilize both OT texts and motifs to shed light on Jesus’s identity and mission. In his brief treatment of Luke, Hays notes that the Third Evangelist does more than draw on the OT’s resources, but sees the canonical matrix generating a cohesive plot; that plot reaches its climax and fulfillment in Jesus, and Luke writes his story as this concluding chapter of God’s saving activity (2006: 67-70).

Hays pushes this work forward with the publication of his 2013–2014 Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge University. Titled Reading Backwards, the major methodological advancement of this monograph was to embrace ‘figural interpretation’ as a tool for reading the Gospels. Drawing heavily on the work of Erich Auerbach (Auerbach 1968), Hays notes that prefiguration, a central tenet of the Gospels (and the rest of the NT) on the admittance of the writers themselves, differs from prediction; the latter requires either the OT author or the OT characters that are writing or talking to know about events to come, whereas discerning ‘figural correspondence is necessarily retrospective’ (Hays 2014: 2-3). This continues Hays’s work from ‘The Canonical Matrix’ by offering more robust understandings of how the Gospels portray Jesus as the culmination of Israel’s story: ‘The Gospels teach us how to read the OT for figuration. The literal historical sense of the OT is not denied or negated; rather, it becomes the vehicle for latent figural meanings unsuspected by the original author and readers’ (2014: 15). Thus the exodus narrative prefigures—but does not predict—the new exodus enacted by Jesus in leading God’s people from bondage to sin and death into the promised land of God’s eschatological reality. This is not prooftexting, but seeing a coherent and interwoven narrative across Israel’s Scriptures and into the gospel proclaimed by the NT writers and the apostolic generation.

Hays expands his project substantially in a fourth publication, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Hays 2016). This most recent work more thoroughly investigates the intertextual connections in the Gospels, but does not vary in approach. Hays’s method—detecting phraseological allusions and echoes, reading connections metaleptically, and leaning on figural interpretation to understand the narrated identity of Jesus—was fully formed in Reading Backwards.

Before we leave Hays and move into Luke-focused intertextual studies, we should comment that Hays also develops specifically Lukan intertextual sensibilities. Hays notes that, unlike Matthew, Luke as narrator rarely offers direct citations; instead, most quotations occur in the mouth of characters. Hence, most of Luke’s intertextual references are ‘implicit correspondences’, forged in allusions and echoes (2014: 57-58). What is more, Luke’s narrative artistry weaves various texts together, creating compound and shifting allusions. ‘It is not Luke’s style to develop sustained sequences in which the patterns coincide and run parallel; rather, almost as soon as we recognize one such narrative convergence, the moment has passed, and a different image appears on the backdrop, perhaps suggesting an entirely different set of linkages’ (2014: 59). The subtlety of Luke’s writing requires subtlety of Luke’s reader; keen eyes and ears are required to catch the fleeting echoes. But if the reader does catch them, Hays suggests, she or he will find narrated the story of a rabbi who somehow shares or overlaps in identity with the God of Israel himself. The echoes of the OT in Luke-Acts ascribe to Jesus many of the prerogatives of YHWH alone (2014: 62-72).

Eclectic Lukan Intertextuality Work

Paul Schubert offers one of the earliest eclectic approaches in his chapter ‘The Structure and Significance of Luke 24’. Examining the somewhat episodic nature of the three pericopes in Luke 24 (24:1–12, 13–33, 34–53), Schubert suggests the single uniting principal is the same thing that stitches together and drives the entirety of Luke-Acts, namely, proving via prophecy (i.e., foretelling) that Jesus is the Christ (1954: 173, 176). Each pericope ends with a supernatural figure (the angels or Jesus) explaining to whichever disciples are present that everything that happened to Jesus did so according to either his own words or those of the Scriptures. Schubert backtracks through the first nine chapters of the Gospel to begin teasing out the strands of prophecy (e.g., Isa 61:1–2 in Luke 4:14–32) and even ‘biblicisms’ (i.e., ways of speaking common to the LXX) that could be in view (1954: 178-85). While Schubert may overplay his hand—the focus on fulfillment in Luke does not come close to that of Matthew—his construction of the ‘proof-from-prophecy’ schema inspires others to take up similar projects.

Eventually, however, Schubert’s thesis was thoroughly challenged by Martin Rese. Rese’s study focused on Luke’s hermeneutics; it contended that the usage of the OT in Luke-Acts rarely functioned in a temporal mode. Using five categories to describe how an OT citation informed a given event in the NT text, Rese found that there were no real ‘proof-from-prophecy’ uses because no instance of the OT established a promise from the temporal past that was explicitly fulfilled in Luke-Acts (1969: 210). Rese only classifies explicit citations, meaning that no allusions and only one typological pointer (Acts 7:37) are considered (1969: 36-42). While Schubert’s project needs critical answering, Rese over-corrects with inflexible categories that exclude too much intertextual evidence.

Coming to Schubert’s defense, Darrell L. Bock used a redaction-critical approach to dismantle Rese’s work and reinstate his own version of the ‘proof-from-prophecy’ theory as the primary understanding of Luke’s use of the OT. Bock examines passages (especially those that Luke clearly changed from his sources) in which Luke develops his Christology using the OT; he aims to show that the OT is leveraged more kerygmatically than apologetically (1987: 47, 72). Bock writes, ‘[T]he Old Testament helps to declare and to interpret the saving events of the tradition, as well as to explain the nature and work of the person who is at the centre of the fulfillment of God’s work in history’ (1987: 82). He clearly moves away from Schubert’s ‘prooftexting’ intertextuality in favor of something more subtle, though there is still an element of prophecy-fulfillment in his schema. In grappling with allusions, Bock also subverts Rese’s dismissal of typology, a tool that Bock claims is crucial in Luke’s constructive Christology (1987: 148-49). Ultimately, Bock’s shift in emphasis creates a reading that sees early Christianity ‘on the offensive’ in Luke-Acts; Luke’s books show Christians evangelizing (proclaiming) their faith instead of defending it (prooftexting) (1987: 275).

Brigid Curtin Frein expands ‘proof-from-prophecy’ to include Luke’s narrative predictions alongside OT prophecy-fulfillment. Predictions litter Luke’s story, and Frein sees the many fulfillments in the narrative (e.g., the prediction of John the Baptizer’s birth [Luke 1:13–17] and the fulfillment of the miracle baby born to his aged parents [1:57]) as overlapping with and fulfilling OT prophecies (e.g., Mal 3:1). For Frein, this fills out the schema made popular by Schubert, showing how proof-from-prophecy functions as a narrative device in filling out Jesus’s character as the preeminent prophet and connecting Luke’s story to the larger story of Israel (Frein 1994: 22-37).

Robert L. Brawley is one of the earliest adopters of Hays’s work on echoes, admitting the influence of Hays while also striking out into new territory for the NT interpreter (1995: x). Brawley is willing to look beyond the mere linguistic parallels between two texts to find hints that the plot, setting, characters, and motifs of a given text allude to precursor texts (1995: 13-14). Further, whereas Hays is happy to discuss how one determines whether a citation, allusion, or echo is present in a given text before reading that text with intertextual eyes, Brawley adopts the revisionary ratios of literary critic Harold Bloom as his primary intertextual analysis tools. While Hays and others like Hollander want to talk about figuration and prefiguration between intertextual parties, Bloom argues that successor texts always ‘creatively correct’ or misinterpret their precursors (Brawley 1995: 7; Bloom 1973). Bloom offers ‘revisionary ratios’, six categories to help readers think about how one text uses another: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades—referring to the bending, completion, elimination, elevation, distillation of, and cooperation with a precursor text’s meaning, respectively (Brawley, 1995: 10-13). Brawley takes Bloom’s ratios, Hays’s expanded allusion-detection methods, and Michel Riffaterre’s notion of ‘ungrammaticalities’ (i.e., disruptions in a text that point to an intertextual connection) to offer readings across Luke-Acts that blend intertextual insights, contemporary social theory, literary criticism, and exegesis. His theory-laden approach highlights the different modes of intertextuality used by Luke and his characters throughout Luke-Acts. Brawley ends his monograph by suggesting that Luke’s intertextual work has a theocentric hermeneutic: Luke uses intertextual connections to display God’s work through Jesus as fulfilling the Abrahamic covenant and blessing all the nations of the earth (1995: 128-30).

Brawley’s most substantial contribution to method in Lukan intertextuality studies is his movement beyond phraseological parallels. While such parallels—quotations, allusions, and echoes—cannot be ignored, neither can the connections suggested by Brawley. After all, type scenes like ‘the betrothal at the well’ (e.g., Gen 29:1–12; John 4:1–29) or motifs like ‘a childless woman’ (e.g., 1 Sam 1:1–20; Luke 1:5–25) have long been utilized by interpreters to talk about how NT authors play off of tropes found in Israel’s Scriptures. Brawley seems to go astray, however, by getting mired in Bloom’s theoretical overcomplications which are purposefully eccentric and cryptic; Brawley could affect the same ends that he seeks—describing Luke as continuing or rewriting a precursor text, for instance—without Bloom’s obfuscating definitions and terms. Nevertheless, Brawley’s contributions are not irretrievably tied to Bloom’s influence.

Published the same year as Brawley’s study, Mark L. Strauss’s dissertation utilized intertextuality to explore the motif of the Davidic messiah in Luke-Acts. Strauss builds on Schubert and Bock’s schemas, showing how typology and scriptural allusions work to prove Jesus is the Davidic heir. He notes that Davidic references litter the Lukan birth narrative (Luke 1–2) and three key speeches in Acts (Peter’s at Pentecost, Acts 2; Paul’s at Pisidian Antioch, Acts 13; and James’s at the Jerusalem council, Acts15) (Strauss 1995: 86, 192-93). Strauss finds allusions to David from the Psalms, Amos, 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Chronicles, and other Israelite Scriptures, but he sees a special place in Luke’s work for Isaiah. Davidic Christology is not the only Christology present in Luke-Acts, Strauss argues, but it is woven together with the other major typologies (the prophet-like-Moses, the suffering servant) in Isaiah’s eschatological deliverer (1995: 262, 336). The texts from Isaiah are used to prove that Jesus’s suffering was necessary, foreordained in Scripture; further, the entire Jesus event has salvific impact as Jesus fulfills the script of the messiah as described in Isaiah (1995: 353). Through all the allusions and the motifs they evoke, Strauss sees the Davidic theme dominate Luke’s Christology (see the related work of Miura 2007).

Bill T. Arnold examines OT allusions in the speeches of Acts. Arnold suggests that the use of quotations without a formulaic introduction in the mouths of Lukan characters shift the point of view of the story (1996: 300-23). Peter’s use of Ps 132:11 in Acts 2:30–31 makes the reader adopt God’s view of Jesus—he is the descendant of David who is placed on the eternal throne (1996: 310). Likewise, Stephen’s use of Deut 18:15 makes us see the story through the eyes of Moses—Jesus is the prophet like Moses who was promised (1996: 316). For Arnold, these allusions are most valuable as showing Luke’s own theological point of view and his means of placing Luke-Acts along the continuum of Israel’s Scriptures (1996: 321-23).

Whereas Bock and others focused on explicit quotations, Dietrich Rusam intended to bring allusions alongside quotations in a study of Luke’s interpretive method. His lengthy volume is ambitious, but the work with allusions is mostly constrained to the infancy narratives; indeed, the total swath of Luke’s intertextual connections probably exceeds the limits of any book. Still, Rusam helpfully contrasts quotations in Jewish and Hellenistic literature from Luke’s era (2003: 446-91), and he further pushes against the dominance of ‘proof-from-prophecy’ by placing each of Luke’s Scripture usages in one of three categories: illustrative (i.e., typologies) of Jewish rejection of Jesus, instructions for behavior, and prophetic foretelling of Jesus and the apostolic missions. The prophecy-fulfillment schema is not thrown out the window, but it is placed alongside other uses of the OT (2003: 492-95).

Kenneth D. Litwak’s doctoral dissertation is similar to Pao’s Acts and the Isaianic New Exodus (discussed below), in which Pao argues that intertextual connections make structural markers and lenses for the rest of the narrative. While Litwak eschews what he deems the artificial limiting of intertextual projects (i.e., focusing on a single OT work like Pao), he also examines strategically placed allusion and quotations in Luke-Acts that create a ‘frame of discourse’ to help readers interpret Luke’s narrative (2005: 2-3). Litwak’s work builds on a foundation laid by Green (Green 1994, discussed below) and serves to complement Hays’s method from Echoes in Paul (Litwak 2005: 34). Examining texts in the beginning, middle, and end of Luke-Acts (Luke 1:5–2:52; 24; Acts 1–2; 28), Litwak persuasively argues that allusions to the OT set the reader up to expect a continuation of God’s unfolding plan of salvation, parse the ascension of Jesus and the giving of the Spirit, and help demystify Paul’s citation of Isaiah in Acts 28:25–28. Litwak deals with many other echoes along the way, covering substantial areas of Luke’s Doppelwerk.

Stanley E. Porter offers a short study that also sees intertextuality working to set the trajectory of Luke’s two volumes. Though not as theoretically robust as Pao’s or Litwak’s works, Porter also sees Luke’s use of the OT at the outset of the Gospel and Acts as setting up the major themes of the two books. In the Gospel, Jesus’s preaching and exposition of Isa 61:1–2 outlines the character of Jesus as the anointed messiah who brings salvation to all, including the Gentiles (Luke 4:16–30). In Acts, Peter’s use of Joel 2:28–32, Ps 16:8–11, and Ps 110:1 in his Pentecost sermon announces Jesus as the enthroned messiah who brings the Holy Spirit and can save all those who call on him (Acts 2:14–36) (Porter 2006: 104-26).

Here, we should note the boon to Lukan intertextuality that is David W. Pao and Eckhard J. Schnabel’s contribution to the volume Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. These scholars give orienting discourses on Luke’s use of the scriptures before working meticulously through the Gospel, noting allusions, echoes, and quotations to the OT (Pao and Schnabel, ‘Luke’ 2007: 251-414). Their observations must be brief, of course, and cannot be comprehensive, but their work is a good starting place for any student looking to get a full picture of where the intertextual connections between Luke and the OT exist. I. Howard Marshall performs the same service in the volume for the Book of Acts (Marshall, ‘Acts’ 2007: 513-606).

James A. Meek returns to Schubert’s ‘proof-from-prophecy’ theory, though he sides with Bock and others who suggest that the original theory was too narrow. Meek wants to utilize ‘proof-from-prophecy’ to advance the Lukan motif of the mission to the gentiles (2008: 1-2). While not denying the Christological emphasis of many OT citations and allusions highlighted by others, Meek also sees Luke use Israel’s Scriptures as a rhetorical appeal to authority to justify the inclusion of the gentiles to his audience (2008: 6-9). Meek examines four explicit citations in Acts that relate to the gentile mission as he sees it. The first two—Isa 49:6 in Acts 13:47 (Paul’s claim that they have been sent to the gentiles) and Amos 9:11–12 in Acts 15:16–18 (James’s verdict for inclusion at the Jerusalem council)—fit his argument perfectly, and he offers reflections on the Vorlage, hermeneutics, and purpose of each citation. The second two citations—Joel 3:1–5 in Acts 2:16–21 and Gen 22:18 in Acts 3:25—are not used to reference gentiles in the narrative, but rather promises to Israel. Meek argues that Luke’s gentile original audience would have read these passages as just that, however: foreshadows of gentile inclusion (2008: 113). Meek argues, somewhat against the grain of scholarship (e.g., Conzelmann 1960: 162, 166-67), that Luke generally pays heed to the original context of the OT citation in his appropriation of intertexts (2008: 132).

Jocelyn McWhirter’s excellent book Rejected Prophets: Jesus and His Witnesses in Luke-Acts (2013) holds a special distinction for its approach to intertextual connections between Luke and the Prophets. McWhirter argues that Jesus in Luke and his disciples in Acts are typologically connected to the prophets (the characters in the OT) by parallelism, quotation, and allusion to the prophetic books (and the Torah). While other scholars discussed below will tie Jesus typologically to Isaiah or Moses, McWhirter’s argument boldly connects Jesus and his witnesses to a slew of prophetic figures: Jesus is the prophet like Moses (2013: 66-68), rejected like Jeremiah (2013: 68-74), prophesies against the temple using the words of Hosea, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Isaiah, Ezekiel (2013: 75-86), is reliable like Samuel (2013: 31-43). Jesus and his disciples heal and preach like Elijah and Elisha (2013: 51-56, 114-121). The sheer number of typological parallels that McWhirter uncovers among Israel’s prophetic roster is staggering, and makes her book indispensable for those looking to explore Luke’s use of prophetic characters or the prophetic books.

In 2016, Sarah Harris’s published dissertation offered a return to the Davidic motif in Luke-Acts, but this time with an emphasis on David as shepherd (Harris 2016). Harris begins with an examination of David’s character in the OT and his identity as a shepherd as a Leitwort for understanding Israel’s greatest king (2016: 36). Harris suggests, with the theory of the primacy effect in narratology, that this first means of introducing David informs the rest of his characterization. She then examines echoes and allusions to stories and oracles of David throughout Luke-Acts, highlighting shepherd imagery (e.g., the annunciation to the shepherds in Luke 2:1–20 (2016: 52-67); the parable of the lost sheep in 15:1–7 (2016: 92-105)). Harris’s project gives more nuance and balance to the Davidic motif in Luke-Acts by emphasizing this part of David’s character that is often overlooked.

One of the perennial problems in intertextuality is how to sort out unclear allusions. For instance, Jesus’s metaphor of a mother hen covering her chicks with her wings in Luke 13:34 could be referencing Deut 32:11, Ps 91:4, Isa 31:5 or other texts in the OT; without decisive verbal parallels, how do we adjudicate between the possible sources and the differing implications? Two recent monographs on intertextuality in Luke have attempted to offer methodological solutions.

First, Steve Smith’s The Fate of the Jerusalem Temple in Luke-Acts offers an eclectic intertextual approach to understanding Jesus’s utterances against the temple in Luke and Stephen’s temple-critical speech in Acts 7. Smith utilizes many of the methods innovated before him in the literary vein (Hays, Brawley). His main methodological contribution to intertextual work is the use of relevance theory, a linguistic theory that details how human minds process utterances; basically, the mind wants to exert a minimal mental load while maximizing linguistic effect. For intertextual studies, this theory suggests that readers stop searching for relevant contexts (i.e., possible OT referents) after arriving at a satisfactory point of relevance (i.e., the most prominent OT referent) (Smith 2017: 29-30). In some ways, this tool combines Hays’s criteria of availability and volume: Whichever OT text maps most closely and prominently onto the Lukan allusion is the best candidate for an intertext. While Smith’s innovation helps to sort through allusions that could reference multiple OT texts, it places an odd emphasis on reconstructing an ideal first-century reader. This use of relevance theory wants to know which OT text would jump out most to a reader or hearer of Luke (2017: 27), suggesting that there is one right way of hearing echoes in a passage. This places an unrealistic expectation on our ability to reconstruct any reader, let alone one from two millennia ago. Over-reliance on the theory could also shut down the possibility of multiple readings that has become the hallmark of postmodern criticism.

The second monograph that attempts to tackle the problem of sorting out what source text is being alluded to is Gregory Lanier’s Old Testament Conceptual Metaphors and the Christology of Luke’s Gospel. Concerns about the Christological payoff of intertextuality drive Lanier’s study, but he recognizes that scholars cannot agree on the source texts for certain passages of Luke that are clearly evoking the OT (2018: 13-14). He confronts the problem by utilizing Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). By mapping how given metaphors are used in the OT (e.g., god is the horn of salvation, Ps 18:2; exalting someone’s status is lifting his/her horn, Ps 89:18), one can examine how a similar metaphor in Luke (here, ἤγειρεν κέρας σωτηρίας ἡμῖν, Luke 1:69) functions in similar or divergent ways. This allows the interpreter to determine whether the metaphor draws on a specific text or a conglomeration of texts before working through potential interpretive payoff (2018: 15-32).

Narrowly Focused Lukan Intertextuality Works

Results of the Forschungsbericht

The above survey suggests that several lacunae still exist in the study of Luke’s use of the OT. Without considering the complex and perhaps impossible question of discovering Luke’s overarching hermeneutic—the holy grail of Lukan intertextual studies—the many methods surveyed and the possible sources utilized show glaring gaps. A few deserve mention.

First, allusions and echoes of given books are missing systematic treatment. Prominently, Leviticus (among others) has yet to be treated on its own terms, despite the well-attested concerns in Luke-Acts with purity/cleanness, the temple, and the jubilee year. Even for those OT texts that have received some attention at the level of explicit quotation (like Exodus or the Book of the Twelve), they still lack treatment of their allusions, echoes, and typologies.

Second, some books that have undisputable quotations in Luke are missing systematic treatment. Notably, Jeremiah has yet to receive a thorough investigation, despite being quoted outright in Luke 19:46 and the flurry of scholarship regarding Luke’s view of the temple.

Third, Jipp and Miller have laid the groundwork for a study of the influence of the Psalms on the narrative structure of Luke-Acts. Both have done fine work to draw our attention to the importance of the Psalms, especially at the close of the Gospel and the opening of Acts. Perhaps a work like Litwak’s or Pao’s that focuses on the Psalter as a major frame for the Doppelwerk is in order.

Fourth, as both Smith and Hays have observed, Luke’s complex hermeneutics and rich use of allusions make the interpreter’s job difficult: Grasping an echo in the Third Gospel or Acts is often more difficult than catching quicksilver (Smith 2017: 17; Hays 2014: 58-59). The evangelist simply moves from allusion to allusion so deftly that it is hard to know whether one has rightly identified the source text. Smith and Lanier have each attempted to mitigate this difficulty, the former using relevance theory and the latter conceptual metaphor theory. Both methods need more testing to prove their viability, and additional tools for sorting tangled allusions could make new headway.

Abbreviations