Abstract
This article surveys scholarly work on intertextual connections between Luke-Acts and Israel’s Scriptures, focusing on those works that interpret the literary and theological payoff of quotations, allusions, and echoes in Luke’s Doppelwerk. After reviewing major contributors to NT intertextuality generally, this survey focuses on those works that narrow in on Luke-Acts, organized into two groups: eclectic works, that study Luke’s allusion to many sources; and narrow-focused works, that study Luke’s allusions to one book (e.g., Isaiah) or one corpus (e.g., Psalms). This organization and a concluding summary will help scholars see what remains to be explored in Lukan intertextuality.
Keywords
While critical theory can provide—and often has provided—a stalwart rationale for pursuing intertextual studies, in the case of Luke-Acts, the text itself explicitly invites such reflection. At the end of the Gospel of Luke, the resurrected Jesus joins two disciples on the road to Emmaus; as they recount the death and reports of Jesus’s resurrection, they remark that these things ‘confused us’ (24:22). Jesus replies, ‘“Oh, how foolish and slow of heart you are to believe all that the prophets said! Was this not necessary, for the Christ to suffer and enter into his glory?” And starting from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things about himself’ (24:25–27, author’s translation). Jesus’s rejoinder suggests that the intertextual project is not only valid but necessary to make sense of who Jesus as the Messiah is according to Luke’s narrative. The story itself urges the reader to return to the beginning and read the text through the frame of the characters, promises, motifs, and theology in Israel’s Scriptures (Hays 2003).
Many biblical scholars have been happy to oblige. Works on intertextuality in Luke-Acts are not quite as numerous as the stars in the sky, but a full survey would require several book-length volumes. Part of the complication is recognizing that several tasks fall under the umbrella term of ‘intertextuality’: identifying allusions, quotations, or echoes, identifying referenced text forms (e.g., is an allusion referencing a LXX or MT text type?), discovering an author’s own hermeneutic (e.g., how did Paul interpret Israel’s Scriptures?), and examining how an intertextual connection interacts literarily or theologically with the referencing work (Hays and Green 2010: 130-32; Bovon 2006: 91). We will narrow our focus by concentrating on those intertextual studies that examine the literary and theological payoff of connections between Luke-Acts and the works that would become the OT/HB. After a brief orienting survey of the most influential works on NT use of the OT more broadly, we will examine eclectic Lukan intertextual works and narrowly focused Lukan intertextual works in turn. The first category holds works that deal with Luke, Luke-Acts, or Acts specifically, but do not focus on the connections with a single OT book (e.g., Isaiah). The second category has those works that tie the Lukan text(s) to a specific OT book or corpus of books (e.g., the Book of the Twelve). We will move through each category chronologically, though the narrowly focused section will also group works by biblical book (e.g., Isaiah, Psalms) so that the reader may see how thoroughly intertextual connections of a given section of the OT have been covered (or not) by interpreters.
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.,
Narrowly Focused Lukan Intertextuality Works
Genesis
Green has written two essays on echoes and allusions of Genesis in Luke-Acts. In the short but poignant ‘The Problem of a Beginning: Israel’s Scriptures in Luke 1–2’, Green examines connections between Luke 1:5–2:52 and the Abrahamic story in Gen 11–21. Green aims to prove that the Third Gospel does not ‘begin’ with Zechariah in the temple or Mary speaking with Gabriel, but that Luke’s use of Israel’s Scriptures demonstrates that ‘the proper “beginning” for [Luke’s] narrative is there, in the past, in God’s redemptive purpose as set forth in the Scriptures’ (1994: 66, italics original). The intertextual connections between the opening of Luke’s Gospel and the promises to Abraham frame the story for the reader to expect God’s work in Genesis (and the rest of the Septuagint) to come to fruition in the following pages. Green does not suggest a hermeneutical program that Luke follows, nor a heavy-handed ‘prophecy-fulfillment’ schema; instead, Luke writes as if his story begins in the middle of the larger story of the God of Israel (1994: 66, 76). Luke imbeds himself in a tradition that reverberates throughout his own story, creating ‘a text which is itself an interplay of other texts’ (1994: 76-77; see also Newberry 2021: 91-108, where connections between the Baptizer’s parents and Genesis are also examined).
Methodologically, Green’s article provides a tool and entry point for intertextual work. Green helps us see that texts always have and arise out of pretexts and assumptions, and recognizing and utilizing those pretexts appropriately takes us one step farther in reading and actualizing a text (1994: 63-64, 84-85). Being attentive to the allusions and echoes of a given text to its assumed pretexts does not import an artificial or foreign strategy to interpretation, but shapes us more into the model readers the text encourages.
Green’s project also highlights the importance of the cumulative effect of echoes and allusions (or ‘recurrence’ according to Hays’s criteria). While some connections between Luke’s infancy narrative and Gen 11–21 may seem faint or possible to explain on other grounds, those clear and strong connections (e.g., Gen 12:7; 13:14–17 and Luke 1:55, 73, regarding the promise to Abraham and his offspring) make the fainter echoes ‘appear more promising precisely because of the otherwise amply attested concern of Luke with … this portion of Genesis’ (1994: 75-76). The more momentum the intertextual project gains, the more feasible the slightest echoes become.
Green explored echoes of Genesis at the beginning of Acts as well. In an essay focused on the glossolalia in Acts 2:1–13, Green notes that speaking and understanding in different tongues at Pentecost does not reverse the ‘curse’ at Babel (Gen 11:1–11), contra F. F. Bruce and others. Rather, as YHWH’s divine intervention at Babel helped humanity fulfill its calling to grow and multiply across the earth, so the Holy Spirit’s use of many tongues to declare the ‘great things of God’ in Acts 2 is the foretaste of the gospel spreading to the ‘ends of the earth’. Pentecost’s glossolalia does not revert humanity back to the imperialistic ‘unity’ of Babel, but resists the difference-erasing unity of Greco-Roman imperialism by addressing disparate peoples in their own vernacular (Green 2008: 198-213).
Exodus
Brian J. Tabb and Steve Walton have written a chapter about the use of Exodus in Luke-Acts, but the authors admit that their project is far from comprehensive (2022: 62, 80). Indeed, their work is an admirable start, covering direct citations and clear allusions, but there is simply too much material from Exodus that appears in Luke-Acts (or, to complicate matters, that occur in other texts echoed in Luke-Acts! (cf. Pao 2000)) to fit into a single essay. The brief treatment Tabb and Walton give Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 suggest that echoes/the retelling of the narrative from Exodus in the martyr’s trial defense could warrant a book-length treatment on its own.
Nevertheless, Tabb and Walton have catalogued and given interpretive comments on direct citations of and the most obvious allusions to Exodus in Luke’s two volumes. They summarize that Luke uses Exodus ‘as authoritative Scripture with enduring, paradigmatic significance’, noting that Jesus and other righteous characters still appeal to and uphold that which was written in Exodus (2022: 87). The citations and allusions also recall foundational events in the history of Israel and recall YHWH’s promises to the patriarchs, promises that the Book of Acts stresses as fulfilled in the work of Jesus (2022: 73-75). Tabb and Walton help the reader see that the Book of Exodus saturates Luke-Acts, touching on subjects from Sabbath healings and the interpretation of the commandments to understanding the significance of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension.
Deuteronomy
The one major work on Deuteronomy and Luke-Acts is David P. Moessner’s Lord of the Banquet: The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative (though see also Evans 1993b). In his hyper-detailed dissertation, Moessner uses intertextuality as a tool to unravel the gordian knot of the Reisebericht: How do we sort out the apparent disconnect between the form and content of Luke’s travel narrative (9:51–19:44) (1989: 6, 14)? Moessner suggests that the travel narrative typologically parallels the exodus narrative, portraying Jesus as the prophet like Moses in Deut 18:15–19 who mediates the voice of God, ministers to a hopelessly twisted generation, dies for his people’s sin, and brings the people covenant blessings through his death (1989: 61-69). While the work helps highlight typological parallels with Deuteronomy (and the wider exodus narrative), Moessner’s exegesis is often too rigid, forcing the Lukan texts into categories or conclusions that they do not support. For instance, Moessner’s theory requires that the entire generation to whom Jesus ministers be corrupt (1989: 84), yet he must admit that at the very end of the travel narrative, the disciples and the people en masse hail and attend to Jesus; he essentially dismisses this counterevidence as narrative irony (1989: 177). This is a frequent issue in the tome; Moessner spends a great deal of time explaining away passages that seem to undermine him. Still, his insistence on the typological parallels between Luke’s Jesus and Deuteronomy’s Moses is not without warrant and can help illuminate Jesus’s long journey to the cross.
1 Samuel/1 Kingdoms
Commentators have long remarked on the similarities between Hannah’s Song (1 Sam 2:1–10) and the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55). The most recent and thorough treatment of the subject comes from Alice Yafeh-Deigh and Federico A. Roth’s ‘Vision and Re-Envision: Re-Tracing the Social Justice Relationship between Hannah’s and Mary’s Songs’ (though note both McWhirter 2013: 31-43 and the forthcoming dissertation from Chi-ying Wang, ‘Hearing from Mary and Hannah: The Reversal Motif in the Gospel of Luke with Special Reference to 1–2 Samuel’, 2022, unavailable to the author at the time of this writing). Yafeh-Deigh and Roth argue that Hannah’s Song creates a melody of divinely-ordained, monarch-enacted justice that falls flat in the Deuteronomistic history as Eli, Saul, and even David fail to bring this justice into reality. Mary’s Song, in response, is couched in the style, phraseology, themes, and even setting (a female protagonist who has a pregnancy via divine intervention) of Hannah’s Song. The Magnificat, Yafeh-Deigh and Roth argue, presents Hannah’s vision of a restorative justice, but expands its scope to all of humanity; the full melody of the song Mary sings in Luke cannot be understood without the harmonies from Hannah’s Song centuries earlier (Yasef-Deigh and Roth 2021: 76-78).
1–2 Kings/3–4 Kingdoms
The intertextual use of Elijah/Elisha in Luke-Acts is a somewhat fraught subject, in no small part due to the theories of Thomas Brodie. Brodie has asserted in numerous publications his conviction that the Elijah/Elisha narrative in 1 Kgs 16:29–2 Kgs 13 serves as the source for Proto-Luke, a form of the Gospel that preceded the extant work we now have (see paradigmatically, Brodie 2014). Brodie’s theories have a small following, but usually garner more rebuttal than agreement (cf. Steyn 1997; Derrenbacker 2014). Ultimately, this type of intertextuality is more source criticism than anything akin to the other projects examined here.
Still, Luke takes a distinct interest in Elijah and Elisha. So far, one monograph-length treatment of the connections between Luke-Acts and these prophets has appeared (though see the somewhat marginal role of Elijah/Elisha in Denova 1997: 141). Jeremy D. Otten argues that Luke’s references and allusions to Elijah, a prophet often connected with remnant theology, help the reader understand Luke-Acts’s perception of Israel and the place of the nation within salvation history (Otten 2021). Luke connects John the Baptizer with Elijah’s reputation for pronouncing judgment, calling for repentance, and regathering those who respond to the prophetic call (2021: 102). Jesus parallels the Tishbite by being a miracle-working prophet who ascends to heaven, leaving behind his spirit on his follower(s) (2021: 135). What is more, Jesus is linked with Elijah in such a way as to be the embodiment of the remnant of Israel—the only person who truly understands and follows God (e.g., 1 Kgs 19:10, 14; cf. Luke 9:28–36) (2021: 155). At his ascension, Jesus bestows his spirit on the disciples who are now able to become the remnant (2021: 165) and take up the role of Elijah themselves (2021: 189-205). Though he also interacts with the Elijah material in Mal 3:23–24, Otten’s work is a welcome correction to the discussion of 1–2 Kings allusions in Luke-Acts.
Psalms
The Psalms’ role in Luke-Acts has received quite a bit of attention in the last two decades. The first survey of connections between the Psalter and Luke-Acts was that by Peter Doble. His work focuses on the Psalms as part of the theological substructure of Luke-Acts. Doble sees the Psalms function to compare Jesus and King David, the latter being the presupposed author and subject of the Psalms used (2004: 83-118). The Psalms serve as ‘a precondition of … Luke’s narrative’, painting Jesus as the long-awaited Davidic king whose kingdom has no end (2004: 117, italics original).
Joshua Jipp has written two pieces on the Psalter in Luke-Acts. The first takes as a departure point the puzzle of Luke 24:46, where Jesus declares that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead ‘as it is written’. Though many interpreters either rely tentatively on Isaiah’s Suffering Servant (especially in Isa 53:1–12) or declare a ‘suffering Messiah’ an oxymoron, Jipp suggests the Book of Psalms offers another way forward. He examines numerous allusions and quotations to the Psalms in Luke’s passion narrative that frame Jesus as the suffering and persecuted righteous king in the royal psalms; as David is mocked, surrounded by enemies, and abandoned by his companions in the psalms, so Jesus suffers the same fates at the crucifixion (Jipp 2010; cf. Doble 2006). Because of this, Jipp argues that the ‘servant’ language that we do encounter in in Luke-Acts is better understood as referencing David, called God’s servant in several psalms (e.g., Pss 68:18; 18:12) (2010: 264-66). Jipp notes that the use of the royal psalms to describe Jesus’s suffering in Acts corroborates this reading of the Lukan passion (2010: 266-73).
Jipp’s second work builds on this theory of Luke’s use of the royal psalms to describe Jesus. In a chapter in a collected volume on the ascension in Luke-Acts, Jipp argues that the evangelist uses the royal psalms in Acts to portray the ascension as a royal enthronement; Luke paints Jesus as the king who now inaugurates and directs the kingdom of God from his heavenly throne (2016: 41-59). The key passages for Jipp’s argument are Acts 2:22–36 and 13:32–37, where Peter and Paul respectively interpret the royal psalms eschatologically. Since David died, he could not have ascended to heaven, as Pss 2, 110 (ET), and others portray the king; Jesus, however, has been raised to heaven and thus fulfills these Psalms in a way that David never could (2016: 47-54). Literarily, this solves the perennial interpretive problem of Acts’ supposed ‘absentee Christology’. Jesus does not shuffle off the stage at the ascension; Luke leverages the Psalter to show how the exalted Jesus pours out the Spirit, vindicates his witnesses, and gives restoration blessings to the believing community (2016: 55-59).
Renee Dutter Miller’s dissertation in many ways takes up where Jipp’s essays left off. Miller tweaks the focus of studying the Psalms in Acts; while Jipp focused on a Christological, proof-from-prophecy type schema of the Psalms’ relations to Jesus, Miller expounds how the Psalms that appear in the speeches of Acts (Acts 2, 7, 13) set a narrative substructure for ecclesiology (Miller 2018: 20). As they preach, so the Christian community lives: their hope for resurrection, stalwart demeanor in the face of suffering, and trust in God’s vindication maps onto the Psalms Luke echoes and the life Jesus leads (2018: 102-3).
Isaiah
Between both intertextual works and commentaries, Isaiah probably appears in Lukan studies more than any other OT book. With nine explicit quotations from the prophet—five of them quite lengthy—in Luke-Acts, there is little question why Isaiah has the lion’s share of intertextual investigation. While the major players are discussed here, Peter Mallen has a more extensive literature review of work on Isaiah in Luke-Acts (2008: 10-19).
In The Things Accomplished among Us: Prophetic Tradition in the Structural Pattern of Luke-Acts, Rebecca I. Denova leverages intertextuality to contribute to the debate regarding the unity of Luke-Acts. Addressing the charge that Acts shifts perspective from that of the Gospel of Luke, evidenced by the abandonment scriptural citations after Paul’s Pisidian Antioch speech (Acts 13:14–47), Denova rejoins that Scripture provides a through line that connects the two volumes via structural pattern (1997: 24-25). In particular, she examines how Isaiah underlies Luke’s Doppelwerk. Working through Jesus’s Nazareth sermon in Luke 4:16–30, Denova suggests that the quotations of Isaiah (Isa 61:1–2; 58:6) offer five major injunctions to Jesus’s ministry: to preach good news to the poor, to set at liberty those oppressed (namely through exorcisms, healings, and the forgiveness of sins), to give recovery of sight to the blind (literally and metaphorically), to proclaim the release to the captives, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Denova reads the ‘release of the captives’ as the ingathering of the exiles and notes that Jesus does not accomplish this in the Gospel; only at Pentecost do we see the germ of reconstituted Israel (1997: 133-38). She argues that Elijah and Elisha are brought up in part to draw a comparison between Jesus and his disciples; as Elisha finishes Elijah’s work, so the apostles must finish the injunctions Jesus himself lays out in Luke 4 (1997: 141). Denova also sees the Isaianic vision of Isa 49:6 (cf. Acts 13:47)—not just restoring Israel, but being ‘a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’—as crucial to Luke’s story but unfulfilled by Jesus. Denova reads Acts through this lens, seeing how the apostles fulfill the mission that Jesus articulated with quotes from Isaiah (1997: 146-49). She also utilizes typology, noting that the rejection of Elijah and Elisha serves as a type for the rejection of Jesus and the heroes of Acts (1997: 138, 177). Though Pao’s work will cinch the strands tighter, Denova’s monograph achieves its goal of tying Acts and Luke together at a structural level via quotes and allusions of Isaiah.
Pao’s Harvard dissertation established him as a major contributor to Lukan intertextuality. Published as Acts and the Isaianic New Exodus, the work adds substantially to both intertextual method and understanding Luke’s own theology and narrative art. Pao works with a metaleptic approach à la Hollander and Hays, but moves beyond isolated instances of metalepsis to examine how numerous and strategically placed quotations and allusions to Isaiah work structurally in Luke-Acts. Pao argues that Luke-Acts’ intertextual connections with Isaiah ‘point toward a wider story with which the narrative of Acts interacts.… [T]he scriptural story illuminates the narrative of Acts. In this sense, the scriptural story can best be understood as providing the hermeneutical framework within which the various individual units find their meaning’ (2000: 4). Isaiah’s adaptation and transformation of the exodus story in Isa 40–55 becomes the structure on which Luke builds his narrative, and understanding how this ‘Isaianic new exodus’ functions in Luke’s writing helps the reader understand the church as the eschatological people of God envisioned in the prophetic book (2000: 217-48).
Like Denova before him, Pao argues that Isaiah lends some sort of structure to Luke-Acts. Quotes from the prophet appear at key points in the narrative: at the beginning and end of Luke (Isa 40:3–5 quoted in Luke 3:4–6; Isa 49:6 alluded to in Luke 24:44–47), in Jesus’s programmatic Nazareth sermon (Isa 61:1–2; 58:6, in Luke 4:18–19), at the beginning and end of Acts (Isa 32:15, 43:10, and 49:6 in Acts 1:8; Isa 6:9–10 in Acts 28:25–28), and in the programmatic sermon at Pisidian Antioch, which is also roughly halfway through the Book of Acts (Isa 49:6 in Acts 13:46–47). These citations, and especially the use of the prologue of Isaiah 40–55 in the description of John the Baptizer’s ministry (Isa 40:1–11 in Luke 3:1–18), should act as the hermeneutical lens for all of Luke and Acts. In other words, Isaiah’s new exodus, when YHWH returns to Zion and the exiles return from Babylon, is eschatologically realized in the ministry of Jesus (and to an extent in that of his forerunner, the Baptizer). In this way, many of the themes and even plotlines of Isa 40–55 can be detected in Acts, including the going out of the Word of God (Isa 2:2–4; e.g., Acts 6:7; 12:24) and anti-idol polemic (e.g., Isa 40:18–24 and Acts 17:24–34). Most importantly for Pao’s purposes, however, Isaiah’s vision of the restoration of Israel plays out in the Book of Acts (and, to a lesser extent, in the Gospel of Luke) to redefine and legitimate the early Christian movement as the true Israel, the eschatological people of God (2000: 111-46). Like Hays’s earlier work, Pao sees the biggest payoff of his project in the realm of ecclesiology.
Seeing previous work as unnecessarily limited by method (e.g., phraseological parallels) or scope (e.g., focused on Acts), Peter Mallen attempts a comprehensive study of the use of Isaiah in Luke-Acts that incorporates narrative, redaction, and rhetorical criticism (Mallen 2008). After surveying reception of Isaiah among other Second Temple Jewish authors, Mallen proves again Pao’s thesis that quotations and allusions from Isaiah are used strategically through the narrative to create a frame of reference for the reader. After examining more references, Mallen asserts that Luke’s characteristic use of Isaiah is to explain the mission of the Isaianic suffering servant as restoring Israel and proclaiming salvation to the nations (2008: 101). Luke transforms and nuances Isaiah’s texts in surprising ways vis-à-vis the writings of other Second Temple writers, however; the emphases on salvation as inclusive of the gentiles, the mixed response of the Jews to the gospel, and Jesus’s death as the necessary death of the servant that catalyzes the new exodus are theological innovations on the evangelist’s part (2008: 101, 132-33, 157, 207).
The most recent work on Luke-Acts’s use of Isaiah comes from Holly Beers, who argues that Luke uses the image of the servant from Isaiah’s New Exodus (NE) to characterize both Jesus and the disciples (Beers 2015). After tracing the characterization of the servants of Yahweh as the main protagonists in the NE (2015: 31-48), Beers traces how the same key characterizations are applied to Jesus and his disciples after him via allusions to Isaiah. Like the servants, Jesus and his followers are characterized as chosen, righteous, suffering, and eventually vindicated witness of Yahweh’s good news (2015: 85-86, 126-38, 167-69). Beers is not the first to study the motif of the Isaianic servant(s) in Luke-Acts (see esp Hooker 1959; Mallen 2008), but she is the first to expound in a sustained way the motif as it characterizes the disciples in Acts. Further, Beers highlights aspects of the servants (e.g., vindication, righteousness) in the NE that are often neglected as the focus falls on other aspects (e.g., light to the gentiles, suffering).
Ezekiel
Scholars have often recognized allusions to Ezekiel in Luke-Acts, but only rarely examined these connections in detail. Craig F. Evans, Gregory R. Lanier, and Dale C. Allison Jr. have all offered short studies of solitary allusions or echoes (Evans 1993a; Lanier 2014; Allison 2016). Building in part on these works, Reed Metcalf has offered the first sustained study of Ezekielian echoes in Luke-Acts (Metcalf 2022). Utilizing the methodology of Hays, Green, Brawley, and Pao, Metcalf examines three major groupings of Ezekielian echoes. First, he sees how connections between Ezekiel’s eschatological washing in Ezek 36–37 and Luke’s portrait of John the Baptizer (Luke 3:1–18) cast the latter’s ministry as God’s eschatological cleansing of the people (Metcalf 2022: 40-89). Second, Metcalf demonstrates how Luke frames the travel narrative (Luke 9:51–19:46) with allusions to Ezekiel (Ezek 21:7 LXX [21:2 ET]//Luke 9:51, 53; Ezek 34:1–31//Luke 15:3–32, 19:1–10; Ezek 4:1–8//Luke 19:41–44). This narrative framing activates judgment themes from Ezekiel’s oracles and aims them at the city of Jerusalem and the leaders of the people who have poorly shepherded the people, allowing them to become ‘lost’ (e.g., Ezek 34:4//Luke 15:3–7) (2022: 96-145). Third, Metcalf examines allusions to the prophet Ezekiel’s own calling (Ezek 1–3, 33) in the descriptions of Paul’s calling (Acts 9:1–9; 22:6–11; 26:12–18) and ministry activity (esp. 18:6; 20:26; 28:28) in Acts, suggesting that Paul is cast typologically as a new Ezekiel—a watchman warning his people of impending judgment (cf. Ezek 33:7–9) (2022: 146-83). Metcalf finishes his study with a discussion of how these echoes and allusions inform Lukan Christology, assigning to Jesus prerogatives that belong to YHWH alone in the Book of Ezekiel (2022: 184-216).
Minor Prophets
Only one major work to date exists to treat the use of the Minor Prophets as a corpus in Luke-Acts (though see the isolated studies of individual quotations from the Minor Prophets in van de Standt 1990; van de Standt 1991; Wall 2000; Newberry 2021). Aaron W. White is the first to handle all four of Acts’s explicit quotations from the Book of the Twelve as a single phenomenon (White 2020). White argues that the Minor Prophets were contained in a single scroll and treated as a theologically unified corpus in the first century, so interpreting Acts as if Luke treated the twelve as a unit is justifiable (2020: 2-4). White avers that the four quotations from the Septuagint Book of the Twelve (Joel 3:1–5 in Acts 2:17–21; Amos 5:25–27 in Acts 7:42b–43; Hab 1:5 in Acts 13:41; Amos 9:11–12 in Acts 15:16–18a) reveal Luke’s understanding of Jesus as the universal Lord long foretold and awaited on the eschatological ‘day of the Lord’ (2020: 52). Luke uses texts from the Minor Prophets at crucial narrative junctions to prove Jesus’s lordship and explain the inclusion of the gentiles qua gentiles as part of the eschatological vision of the prophets and the natural destination of God’s salvific work (2020: 207). While he eschews working with any allusions or echoes of the Book of the Twelve in Acts, White’s monograph blazes the trail for the Minor Prophets’ theological influence on Luke-Acts as a unit.
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
Bulletin for Biblical Research
Biblical Interpretation Series
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
Currents in Research: Biblical Studies
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses
Journal of Biblical Literature
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series
Journal of Theological Studies
Library of New Testament Studies
New Testament Studies
Studien zum Neuen Testament
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament
Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche