Luke – Historian and Theologian

Apart from the apostle Paul, Luke is arguably the most influential force in the canon of the New Testament.  His Gospel and Acts occupy almost a third of the New Testament, and together their narrative voice carries us over a span of more than sixty years, from the birth of Jesus to the imprisonment of Paul in Rome.  It is difficult to imagine our understanding of the New Testament period without Luke’s writings.  For this reason, the question of Luke’s historical reliability has been repeatedly investigated.

In this study Howard Marshall affirms Luke’s trustworthiness as an historian.  But Luke is more than historian; he is also a theologian who finds his interpretive key in the great theme of salvation.  Marshall provides us with a lucid guide to Luke’s theology of salvation as it is unfurled in Gospel narrative, but always with a eye on its ongoing development in the companion work, the Acts of the Apostles.  A postscript assesses the course of Lukan studies during the decade of 1979-1988.