Boid on the Authorship and Purpose of the Gospel of Luke

Here is my proposed solution to the authorship and purpose of Luke’s Gospel.

(a) Purpose. It seems to me that some of the answer or even perhaps all of it was meant to be found in the long opening sentence (spread over four verses in modern editions). This sentence is NOT verbiage. I know it sounds like that in most translations, but have a look at the rendering in the Authorised Version. There you will see the precise meaning of the Greek. The Peshitta is even plainer, and the Old Syriac plainer still. The sentence says explicitly that Theophilos only has a vague and partially wrong concept, that the author was a witness to the events or well-informed by witnesses, and that he intends to write a corrective to the versions Theophilos has been taught. The Gospel presented is to be a refutation of what has been put into circulation relatively recently, by re-presenting the truth. I will send you exact translations of the Greek, the Peshitta, and the Old Syriac in a few days. This same person wrote the book of Acts. Disregard the form of that book as we now have it. I remind you that there must have been an older form that was different in purpose. The proof is that the first chapters of Acts are the work of a person of considerable ability, AND THEY CONTRADICT THE ADULTERATED GOSPEL. This is why they are not taken seriously in most Christian writing. Re-read ch. III. This chapter says as explicitly as anyone ever could say that the resurrection of Jesus is the consequence of the previous resurrection of Moses. (To forestall objections: The resurrection of Moses was imperfect, in that his body was uncorrupted while he ministered as High Priest in the Heavenly Tabernacle. It is to be assumed he was transported upon the death of Jesus. I think this is part of the meaning of tetelêthê “it is finished” , literally “the endpoint has been reached”. The resurrection of “many of the saints of old” reported in Matthew assumes the immediately preceding full resurrection of Moses). The account of the first Pentecost says as explicitly as could be said that the kind of revelation that happened at the previous first Pentecost on Mt. Sinai has happened again, but that the SECOND WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE FIRST. This is what is said in John I: 16 and 17, which are persistently ignored or misread. Luke II: 22 says that Jesus and his mother observed the Torah. Why bother to state the obvious? To counter poisonous misrepresentation of what Jesus said and did in relation to the Torah. Immediately sifter that, Jesus is recognised by the Priest Simeon. This name is loaded. There is a Rabbinic explanation of the apparent omission of Simeon from the list of tribes in Dt XXXIII that says Simeon’s blessing is inside Judah’s, which is actually true if you look at the Hebrew. This explanation then says that Judah is the public face of Simeon and Simeon the hidden face of Judah. This doesn’t mean this priest was from the tribe of Simeon, which would be impossible by definition. It means that this priest has the attribute of Simeon in RECOGNISING JUDAH. To emphasise the hint to the reader, that this priest represents the hidden or private face, it says that Simeon had thus finished his life’s work. Simeon prays “Now dismissest thou thy servant in peace”. Only Luke has the Good Samaritan. Now most people think, wrongly, that a parable must be a made-up story. Not so. A parable is an undeniable datum that makes the listener realise something. The story, if made up. Must be undeniably what usually does happen, or what someone might well do. It must be PLAUSIBLE. But a parable need not be a story. In Mark VII the parable is an undeniable fact admitted by everyone including the Pharisees, that the question of the kosherness of what might have been on unwashed hands and swallowed along with food is totally irrelevant and unimportant, because by the time it gets to the small intestine (mistranslated in all modern translations) chemical change has occurred. In fact, the Pharisaic washing of hands and the Moslem washing of hands and feet wee and are imitations of what was done by priests before officiating. It is assumed that the hands will be cleansed of dirt and gunk BEFORE the ritual washing. (You have no idea how many bad sermons have been delivered in ignorance of this, and that includes pontificating from staff of theological colleges). This is part of the wider principle that any thorough chemical change makes the question of the kosherness of the original material irrelevant. Thus you could get fragments of a disintegrating pigskin wallet in your food without it mattering, as Maimonides says in slightly different words. To come back to the Good Samaritan. The word “parable” could refer to a story that was made up but could happen, or it could refer to a story that was undeniably true. If the story is undeniably true, then the traveller was Jesus himself. Only Luke has the loaded Samaritan term the Power of God in relation to the conception of Jesus. John has the term but in other contexts.

In general, it could be said that John is a corrective written in abstract terms, and Luke is a corrective written in more concrete terms.

If you want to see what had to be corrected, the Epistle of Barnabas is a start.

(b) Authorship. This Gospel could have been commissioned by the author of the original long Gospel, but the tone seems to favour an independent decision. The answer is somewhere in the author’s name. The name “Loukas” is a Greek adaptation of the Latin Lucius. The very fact that the name is Latin seems to be a signal to the reader. This name means “shining”. I think this is meant to be a coded reference to the Torah. The verse (in Proverbs I think) is “The mitsvah is a lamp and the Torah is light”. Implicitly, the name says that Jesus DID respect the mitsvot, and affirms the value of the first Torah. I don’t know if we can identify the person, but on purely linguistic grounds, and nothing else, I’d like you to look at Lucius Flavius Silva Nonnus Bassus, Governor of Palestine during the first war against Rome. For reasons I haven’t got time to explain, the name Lucius in Latin might be taken as having the same meaning as Silva. Note the name Lucius. Note the name Nonnus, the name of the son of the Samaritan Marqe. Notice also the connection with the Flavians. If you wanted to push it, even the name Bassus might be hinted at by the name Luke, but I need to think a bit about this.

Please tell me what you think.