the role of the lukan parables in terms of the purpose of luke's gospel

to strategic episodes in the unfolding of the Christian story.” 11
1-2. A theology adapted to the parousia’s delay
Not satisfied by the arguments of those who see the purpose of Luke-Acts as a religio licita
status for Christianity, H. Conzelmann claims that Luke wrote to defend the parousia’s delay.
In the situation in which Jesus has still not returned, and in which the apostles and many from
the earliest days of the church were dying, Luke feels the need to explain the delay to prevent
their confusion. Luke, then, undertakes to remold the early church’s theology to settle their
dilemma, which arises from the parousia’s delay. As a result of a theological consideration of
the relation between history and eschatology, Luke builds a model of the history of salvation
to account for the delay. He outlines three epochs: The period of Israel, the satan-free period
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of Jesus and the period of the church. In this case, the church belongs to the period of the
church which is committed to proclaim God’s saving message to the world. The other side of
the coin, is to what extent the parousia in the light of God’s plan of redemptive history moves
back to an indeterminable point in the future. Conzelmann’s thesis appears fairly persuasive,
in that the issue of the parousia’s delay does appear on the whole in Pauline letters, the
Pastorals, and the writings of Peter, John, and Jude. His argument however, raises a problem,
in particular the lack of a concrete instance that gives rise to such writing. Firstly, of the three
texts on which he bases his theory (16:16; 4:21; 22:35-37), the first and last do not teach what
he supposes. If the texts point to the satan-free period of Jesus and of the church, as he alleges,
it would need to be more explicit to the reader of the early church fallen in the dilemma of the
parousia’s delay. Secondly, in the light of the ancient reader who, in contrast to modern
readers, would primarily hear rather than read, Conzelmann’s contention is called into
question: How obvious would the three-stage of the history salvation proposed by him, be to
them? This is not to question the adequacy of the history of salvation as a Lukan theological
theme, or as a common theological theme in the New Testament, but simply to question how
11. A. Neagoe, The Trial of the Gospel: An Apologetic Reading of Luke’s Trial Narratives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 220-201, tackles three aspects of Luke’s trial narratives: “(1) The trial of
Jesus serves to test and confirm the Christological contention of the foregoing Gospel narrative that Jesus is the
divinely appointed agent for the restoration of Israel. (2) The trials of Peter and his apostolic companion serve to
test and confirm the claim that it is in the name of Jesus and through the ministry of his followers that God is
now visiting and restoring his people. (3) The lengthy accounts of Paul’s trials test and confirm the contention
that the Christian gospel has a legitimate place within the Gentile world and, more specifically, within the
Roman empire.” For more on this motif, see Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and
Political motivations of Lucan Theology, 201-19.
12. Conzelmann, Theology of St. Luke, 13-17, 132.
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