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

Stein, unlike Conzelmann’s contention, Luke still has an imminent expectation in Luke-Acts
and “the believer lives in the joy of the already now and the hope of the final
consummation.” 77
In conjunction with (4), Luke describes Rome in a positive view, that is,
when persecution arose, it was generally on account of opposition from the Jewish leadership,
not Roman authorities. It means that Christians do not need to fear Rome in following Jesus.
As we have seen above, each suggestion concerning the purpose of Luke-Acts has
methodological, textual, and historical problems. At times, their claims can be applicable to
the caution that “too little of the Gospel deals with such legal, political concerns and too
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much exhortation deals with issues beyond simple evangelism.” It is fairly hard to view the
following proposals as the purpose of Luke-Acts as a whole: a defense of Paul, an anti-
Gnostic concern, evangelism, an explanation of the parousia’s delay, an apologetic for religio
licita status, a political apologia pro ecclesia, an apologia pro imperio, a theodicy of God’s
faithfulness to Israel, an effort at conciliation with Judaism. To put it differently, even though
these can be one of the key aspects of Luke’s agenda, it in no way fits Luke’s principle aim,
since there is much more to it in Luke-Acts. Most importantly, it can be pointed out that some
of them ignore the unity of Luke-Acts in attempting to determine the purpose of Luke. While
such attitudes may be misleading, those who acknowledge the unity of Luke-Acts can gain
some insights into Luke’s purpose through threads running through both books. 79
In what
77. Ibid., 44.
78. Bock, Luke, 15.
79. Recently, Mikael Parsons and Richard I. Pervo have raised some questions about the unity of Luke-Acts by
contending that its unity needs to be questioned and justified, since “the unity of the Lukan writings is a largely
unexamined question.” They give attention to the differences in genre, narrative and theology in Luke-Acts, and
focus on a number of authorial and canonical questions posed by Luke and Acts. As a result, they come to the
conclusion that although the same real author wrote Luke and Acts, the two works possess “two very distinct
narrative embodying different literary devices, generic conventions, and perhaps even theological concerns.” In
their view, it is desirable to view Luke and Acts as loosely connected, rather than see a close connection
between the two. See M.C. Parsons and R.I. Pervo, Rethinking the Unity of Luke and Acts (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1993), 18, 89, 115-126; M.C. Parsons, “The Unity of the Lukan Writings: Rethinking the
OPINIO COMMUNIS,” in ed. Naymond H. Keathley, With Steadfast Purpose: Essays on Acts in Honor of
Henry Jackson Flanders (Texas, Waco: Baylor University, 1990). From a different angle, Andrew Gregory and
C. Kavin Rowe tackle the question of the unity of Luke-Acts by examining the history of reception, noting that
Luke-Acts were not read and heard together by the early Christians in the ancient world. In other words, secondcentury
writers did not read Luke and Acts in unison or treat them as a single literary unit. Gregory argues that
“Irenaeus and the author of the Muratorian Fragment each read Luke and Acts as two elements of one literary
whole, but that Irenaeus’s understanding of what this literary unity entails appears to have been different from
that of many modern scholarly readings of Luke-Acts.” According to him, prior to Irenaeus, Luke and Acts seem
to have been used as distinct texts, and after Irenaeus, they appear to have been read primarily “as respective
parts either of the Gospel or of the Apostle, the two principle components of what becomes the New Testament.”
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