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

critics have responded to his theme that the Evangelists wrote for general audiences, not for
local communities. I will therefore allow for more space here to deal with the argument of the
Christian community. I will deal with the audience of Luke in three parts: The Argument of
the Christian community, Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians as a Christian Audience,
and a Non-Christian Audience.
2-2-1. The Argument of the Christian Community
The nature of the relationship between the Gospel of Luke and a specific Christian
community has been discussed recently by a number of scholars. 76
Having identified Luke as
a pastoral theologian who is concerned for the faith of his missionary communities, R.J.
Karris takes up the concerns of faith which Luke’s missionary communities are experiencing
after the Destruction of Jerusalem, such as persecution, harassment, distress, the poor and
rich, the search for continuity amidst discontinuity, and Luke’s missionary communities. In
his view, Luke presents diverse answers to his persecuted community, showing the fact that
growth, as the standard of Christian life, follows persecution throughout Acts. For him the
Lukan community includes the poor and rich as an actual situation, in contrast to the
symbolic and metaphorical expressions by L.T. Johnson who argues that “the expressions
rich and poor function within the story as metaphorical expressions for those rejected and
Eerdmans, 1998).
76. L.T. Johnson, “On Finding the Lukan Community: A Cautious Cautionary Essay,” SBL 1979 Seminar
Papers. (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1979), 87-100; Robert J. Karris, “Missionary communities: a new
paradigm for the study of Luke-Acts,” 80-97; P.F. Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and
Political Motivations of Lucan Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); D. Allison, “Was
There a Lukan Community?,” IBS 10 (1988), 62-70; Vernon Robbins, “The Social Location of the Implied
Author of Luke-Acts,” 305-32 and Moxnes, “Patron-Client Relations and the New Community in Luke-Acts,”
241-68; idem, “The Social Context of Luke’s Community,” 379-89; S.J. Joubert, “The Jerusalem community as
role-model for a cosmopolitan group: A socio-literary analysis of Luke’s symbolic universe,” Neotestamentica
29 (1995), 49-59; Pieter J.J. Botha, “Community and Conviction in Luke-Acts,” Neotestamentica 29 (1995),
145-65. For the nature of the relationships between the Gospels and specific Christian communities, see Richard
Bauckham, “For Whom Were the Gospels Written?” 9-48 and Richard A. Burridge, “About People, by People,
for People: Gospel Genre and Audiences,” 113-45 and Stephen C. Barton, “Can We Identify the Gospel
Audiences?,” 173-94, in ed., Richard Bauckham, The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel
Audience (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998); Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus
Christ: An Investigation of the Collection and Origin of the Canonical Gospels (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2000);
P.F. Esler, “Community and Gospel in Early Christianity: A Response to Richard Bauckham’s Gospels for All
Christians,” SJT 51 (1998), 235-48; I.J. du Plessis, “The Lukan Audience-Rediscovered? Some Reactions to
Bauckham’s Theory,” Neotestamentica 34 (2000), 243-261; David C. Sim, “The Gospels for all Christians? A
Response to Richard Bauckham,” JSNT 84 (2001), 3-27; Thomas Kazen, “Sectarian Gospels for Some
Christians? Intention and Mirror Reading in the Light of Extra-Canonical Texts,” NTS 51 (2005), 561-78;
Margaret M. Mitchell, “Patristic Counter-Evidence to the Claim that ‘The Gospels Were Written for All
Christians’,” NTS 51 (2005), 36-79.
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