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

Christians by means of this ethos of his ideal community described above. 85
On the other hand, Richard Bauckham contends that the four Gospels were written not for
local Christians, but for a very broad Christian readership, to be circulated to all churches and
86
to be read by all Christians. Bauckham attempts to refute the current consensus in Gospel
scholarship which simply assumes the existence of the four specific Christian communities,
namely, the so-called Matthean, Markan, Lukan, and Johannine communities. First of all, he
begins with the common view that the four Gospels were written for Christians, not for non-
Christians. He claims that if Matthew and Luke used Mark which had circulated widely prior
to their Gospels, both authors would have been aware that it was inappropriate to write their
own Gospels merely for their own local communities. He criticizes Gospel scholars who are
inclined to read the Gospels as if they were Pauline letters which sprung into being from the
local community. The Gospels, however, belong to the genre of ancient Greco-Roman
biography which have a generally broad readership, and are expected to circulate to readers
unknown to its author. This means that a small circle and friends who might initially read it
were only the first step to a wider circulation. 87 Moreover, the early Christian movement is
not a collection of isolated and independent churches, for the movement presents a network
of groups that keep in close communication with one another. 88
Bauckham concludes with a
number of hermeneutical observations: 1) The current consensus in the Gospels scholarship,
that the so-called Gospel communities function as a key hermeneutical role in interpreting the
Gospels, makes a mistake. 2) Bauckham’s argument is not intended to broaden the implied
audience of the Gospels from a local church to a wider group of churches, but to make the
point that the Gospels are composed for any and every church in which their Gospels might
85. Ibid., 387.
86. Bauckham, “For Whom Were the Gospels Written?” 9-48.
87. Ibid., 29.
88. For this, Bauckham presents a large amount of relevant evidence: “1) Mobility and communication in the
first-century Roman world was exceptionally high. 2) The early Christian movement had a strong sense of itself
as a worldwide movement. 3) Most of the Christian leaders whom we know in the New Testament period,
moved around. 4) Another feature of the early Christian movement that we can establish as a continuous
practice from the time of Paul to the mid-second century is the sending of letters from one church to another. 5)
There is concrete evidence for close contact between churches in the period around, or soon after the writing of
the Gospels: the fragment of Papias’s prologue to his lost work, the letters of Ignatius, and the shepherd of
Hermas. 6) The evidence for conflict and diversity in early Christianity supports my picture of the early
Christian movement as a network of communities in constant communication.” Bauckham, “For Whom Were
the Gospels Written?” 30-44. For a detailed discussion of the mobility within the Christian movement, see M.B.
Thompson, “The Holy Internet: Communication between Churches in the First Christian Generation,” in ed.,
Richard Bauckham, The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audience (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1998), 49-70.
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