The Preface to Luke’s Gospel

Luke’s two-volume work begins with a formal preface unlike anything else in the New Testament, and it has long been academic orthodoxy that Luke’s choice of style, vocabulary, and content in this short passage reveal a desire to present his work to contemporary readers as ‘History’ in the great tradition of Thucydides and Polybius. This study challenges that assumption: far from aping the classical historians, Dr Alexander argues, Luke was simply introducing his book in a style that would have been familiar to readers of the scientific and technical manuals which proliferated in the hellenistic world. The book contains a detailed study of these Greek ‘scientific’ prefaces as well as a word-by-word commentary on the Lucan texts. In her concluding chapters, Alexander seeks to explore the consequences of this alignment both for the literary genre of Luke-Acts (is it meant to be read as ‘history’?) and for the social background of the author and the book’s first readers.

• Wide-ranging in the issues it addresses about Luke and his work • Overturns a scholarly consensus with regard to the the provenance of Luke’s Gospel • Throws new light on the kinds of readers the Gospel was intended for

Abbreviations; Foreword; 1. The Lucan preface: questions and assumptions; 2. On the beginnings of books; 3. Historical prefaces; 4. Scientific prefaces (1): origins and development; 5. Scientific prefaces (2): Structure, content & style; 6. Luke’s preface; 7. Hellenistic Jewish prefaces; 8. The Social matrix of Luke’s preface; 9 The appropriate form of words for the occasion; Appendix A: selected scientific prefaces; Appendix B: bibliographical notes on texts studied; Short bibliography; Index.