Christ's Continual Ministry
Introduction
I am assuming throughout this study that the same author wrote both the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, that this author is Luke, the ‘sometime companion of Paul’, and that he probably wrote Acts sometime before AD 70. Who was Luke writing for?19 The attempt to locate a particular ‘Lukan community’ is fraught with difficulty and has now been largely abandoned. The lack of any reference to a particular community, coupled with the general nature of the prologue of Luke’s Gospel, makes any such historical reconstruction for a particular locality tentative at best.21 Thus clues must be examined in the narrative itself for descriptions of who the readers implied by the narrative may be
What Luke’s audience needed, however, was ‘certainty’ or ‘assurance’ about what they had been taught. When Luke’s Gospel and the book of Acts are read in the light of this preface, it appears that Luke is writing to provide reassurance to believers about the nature of the events surrounding Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, the spread of the message about Jesus, and the nature of God’s people following Jesus’ ascension.
What Luke’s audience needed, however, was ‘certainty’ or ‘assurance’ about what they had been taught. When Luke’s Gospel and the book of Acts are read in the light of this preface, it appears that Luke is writing to provide reassurance to believers about the nature of the events surrounding Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, the spread of the message about Jesus, and the nature of God’s people following Jesus’ ascension.
At the beginning of Luke’s Gospel (1) the links between the OT and Luke’s writing are indicated (‘the things that have been fulfilled among us’). At the end of Luke’s Gospel (2) the links between (a) the OT (‘everything must be fulfilled … Law … Prophets … Psalms’) and (b) the account of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection in Luke’s Gospel (‘about me … the Christ will suffer and rise’) are confirmed, and the links between (a) the OT and (c) the spread of the Gospel in Acts are also identified (‘everything must be fulfilled … and repentance and forgiveness … will be preached’). At the beginning of Acts (3) the link between Luke’s Gospel and Acts is highlighted (‘in my former book …’). These three texts indicate that Luke intends Acts to be read as a continuation of this line as he recounts the continued outworking of God’s saving purposes