The genesis of the Gospel of Luke: on the place, time of writing and the personality of the addressee
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51216/Keywords:
Gospel of Luke, Acts of the Holy Apostles, apostle Paul, Theophilus, Koine, Titus Flavius SabinusAbstract
The article is devoted to one of the controversial issues of modern biblical studies - the determination of the time and place of writing the Gospel of Luke, as well as the identification of the addressee, based on the available historical and theological sources. The purpose of the work is to substantiate the author’s hypothesis that the third Gospel was written in the period from 60 to 63 AD. in Rome, and the addressee was the Roman patrician Titus Flavius Sabinus. The attention of the authors is focused on the forms of addressing a person used in Koine, a colloquial version of the ancient Greek language in which the Gospel of Luke was written. It is emphasized that the use of the definite article was an important element of the grammatical structure of Koine, and therefore this fact is of great importance for understanding the texts of the New Testament. The work uses the methods of deduction and generalization in concretizing the results obtained; comparative theological and dialectical methods, with the help of which the views of Orthodox theologians and individual representatives of biblical criticism on the issues under consideration were compared; the
hermeneutical method is applied in the analysis and interpretation of texts; intertextual analysis was used in comparing the texts of the Holy Scriptures. The argumentation of the proposed hypothesis allows the authors to summarize that 1) the Gospel of Luke was written in Rome during the stay of the Apostle Paul there approximately in 60-62 AD; 2) the address “Venerable Theophilus”, due to Koine grammatical features, does not unambiguously indicate a personal name or some nickname of a high-ranking “lover of God”;
3) it is possible that the addressee of the Gospel and the Acts of the Holy Apostles was a member of the future imperial Flavian dynasty.
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