This is the Bamelon podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we look at the Gospel of Luke and wrestle with the many perspectives regarding his audience and his agenda.

Yeah, so this is our halfway through the Gospel. This is going to be our third of four. The Bible has more than four Gospels. Let us know. We're only going to be looking at the four that are in ours. Enough with my Bible jokes. Let's get out of there.

We talk about Matthew. Matthew said his agenda was what Brent? The mumblezer. He was talking as a Jew to Jews. And then Mark, he's also a Jew, but he's speaking to Romans.

And so that was his agenda was making sure that his gospel spoke to a Roman worldview. It's definitely going to need to be different than the one that is shared with the Jewish worldview. And so that was that. Now we kind of talked about this before. We're going to talk about Luke today.

The predominant popular idea, we kind of talked about a last podcast, is that Mark is the shortest. Mark and Matthew are so similar that they share some kind of material many have called it Q source Q.

And because Mark is the shortest and the briefest, the popular opinion is Mark was written first. Matthew then writes a gospel based off of Mark's material and the source material Q. And and expands on that. And it's the second gospel that's written. And then many people believe that Luke comes along popular opinion was taught to me. And in many ways still is today that Luke comes along to

to tell a gospel that is more chronological, more detailed, more, you see Matthew and Mark, we've already talked about it. They're willing to like shape their gospel and Luke cared about details, Luke cared about accuracy. And so Luke went to write a more accurate, a more orderly gospel.

That's a popular opinion. They also popular opinions that Luke wrote to Gentiles, a couple different reasons that people think that Luke was himself a Gentile. In fact, a lot of people often say I've said before in the podcast, the Bible was written as an Eastern book. And it's written by Eastern authors. Nobody wrote me any emails over that. But I was assuming that there are some Bible students that went, no, no, there's one Gentile author.

Luke is a Gentile author. And I would argue Luke is not a Gentile author. Luke is following the disciples around long before the Jerusalem Council, long before they've made decisions about Gentiles. And Luke is not a problem like nobody's talking about Luke, which tells me that Luke was a proselyt. Luke grew up Gentile, but Luke was Jewish. Luke converted Luke took on circumcision. Luke ate kosher.

Luke wasn't a God fear, a Gentile worshiper of the God of Israel. I don't know. But Luke was a Gentile who converted and was incredibly Jewish, probably went through intensive Jewish training. We know that Luke was a doctor, which by the way, if Luke was a doctor and he was a Gentile, what can we pretty safely assume? We can definitively state this. But what could we almost assume, Brent?

He's probably worked in the Oskolopian. Absolutely. He's probably an Oskolopian priest in his former life. Very trained, would have been very academic, very intellectual, I imagine. And when he converted, very capable and able to learn a new worldview and catch up. So I don't just go, well, Luke is a Gentile author. No, Luke is a, listen, if you are a proselyt, if you convert in the Jewish world, you are as Jewish as if you were born.

You take on circumcision. You are a son of Abraham. You are as, we'll talk about that more in session four, but you are as Jewish as if you were born Jewish. So you can't in their world call Luke a Gentile author. Luke is a proselyt. And we're not told he's a proselyt, but I think it's a safe assumption based on the context. Luke is a Jewish author. He has a Gentile background, pagan roots. He's Jewish and he's a Jewish.

The other reason that we thought he was writing to a Gentile audience is because he writes to theophilus. You have the first four verses of Luke, don't you Brent? Yes. Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.

With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you most excellent theophilus so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

So that opening paragraph to the gospel Luke seems to just tell us all the details that we need to know seems like a pretty open shut case. I never really questioned it when I was taught it. I read that and went, yeah, absolutely. Theophilus is definitely a Greek name means friend of God, Theo, Philos, friend of God, God's friend. And it's a Greek name, but we don't know if he was Greek. He could have been what kind of a Jew Brent, the proselyt, or even even let's just be even more Jewish. What kind of Jew?

We've run into Jews before the head Greek names. Oh, sure. Herodian could have just been a herodian could have had Greek parents that loved and friend of God, like if I were a Jew that cared about my Jewish roots, but still was Greek and Hellenistic, friend of God would seem like a pretty typical name. And it could just it could be not even an actual person themselves like theophilus, friend of God, that could be a euphemism for the church, for the brothers and sisters of Christ.

And as a body, as a friend of God, assisted pretty generic term, we don't know who theophilus was. He's also going to be referencing the book of Acts. Did Luke really write this entire gospel for one person named theophilus? That would be a little outrageous. It might have been directed towards him, intended to be shared with others. It could be a person it could be. So these aren't definitive cases. It's kind of like the way we talk about communion, where we have an open table and we say, if you call yourself a follower of Jesus, we want you to join us.

Yeah. If you call yourself a friend of God, if you call yourself theophilus, this is an account for you. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And when you read the rest of that paragraph, so it made sense. It made sense to step away from this and go, okay, Luke is a Gentile, writing to a Gentile audience.

He says in the first few verses, he wants to give an orderly account. It seemed like an open shut case until you actually get to studying the synoptic gospels and going about that work of trying to quote unquote harmonize them.

You realize that Luke isn't the most chronological, not even not at all. And he's not doing a very good job of writing an orderly detailed account.

Like that's he's really not doing as good of a job as we would want him to. So it gets to be really confusing when you get into it.

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