Luke's Portrait of Jesus the Prophet

Who was Jesus? According to Luke, he was the son of God, and the last prophet of Israel, the man sent by God to announce the imminent approach of the kingdom.

Luke’s ancient biography of Jesus was well written. He lays out his case immediately in the virgin birth story. A comparison of the ancestry of Jesus in Matthew (1:1-16) and Luke (3:23-38) is informative. Matthew traces Jesus’ lineage to Abraham, the father of Israel. His was a Jewish gospel. Luke traces Jesus’ ancestry to Adam and finally to God. This is a gospel for the entire world, the link to Adam, and it is the story of God’s son.

To understand the purpose of the virgin birth story in Luke, we must first admit that it is a work of fiction. As I pointed out in discussing Matthew’s virgin birth story, the two stories share nothing in common with the exception of the characters. Luke’s story is contrived from the outset. It is based on the premise of a worldwide census ordered by Caesar Augustus that takes a pregnant Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. The prophet Micah (5:2) specified that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. To announce to his readers that Jesus was the promised Messiah, it was important that the birth take place in Bethlehem. The problem is that a worldwide census was never order by Caesar Augustus. Luke’s story is inspired by a Syrian census that was conducted when Jesus was ten years old.

Once we accept the fact that the story is a work of fiction, we can ask the important question of why it was written. The point was to proclaim Jesus as the final prophet of Israel. To do this, Luke patterns his story after the birth of the prophet Samuel (read 1 Samuel 1:9-2: 6). In the Samuel story, a barren woman gives birth to a future prophet as a result of divine intervention. The Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-55) is clearly inspired by the hymn of Hannah (1 Samuel 2: 1-10). The birth of Jesus is also linked to the birth of John the Baptist, a prophet in the tradition of Elijah (Luke 1: 17). Ancient Jews believed that Elijah’s return would presage the coming Messiah. Any first century Jew reading or hearing this story would immediately pick up the signals that this was a story about Jesus the prophet.

The next piece of evidence comes from the story where Jesus is rejected in Nazareth (Luke 4: 14-5:16). I have already pointed out in introducing Luke that this is a fictional story. Although it is likely that Jesus spoke in his hometown, the events depicted in the story could not have taken place in the tiny village of Nazareth.

Luke takes this story from Mark (see Mark 6: 1-6). What is significant is the material Luke adds to the story. When Jesus speaks in the synagogue, he reads from the prophet Isaiah. He concludes the reading with the claim that the prophecy from Isaiah was being fulfilled even as he was speaking. The crowd was duly impressed, sensing that they were in the presence of a great prophet.

Luke’s last addition to the story creates trouble. Jesus tells the audience of two examples where God sent Elijah and Elisha on missions to Gentiles rather than to Israel. The implication is that this is what Jesus has been commissioned to do. The people feel threatened by Jesus’ comments, and they try to throw him off a cliff. It seems clear that Luke shapes this story to serve his own agenda of proclaiming Jesus as a prophet.

Next, we have two miracle stories that only appear in Luke. In the first story (Luke 7: 1-10), Jesus heals the slave of a Gentile centurion through the intercession of Jewish elders. This miracle is modeled after a similar miracle performed by Elisha (see 2 Kings 5: 1-14) where Elisha heals a Syrian general through the intercession of a young Jewish girl.

In the second story, Jesus raises back to life the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 7: 11-15). This miracle is patterned after Elijah who raised the son of the widow of Zarephath (see 1 Kings 17: 17-24). Luke concludes his story with the same words used in the Elijah story, “and he gave him to his mother (7: 16).” What is significant is that the witnesses to Jesus’ miracles understand the parallels immediately and proclaim, “A great prophet has appeared among us (Luke 7: 16).”

According to Luke’s account, Jesus dies as a prophet. By tradition, prophets of Israel speak threatening messages which result in their deaths. Jesus associates himself with this tradition in Luke 13: 34-35.

When Jesus expels the dealers from the Temple, an act that leads to his death, he functions as a prophet. The words, “my house will be a house of prayer” (Isaiah 56:7), and “But you, have turned it into a robbers’ den” (Jeremiah 7:11), are taken from two prophets. The Temple will not be reformed. It will be destroyed (Luke 21: 5-7). This is the gloomy message of a prophet. In this gospel, Jesus does not die for others as an atoning sacrifice for sin, but he dies as a prophet to draw attention to his message.

We also need to examine the immediate events surrounding Jesus’ death. In Mark, as I explained in an earlier blog, the veil of the Temple is torn asunder at the precise moment when Jesus dies (Mark 15: 37), symbolizing the idea that Jesus’ death provides unmediated access to God. In Luke, the veil is torn before Jesus dies, as darkness descends on the land (Luke 22: 44-46—read this passage carefully!), a symbol of impending doom and prophetic judgment.

Finally, our centurion sees Jesus’ death somewhat differently. In Mark and Matthew, he proclaims Jesus to be the son of God. In Luke, the centurion sees Jesus as a prophet, as “a great and a good man (23:48).”

Luke does not miss an opportunity. His story of the resurrection is filled with illusions to Jesus as prophet. When Jesus meets Cleopas on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24: 13-20), Cleopas and his companion do not recognize the resurrected Jesus. In their encounter, Jesus asks them what they were talking about. Cleopas responds that they were discussing Jesus of Nazareth “who proved he was a great prophet by the things he said and did (24: 20).” This story is only found in Luke.

In Luke, the resurrected Jesus meets his disciples in a home in Jerusalem. In Matthew, this meeting takes place on a mountain top in Galilee (see Matthew 28: 16-20). For his final instructions, Jesus tells his disciples to remain in Jerusalem because that is where God will launch his kingdom (24: 44-49). The focus on Jerusalem makes sense because Jerusalem was the city of prophets.

The gospel of Luke is ancient biography, not history. The stories discussed above are unique to Luke or, if taken from Mark, presented with a spin that is unique to Luke. Taken as a whole, this creative editorial work paints a distinctive picture of Jesus. That is how ancient biography was written. To claim that much of Luke is a work of fiction is a threatening idea only if it relates to the gospel of Luke. Fortunately, all ancient biographies were written this way. Authors did not have hard historical data to work with. Instead they had stories handed down through an oral tradition.

The gospel of Luke was written sixty years after the death of Jesus in an unknown place that was clearly a long way from Palestine. The author did not have newspaper clippings, television feeds, interviews with Jesus, or interviews with people involved in the events described. Instead, he had several conflicting stories to choose from, stories shaped by the oral tradition. Unfortunately, many of these conflicting stories have been hidden from us. Stories with a Jewish spin, with the exception of Matthew, were destroyed in the Roman invasion of 66-73 CE. Gnostic stories (the subject of a future blog) were suppressed (burned) by the established Church in the fourth century. Fortunately, some of these Gnostic stories of Jesus were unearthed from an Egyptian cave in 1948. In any event, this diversity of stories gave Luke a lot to choose from.

What is remarkable about Luke is what the author claims and what more and more people were coming to believe. Luke claims that Jesus was the son of God, that he was the last prophet of Israel, and that after dying on the cross he came back to physical life to meet with his disciples. There must have been something behind these conflicting stories to survive the oral tradition and to inspire such beliefs.