Baker Academic

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Forthcoming Articles—Chris Keith

I wanted to alert readers of the Jesus Blog to a couple pieces of research I have forthcoming in the Journal of Biblical Literature and Catholic Biblical Quarterly.

The first essay, appearing in JBL in December (I think), is "The Oddity of the Reference to Jesus in Acts 4:13b."  As the title suggests, the main argument is that Luke's association of Jesus strongly with the manual labor class and illiterate status of the apostles in Acts 4:13 is odd because, in his Gospel, Luke ("Luke") has worked consistently to align Jesus with the scribal-literate class of interpreters.  It's an extension of an argument I previously pursued in Jesus' Literacy.  If you liked that, you will probably like this.  If you hated that, you will probably hate this.

The second essay, appearing in CBQ next year, is "The Competitive Textualization of the Jesus Tradition in John 20:30-31 and 21:24-25."  In this essay, I argue that the Johannine "colophons" of John 20:30-31 and 21:24-25 support the argument that the author (or authors) of John's Gospel was (or were) aware of one or more of the Synoptic Gospels.  These passages don't prove that theory, but, so I argue, they show that John's Gospel is participating in a competitive textualization of the Jesus tradition, trying to best prior textualized Jesus books in a manner not unlike Luke 1:1-4.  This raises the question of what prior textualized Jesus traditions the author could have known and, in my opinion, though they are not the only options, the Synoptics are by far the most likely candidates.

4 comments:

  1. A few distally related questions to your upcoming JBL paper on Acts 4:13b;

    When would you approximate the date of both Luke and Acts, and do you think that there was a proto-Luke prior our current version of Luke? (the notion being that maybe a 2nd century editor of Luke-Acts grafted in a 2nd century concept of Jesus being scribally literate into Luke but missed the opportunity to update this in Acts)

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    1. Jim, one could certainly spin it in this direction if one wanted. I'm personally comfortable with dating Luke in the 75-85 range and Acts in the 80-90 range, though I could go much later for Acts. For my money, the proto-Luke that we can speak coherently about is Mark. That is to say, if there is a proto-Luke, I don't think we can say much about what it looked like. I am pretty sure that Luke was using Mark, though, and we can say much about how he used that source. This might just be a personality thing, but I'm very skeptical of using hypothetical reconstructed sources. If you are inclined toward using them, however, there's certainly plenty of good scholars whose company you keep.

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  2. Ty for your comment. Equipped with only an armchair, a beer and a Joseph Tyson book on Marcion, I was just throwing an unverifiable one out there. I guess I should stick to consensus. Thanks once again.

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    1. Nah, we need to do all those things now and again!

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