The Arabic expression mashallah, which means “what God wills” or “what God desires has happened,” may be the best chance English speakers have at unlocking the spirit of Luke’s use of the Greek term, eudokia. The latter also pertains to the completion of God’s will, what God desires by fiat, and his good pleasure in the biblical…
Category: The Bible as Literature
The Fallacy of Identity
A thousand years before the birth of Greek philosophy, the forbears of the biblical authors inhabited a world in which the families of the earth coexisted in the land with different languages and cultures. In the story of Luke, as with the rest of the Bible, the author’s focus is not on identity, but locality,…
Dividing the Flock
“Each tree,” Luke will soon explain, “is known by its own fruit.” (Luke 6:44) When Gabriel speaks the command of God, a prophet is born of Elizabeth to “turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God.” (Luke 1:16) Likewise, at Gabriel’s command, the Messiah is conceived in Mary’s womb, to…
Anti-History, Anti-Romulus
When a character from Roman history appears in Luke, the worst thing any of us could ever do is go back to accounts of Roman history to try to piece together a timeline or historical framework against which we read the gospel text. On the contrary, when a familiar character appears, you can be sure…
Grudge Match
At the beginning of Luke 2, the author sets up an artificial parallel between the Lukan “things accomplished among us” and Caesar’s “decree that a census be taken.” Insofar as both attempts at setting the record straight take place under the authorship of the evangelist himself, far from an account of Roman history, the census…
Which Spirit?
When biblical interpreters decide on capitalization when translating Greek or Hebrew to a modern language, they impose two layers of subjectivity. First, they impose their assumption about a word’s elevated or discounted importance, shutting readers out of the text and preventing them from hearing the author’s voice. Second, they create a distinction between words that…
Tender Mercies
What do you get when you combine a cloud service provider outage, one co-host recovering from illness, and the other recording from a parked car somewhere with only two bars on a mobile device? Not only a perfect setting for a discussion of tender mercies in Luke 1, but an excellent commercial for a return…
Amnesty and Accountability
In the Gospel of Luke, the news of the forgiveness of sins is the knowledge that John the Baptist was born and commissioned to share with absolute urgency. It is the declaration of the King, meant to be circulated as widely as possible for anyone willing to listen. The news of this forgiveness, contained within…
Be Neighborly
Throughout the story of Scripture, it is the Lord who delivers his people from their enemies. This deliverance is not about victory in the conventional sense, where one group of human beings claims victory against another. On the contrary, it is God, in his unparalleled position of strength, who puts down all sides, leaving everyone,…
Romulus Was a Thug and a Criminal
In tribal experience, as in American mythology, life originates with the forefather. How often on this program have we mentioned the blasphemous depiction of George Washington seated in glory, riding upon the clouds, flanked by the angelic hosts? In this sense, the Capital Rotunda is a kind of Platonic Fold: an event horizon where the…