Kylie Crabbe - Luke/Acts and the End of History

Kylie Crabbe

Luke/Acts and the End of History

Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft

Edited by

Volume

Kylie Crabbe

ISBN 9783110614558

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110615197

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110614756

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

To

Merrilyn, Peter,

Delia, Maree, and Narelle Crabbe

This book began as a nagging question, posed well before I began my doctoral work: how do ancient writers make sense of experience, especially negative experience? For reasons that I hope will become obvious, this became a set of questions about how texts portray the structure of time, what they say about divine and human agency in history, and why Luke/Acts in particular has been at the centre of controversy over just these questions. I became fascinated by the ways the post-war context had shaped the most influential of modern Lukan scholars and their concepts of delayed parousia, theologia gloria, and salvation-historical paradigms. When I found these same ideas embedded deep within the assumptions and footnotes of contemporary commentaries and introductory textbooks, this bookor, more precisely, the 2017 Oxford doctoral dissertation on which it is basedstarted to take shape.

By examining Luke/Acts alongside ten contemporaneous texts, I hope to illuminate these themes of history, time, and divine and human agency. These are themes which, in turn, are essential for understanding other matterslike how ancient writers explain experience, including negative experience, and their approaches to hope, politics, and divine justice. As well as having something helpful to say about these themes in Luke/Acts, my hope is that this study is a way of hosting a conversation about these big ideas, and about how we go about doing Lukan studies when it comes to these kinds of questions.

This book is itself the product of many earlier conversations. It is also the product of the support and care of a great number of people, to whom I owe much more than these notes of thanks can say.

To my doctoral supervisors, Christopher Rowland and Markus Bockmuehl, I owe a great debt of thanks. They were ideal supervisors, excellent individually and formidable in combination. Chriss careful questioning in the early stages of my project sharpened my questions; Markuss insightful suggestions for further reading likewise shaped my thinking and research. They both have a deep familiarity with an extraordinary range of primary texts, and discussions with them helped me to identify the scholarly patterns and assumptions that lay behind so much of what I was wanting to question about Luke/Acts. Emails and conversations with Chris retain his characteristic mix of intellectual insight and pastoral depth. Im similarly appreciative of Markuss consistent work with me in the years following Chriss retirement, for his absolute commitment to supporting my professional development as well as my doctoral project, and for his kindness.

Given the breadth of my project, I have boldly enlisted the expertise of scholars from diverse areas, and I am very grateful for the good humour and excellent advice particularly of Barnaby Taylor, Tristan Franklinos, and Tessa Rajak. Loren Stuckenbruck offered enthusiastic support of my project and a prepublication copy of his recent work on time in Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament, and John Barclay generously engaged with me about his work on 4 Ezra. Martin Bauspie and Michael Tilley happily made themselves available to discuss Lukan eschatology in and around Tbingen, and Michael Wolter has been a great encouragement ever since he gave the response to a related paper I presented in Bonn. Im also much obliged to the classicists who welcomed me into the Princeton-Oxford Classics conference and gave me helpful feedback, as well as to the communities of biblical scholars who gave me feedback on papers related to parts of this work, including the British New Testament Society Acts session, the Society of Biblical Literature Acts session, the New Testament graduate and senior seminars at Oxford, and the members of the Texts, Traditions, and Early Christian Identities team at Australian Catholic University.

I am grateful to my examiners, Loveday Alexander and Teresa Morgan, as well as to those who gave feedback on my doctoral project at the earlier internal stages of assessment: David Lincicum, Mary Marshall, and Christopher Tuckett. I also welcomed comments from two anonymous reviewers on behalf of the BZNW series editors. Together they have all helped to strengthen, refine, and correct my work; any remaining weaknesses are all my own doing. I have been privileged with an amazing team of proof-readers, both for the thesis and the finished book. Thanks go to the marvellous Nicholas Moore (who read and commented on a considerable proportion of the thesis manuscript), Christine Joynes, Jenny Crane, Sarah Leeser, Roosmarijn de Geus, Sarah Apetrei, and Sam Kiss. And my sincere thanks to Martin Wright, who was not daunted by the books longer manuscript, producing indexes and identifying errors with characteristic efficiency, accuracy, and good humour. I am also grateful for the care and efficient work of the de Gruyter editorial team and the BZNW series editors.

Over the course of this project, I have been the grateful recipient of generous financial support from the Clarendon fund, the Keble Association, Ivens-Franklin Travel Fund, Alan Stockbridge Award, Squire and Marriott Bursaries, Crewdson Fund, and a bursary from Gladstones library. Academic communities have supported me in manifold ways; Im grateful for the communities at Keble and Trinity Colleges and ACU, and the extraordinary hospitality of Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, who welcomed me into her research house in Wales for an intense week of writing.

Thanks are due to those who supported my academic work in earlier stages, particularly Brendan Byrne, who taught me to read Luke in new ways and supervised my Masters thesis, and Dorothy Lee, who taught me many things, not least the surprising reality that NT Greek reading could be a good class with which to ease back into study after a bereavement! And thanks to Sean Winter, who encouraged me to consider the outlandish possibility of undertaking doctoral work in the UK.

Finally, to the communities who have supported me through this time of research and the long road that led to it: thank you. For all those who have shared meals over the years, exchanged tense messages over particularly frustrating chapters, or discussed the frivolous and the divine, shared joy and profound grief, and politics and faith and theodicythank you, and may the conversation (and meals) continue! Whether in Oxford or in Melbourne I have been so fortunate to have extraordinary friends around me, andconscious of the inadequacy of any list of namesI would like particularly to thank: Sam Kiss, Roosmarijn de Geus, Jenny Crane, Robbie Davies, David Bowkett, Ellie Healey, Liam Gannon, Alma Brodersen, Jennifer Strawbridge, Sarah Apetrei, Christine Joynes, Mary Marshall, Jonathan Downing, Donovan Schaefer, Megan Dent, Anik Laferriere, Sarah Leeser, Kirk Robson, Mavis Robson, Peter Robson, Nicole Batch, Joel Townsend, Annie Quail, Naomi Flanagan, Tara Shackell, Melina Shackell, Anita Major, Martin Wright, Sally Douglas, Andy Hamilton, Alistair Macrae, Clare Boyd Macrae, Robyn Whitaker, Sharon Hollis, and so many others I could name but I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written if I were to do so. I will simply hope that you really do all know, whether named or not, what a very great deal you mean to me.