3 - Authorial criteria: Greek prose compositional conventions

Summary

Indeed, it is above all necessary to stress today what Streeter once wrote years ago, that Luke “though not, as has been rashly alleged, ‘a great historian’ in the modern sense, is a consummate literary ‘artist’ (The Four Gospels, 548). For he composed his narrative (diēgēsis) not merely as an ancient historian of the Hellenistic mode, nor merely as a theologian of the early church writing in a biblical mold, but also as a conscious littérateur of the Greco-Roman period [emphasis added].

That the style of Luke and Acts was influenced by the literary milieu of the first century is rarely disputed. Scholars point to the preface of Luke (Lk 1:1–4), the author-editor's remarkable stylistic range, or the rhetorical character of the Acts speeches. Hellenistic or κοινή Greek, the vernacular of that era, was used not only on the street or in marketplace transactions but also in literary works whose language and style at times reflect an awareness of a more elevated style of Greek.

Adolf Deissmann defines the term “literature” as “that which is written for the public, or for a public, and which is cast in a definite artistic form.” Deissmann argues that early Christian literature, in which he includes Luke and Acts, was “on the whole, popular literature.” In language, style, and subject matter, he classifies the gospels and Acts as popular and literary, though not professionally literary. Shortly after Deissmann, Henry Cadbury describes the language of Luke and Acts as follows:

Luke's Greek is neither classical Greek nor modern Greek. It is Hellenistic Greek, sometimes called Koine, – the Greek that was employed in the first century when Luke wrote … From extremes of style Luke may certainly be excluded. He is not of the lowest cultural grade on the one hand, nor on the other does he belong with the Atticists of the time, who by rigid rules and conscious imitation attempted to write in a style comparable to that of the classical masters of Greek prose.