separated from Luke but it is also typically conjoined with the Catholic
Epistles. Thus, of the four main subunits—i.e., the four Gospels, the Pauline
Corpus (including Hebrews), the Catholic Epistles (with Acts), and the
Book of Revelation—in which the New Testament typically was published
and disseminated before the Protestant Reformation, at least two of these
(the four Gospels and the Catholic Epistles) include the perspective of
Luke-Acts. Moreover, through the addition of the Pastoral Epistles to the
Pauline Corpus, which manifest a social vision very much akin to that of
Luke-Acts (and 1 Peter)—indeed, to such an extent that Stephen Wilson
(1979) has suggested that “Luke” himself may have been responsible for the
composition of these writings, not to mention the interpolation of other like-
minded materials into the historically authentic writings of Paul (see, e.g.,
1 Cor. 14:33b-36, viz. 14:34–35)—it becomes clear that virtually the entire
New Testament, in its principal manuscript divisions, is marked by a view
that, at best, deserves to be seen as politically accommodating.
According to Paul W. Walasky (1983), Luke has written, in his two-
volume account of Christian beginnings, an apologia pro imperio—and not,
as other scholars have suggested, an apologia pro ecclesia.Thus the implied
audience of the work would not be a Roman magistrate or some other
external authority but, rather, early Christians who apparently (mistak-
enly) thought that their faith required or implied an anti-imperial stance.
Walasky is correct, I believe, in characterizing Luke-Acts as an apologia pro
imperio(cf. Conzelmann 1964; Cassidy 1978; 1987; Esler 1987; Yoder 1988;
also Strobel 1973, 97–106, esp. p. 100). Walasky’s conclusion, however, or
assumption that this was good and wise counsel on the part of the evan-
gelist, is less obviously apt. Walasky would have Luke make a necessary
accommodation of the early Christian project to earthly reality; but Walasky
describes this earthly reality all too superficially as basically benign. More-
over, Luke is supposed thereby to have safeguarded the spiritual truth of the
Christian gospel against an excessively countercultural or antinomian
understanding. This, too, begs more questions than it answers.
Nonetheless, Walasky is basically correct, I think, that Luke’s under-
standing of early Christianity effectively renders it a (Stoic) type of personal
ethics (à la Seneca), which promised its practitioners a greater measure of
individual well-being and contentment but always entirely within the
bounds of the existing social order. If occasionally one might be obliged to
“serve God rather than man,” such service was typically a threat only to
one’s own existence as a martyr or witness to the truth in question. In this
regard, Luke’s representation of Jesus and his disciples, including the fig-
ure of Paul, as men of (ascetic) valour is quite compatible with the evan-
nora
(Nora)
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