Zechariah's unbelief and early Jewish-Christian relations: the form and structure of Luke 1:5-25 as a clue to the narrative agenda of the Gospel of Luke

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Spring, 2001 by Steven R. Harmon

Abstract

The narrative agenda of the Gospel of Luke seeks to move the implied reader (who resembles the "Godfearer" of Acts) from an interest in Judaism to conversion to Christianity. Luke 1:5-25 introduces this agenda by highlighting both continuity and discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity. Use of the Hebrew Bible commissioning narrative form establishes a continuity between Judaism and Christianity, appealing to the implied reader's attraction to Judaism yet suggesting conversion to Christianity as a natural next step. A chiastic structure that focuses on Zechariah's unbelieving response to the announcement of John's birth introduces a discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity, suggesting to the implied reader that the time has come to go beyond Judaism and embrace Christianity.

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Post-Holocaust Second Testament scholarship has rightly made the question of anti-Semitism in the Second Testament documents a major topic for inquiry and debate (Dunn 1992, Klassen 1986, Sandmel 1978). An article by Joseph Tyson (1995) makes an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the problems posed by Luke-Acts. Tyson identifies the opposing conclusions of Jacob Jervell (1972) and Jack Sanders (1987) about the portrayal of Jews and Judaism in Luke-Acts as the basic parameters for contemporary investigation. Jervell offers a positive reading of Luke's attitude toward the Jewish people. Sanders, on the other hand, argues that Luke-Acts is fundamentally an anti-Jewish writing. Both propose that Luke-Acts is in some way a response to controversy in the Lukan community over the relationship of the emerging Christian church to Judaism. The Achilles heel of the approaches of both Jervell and Sanders, according to Tyson, is their reliance on modern diachronic reconstructions of the readership of Luke-Acts (Tyson 1995: 19-23).

Tyson suggests that the impasse between Jervell and Sanders may be resolved by seeking clues to Luke's intentions not in the reconstructed first readers in the hypothetical world behind the text but rather in the reader implicit in the world of the text itself (p. 23). This implied reader, Tyson concludes, "is similar to those characters in Acts that are called `Godfearers,'" represented intratextually by Theophilus, the centurion at Capernaum in Luke 7, the Ethiopian eunuch, and Cornelius (pp. 25-26). The implied reader is "a pious Gentile who has deep affinities with Judaism but has not yet made a total commitment" (p. 26). Luke-Acts is therefore "an evangelistic text addressed to Godfearers" (p. 38). Tyson submits that such a reading of Luke-Acts supports and qualifies the otherwise opposed interpretations of Jervell and Sanders:

   The treatment of Jewish religion and people forms part of the rhetorical
   strategy used by the implied author in addressing the implied reader.
   Positive images of Judaism are consistent with the assumed attitudes of a
   Godfearer as he is first addressed. But negative images, which show the
   inferiority of Judaism to Christianity and help to explain Jewish rejection
   of the Christian message, urge the Godfearer to abandon the philo-Judaism
   with which he began [p. 38].

Tyson selects five passages in Luke-Acts as-test cases for his thesis: Luke 1-2 and 9:28-36, and Acts 13:13-52, 15:1-29, and 28:17-28. In his reading of the infancy narratives in Luke 1-2, Tyson includes Zechariah among the positive representatives of Jewish piety in these narratives with whom the implied author hopes the Godfearer to identify (p. 27). Tyson also identifies the speech of Simeon in 2:29-35 as the key passage in the Lukan infancy narratives that anticipates the relation of Christianity to Judaism in the rest of the work (pp. 27-28). This article contends that Tyson's thesis is better supported by a differently nuanced reading of the role of Zechariah and a different identification of the key anticipatory passage in Luke 1-2 in light of a formal and structural analysis of the annunciation pericope in Luke 1:5-25. Interpreting 1:5-25 as a chiastically structured commissioning narrative, while qualifying Tyson's reading of the passage, provides additional exegetical support for Tyson's overall understanding of the narrative agenda of the Gospel of Luke.

The Significance of the Commissioning Narrative Form in Luke 1:5-25

Most studies of the Lukan infancy narratives have concluded that the annunciation story in 1:5-25 is patterned after annunciations or birth oracles in the Hebrew Bible (Loisy 1924: 77; Benoit 1957: 17640; Ruddick 1970: 343-48; Ellis 1974: 67-68; Schweizer 1984: 18-24; Nolland 1989: 18; Evans 1990: 144-45; Johnson 1991: 32, 34-35; Brown 1993: 268-69; Ernst 1993: 52). Formal allusions to Hebrew Bible birth oracles suggest parallels with Abraham and Sarah (Gen 18:1-15), Manoah and the mother of Samson (Judg 13:1-23), and Elkanah and Hannah (1 Sam 1:1-18), thus placing the birth of the messianic forerunner in continuity with the births of important figures in Hebrew salvation-history in the mind of the reader at the outset of the narrative (Brown 1993: 269). Such an identification and interpretation of the form of the pericope would be consistent with Tyson's observations about the role of the infancy narratives in eliciting the implied reader's sympathy for Jewish piety and its messianic expectations (Tyson 1995: 26-28).