Reading and interpreting the Christian Bible

The Common Lectionary is a carefully crafted three year cycle of Bible readings that is used in most traditional Protestant churches. Typical Sunday readings includes an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, a reading from one of the four Gospels, and a reading from one of the other writings of the New Testament. The lectionary divides the year into four parts. The second season is called Epiphany and follows the Christmas season. Sunday, January 27, is the sixth Sunday of the 50 day period. The Gospel reading is Luke 4:14-21.

According to the story line in Luke 4, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, fasting and pondering what was ahead. In this setting Satan appears and offers him power, wealth and worldly acclaim. Jesus said a firm “no” to everything Satan offered. Jesus then returned to his home town (Nazareth), went to a synagogue and declared his future mission. (l) Bring good news to the poor, (2) release prisoners, (3) give sight to the blind, (4) set free all slaves, and (5) declare a new year of Jubilee (redistribute wealth, cancel debts, and free slaves).

During my career as a minister/pastor of a church, I often preached on the Gospel lesson of the lectionary. Several times I preached on Luke 4:14-21. I loved it every time. It establishes very clearly that the first commitments of Jesus were concerns for this world. His pronouncements were not about saving souls or waiting for a soft landing in the heavens. It was about tough social issues: poverty, sickness, slavery, prisons, and absurd concentration of wealth with an elite few. Nazareth was a small village of extreme poverty.

There is good evidence that the events described in Luke chapter 4 never happened. In the story, Jesus supposedly went to a synagogue. Ancient Nazareth has been excavated thoroughly. There was no synagogue in Nazareth at the time and nowhere else in the area. Buildings called synagogues were unknown until about 50 years after the death of Jesus and after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 CE. Add to that that scrolls like the one Jesus is reported reading were rare and expensive. The possibility that a scroll of any portion of the Old Testament was ever in Nazareth is extremely remote. Obviously the writer of the Luke gospel was writing fiction and probably knew it.

The Luke gospel was written after 80 CE. It reflects the thinking of early followers of Jesus from Nazareth toward the end of the first century CE. Followers of Jesus in the years following the execution of Jesus continued to be a movement within Judaism. A very big change took place after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. With the destruction of the Temple, the Roman rulers had hoped to put an end to rebellious Judaism. The Temple was gone and Judaism became fragmented and scattered. Devout believers began a period of reorganization and significant rethinking about the nature and structure of their Faith.

The followers of Jesus were one of those groups that had to redefine the path of their Faith practice. The writer of the Luke gospel was a researcher, but also a creative writer of non-historical material. The same writer wrote the book of Acts. The book of Acts can also be shown to be a mixture of history and fiction. It is no small task to sort through history and creative writing from the pen of the Luke writer.

In the Luke 4 passage, Luke may have gotten his history a bit less than accurate, but the heart of the passage is 100 percent correct. The five points of the mission of Jesus were true to his mission and message. He was a social and political activist, who was put to death by crucifixion at the order of Roman officials. The charge against Jesus was insurrection.

The conclusion of critical scholarship is that the birth of the distinctly Christian movement was not at the Pentecostal episode described in the book of Acts. Christianity with its identity outside of Judaism took place after the destruction of the Temple. The Luke writer establishes two things. First, the emerging Christian movement at the end of the first century CE was intensely committed to social and political issues and to the doing of what they understood to be just. Second, they took on these social and political commitments as the direct legacy of Jesus from Nazareth, whom they called “Lord.”

While Christianity has had some towering social reformers in my lifetime, one name stands above all the others. Martin Luther King Jr. Most people remember him as the voice that demanded racial equality and justice. His “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington DC and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” are two of the truly great demands for equality in the history of our nation. His statements against the Vietnam War are just as eloquent. King understood the words of Jesus. He embraced the essence of the Faith of early followers of Jesus He spoke and he marched..

Sadly, most Protestant ministers and churches are hung up on soul saving and forget about the mission statement that Jesus clearly stated.

If read seriously with understanding, Luke 4 calls Christians and their churches to be political and social activists. Reread Luke 4. What say you?

The End

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska. He is pastor emeritus of Church of the Covenant. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net;