Abstract
Rob James explores the intratextuality of the Gospel of Luke through a literary critical approach. In one respect James’s project is ambitious: demonstrating defensibly intentional intratextual connections of themes and passages within Luke’s Gospel. In another respect, his aim is narrow. His focus is not inter-textual connections, but intra-textual ones. His source material is confined to Luke.
Few would argue against there being intratextual connections within a text such as Luke’s Gospel, but James’s argument maintains that there are intratextual connections bound up with a practice of reading and rereading this Gospel in a worship context as Scripture by the initial community to whom Luke intended his Gospel to serve as the primary witness to Jesus’ life and teaching. James argues for a continuous communal repetition of reading resulting in a spiral of greater awareness of the intended intratextual connections present. Each reading allows the text’s internal connections, themes and presentations to be discerned, especially as one reads from the end immediately back to the beginning.
James suggests that there are not only intratextual connections between the beginning and the end as one would find in an inclusio, but connections that could suggest that the Gospel was always intended to be read over and over immediately, such that the final section of the Gospel naturally flows into the beginning of the same Gospel. While James mainly confines his interest to intratextual connections, to illuminate these he utilizes intertextual comparisons with the other Gospel traditions, especially the Synoptics. By showing where Luke has seemingly intentionally diverged from the text of Mark and Matthew (and/or Q), James highlights the unique narration and presentation of Jesus by Luke. This is a useful contribution to those interested in both Synoptic questions and the literary nuances within the Synoptic tradition.
Likewise, while James argues that his work and argument stand or fall regardless of the presence or absence of Q in Luke’s compositional activity, a significant implication of his study is to cast doubt on the need for Q as an independent source in Luke’s production of his Gospel. James suggests that, as one considers the synoptic intertextual comparisons within the frame of the intratextuality of Luke, the need for Q declines, since it appears that Luke had access to both Mark and Matthew and intentionally reworks both sources in his own telling of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus, James also offers a contribution towards reconsidering the need for Q in source criticism of the Synoptic tradition.
James’s study of what he calls the Spiral Gospel may be brief but it offers provocative questions and convincing intratextual connections. Its brevity may leave some wanting more in-depth treatment, but its lack of overly cumbersome footnotes makes it all the more accessible to a wide audience interested in literary and source criticism of the Synoptics, including those communities today engaged in reading and re-reading Luke’s account of the life of Jesus to which his Gospel attests.