How Is Luke Structured? The Journey to Jerusalem (1 of 1)

Roughly a third of Luke’s Gospel covers a journey that Mark handles in one chapter.

That disproportion is the most important structural fact about the book, and once you see it, the whole Gospel organises around it.

What Kind of Book Is Luke?

Volume one of a two-volume work, addressed to a named recipient.

Luke and Acts share a dedication to Theophilus, a style, a vocabulary, and a set of concerns, and Acts opens by referring back to the former book. Common authorship is about as secure as anything in New Testament introduction.

Together they run to roughly a quarter of the New Testament, which makes their author the largest contributor by volume after Paul.

Reading them as one work changes both. Luke ends in Jerusalem with a commission and an instruction to wait. Acts opens in Jerusalem with the waiting and then moves outward. The seam is designed.

What Does Luke Say About His Method?

That he investigated, and that others were the eyewitnesses.

Luke 1:1-4 is the only formal preface in the Gospels and it reads like the opening of a Hellenistic historical work. Many have undertaken accounts. These were handed down by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, he decided to write an orderly account so that Theophilus might know the certainty of what he had been taught.

The word usually rendered orderly does not necessarily mean chronological. It can mean an ordered arrangement, which matters given how Luke handles his material.

He also leaves visible seams. In places he inserts a short note supplying background his source assumed, and those notes break the rhythm of the surrounding material in a way that marks them as additions to something received rather than his own composition. A writer doing that is showing you he is working from older material and telling you who he expects to be reading.

What Is the Travel Narrative?

The central section, from Luke 9:51 to about 19:27, and it is unique to this Gospel.

It opens with the turn: as the time approached for him to be taken up, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. From that verse the destination is fixed and Luke reminds the reader of it repeatedly.

What fills those ten chapters is mostly teaching, and mostly material found nowhere else. The geography is loose and sometimes hard to track. People have long noticed that the journey does not progress in a straight line and that Jesus appears to be in several places out of sequence.

That is not sloppiness. The journey is a frame. Luke is arranging a body of teaching inside a movement toward the cross, so that every parable and every controversy is read by someone who knows where the road ends.

Mark gets from the confession at Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem in about two chapters. Luke takes ten. The difference is the point.

What Material Is Found Only in Luke?

A remarkable amount, and it is some of the best known material in the Bible.

The birth narratives from Luke’s side: Zechariah and Elizabeth, the annunciation, the Magnificat, the shepherds, Simeon and Anna.

The parables: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Rich Fool, the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Persistent Widow, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, the Lost Coin.

The scenes: the widow of Nain’s son, the sinful woman in Simon’s house, Mary and Martha, Zacchaeus, the ten lepers with the Samaritan who returned, the criminal on the cross, and the road to Emmaus.

Remove Luke and a large share of what people picture when they think of Jesus disappears.

Why Does Luke Pair Men and Women?

Because he does it constantly and deliberately.

Gabriel appears to Zechariah and to Mary. Zechariah sings and Mary sings. Simeon and Anna both recognise the child. A man with a mustard seed and a woman with yeast. A shepherd with a lost sheep and a woman with a lost coin. A centurion’s servant and a widow’s son. A man knocking at midnight and a widow before a judge.

Bailey identifies more than two dozen such pairings running the length of the Gospel.

The effect is cumulative rather than announced. Luke never states a principle about it. He simply arranges his material so that a woman’s experience stands beside a man’s throughout, and the reader who notices is meant to draw the conclusion.

Luke 8:1-3 then states plainly what none of the other Gospels do, that the ministry was funded by women who travelled with it, and names three of them.

What Are Luke’s Other Distinctives?

Four run through the whole book.

The poor and the outsider. Mary’s song has the humble lifted and the rich sent away empty. The Nazareth sermon opens with good news to the poor. Samaritans appear repeatedly and favourably, which no other Gospel does to this extent.

Prayer. Luke shows Jesus praying at more points than the others: at the baptism, before choosing the Twelve, at the transfiguration, and in Gethsemane. Two parables about persistence in prayer are unique to him.

The Holy Spirit. The Spirit is named far more often in Luke than in Matthew or Mark, and Acts continues the emphasis, which is one of the clearest signs the two books were planned together.

Meals. An unusual number of scenes take place at a table, and the questions raised there are about who is welcome to eat with whom, which turns out to be the central conflict of the Gospel.

How Do Luke and Acts Mirror Each Other?

Geographically, in opposite directions.

Luke begins in the temple with Zechariah and ends in the temple with the disciples praising God. Between those points the movement is inward, from Galilee toward Jerusalem, and the whole book converges on one city.

Acts reverses it. It begins in Jerusalem and moves outward, through Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, ending in Rome with the gospel proclaimed without hindrance.

One book funnels in. The other radiates out. The hinge between them is the ascension, which Luke narrates twice, once to close the first volume and once to open the second.

Why Does Luke End Where It Does?

Because the story is not finished and the author knows it.

The Emmaus road is the penultimate scene, and it is the longest resurrection narrative in the Gospels. Two disciples walk seven miles with someone they do not recognise, hear the Scriptures opened, and know him at the breaking of bread.

That is a fair description of what Luke expects his readers to be doing: reading the Scriptures with someone explaining them, and recognising him at a table.

Then the commission, the instruction to wait in the city, the blessing, and the ascension. The Gospel closes with the disciples in the temple, praising God, waiting for something that has not happened yet.

Volume two begins there.

Companion to the series following the Life of Jesus timeline, and to the post on who Luke was.

Footnotes2

1. The looseness of the geography in the travel narrative has been noticed since antiquity and has generated several explanations, including that Luke is following a source arranged topically or that the journey frame is a literary structure rather than an itinerary. Whichever is right, the effect on the reader is the same: teaching heard under the shadow of a fixed destination.
2. That Luke never states his principle about pairing men and women is what makes the pattern persuasive. An author making a point would announce it once. An author who has simply organised his material that way leaves it to accumulate, and it does.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Luke 1:1-4, 8:1-3, 9:51, 24:13-53, and Acts 1:1-11.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008). Supports the pattern of paired male and female stories and the identification of Luke's explanatory notes as additions to received material. In print from IVP Academic.

Where the sourcing stops: the exact boundaries of the travel narrative are debated, with proposals ending it anywhere from 18:14 to 19:44. The question of Luke's sources, and his relationship to Mark and to the material shared with Matthew, is a large discussion this post does not enter.