"What is This Word?": An Early Christian Narrative of the Universal Spread of the Spirit-Accompanied Word

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the divine word and the Spirit as co-narrative themes in Luke-Acts. While the thematic importance of the word in Luke-Acts has been generally recognized, what remains jejune is the examination of the particular ways in which the word constitutes the overarching theme of Luke's double narrative by ordering and constructing the entire narrative program. On the other hand, while studies in Lukan pneumatology abound, aside from the general consensus that the Spirit is essentially a Spirit of prophecy, the precise nature of the pneumatic role remains moot. The function and role of the word and the Spirit can be most clearly discerned when their narrative interrelation is more fully explored. An examination of the deployment of the word in the Scriptures (LXX), Hellenistic-Jewish literature, and the New Testament, indicates that it is in the Lukan writings that the word takes on a most prominent significance. Luke resolutely places the word at the central stage of sorts, insisting that it is the word that is sent, proclaimed, accepted, praised, and that it is the word that saves, grows, spreads, prevails, constrains, and creates and grows the early Christian ekklesia. The theme of the word comprises the very foundation of the entire work. In conferring an overriding narrative function and role to the centrifugal word, Luke assigns the Spirit an indispensable role in collaboration with this narrative goal. For Luke, the Spirit's work is a work of the word in that it is invariably in service of the ubiquitous expansion of the word in the midst of escalating opposition. This dissertation engages the narrative of Luke-Acts as a single continuous whole in its historical, literary, and theological embeddedness. The discrete narrative components that make up the entire narrative plot of the twofold work (e.g., geographical scheme, travel motifs, configuration of various human characters) come under coherent alignment in light of the pivotal theme of the Spirit-accompanied word. Luke-Acts is to be read as an early Christian narrative which recounts the stepping stones of the universal spread of the Spirit-accompanied word in the face of Roman claims to universalism.