Luke 1 Footnotes

1:1-4 This prologue is typical of Greco-Roman literary works. Luke noted that other gospel narratives had been produced prior to his. These were based on the testimony of eyewitnesses. His account, the result of careful investigation, was intended to reassure his benefactor, Theophilus, of the historical accuracy of that received tradition. Luke did not contrast his Gospel to earlier ones; rather, he placed his alongside them (note “also” in v. 3). The account is “orderly” (Gk kathexes), but the term does not tell us what the principle(s) of order is (are). Of the four canonical Gospels, Luke is most like a biography, beginning with detailed circumstances of Jesus’s birth and frequently tying notable events to secular history and personages.

1:27 Luke presented Jesus as descended from David through his stepfather, Joseph. As a relative of Elizabeth (v. 36) from the “daughters of Aaron” (v. 5), Mary had Levitical ancestry. It may have been that her bloodlines were mixed with Davidic heritage, but we are nowhere told this (unless Rm 1:3 can be taken as affirming it). Nevertheless, as the adopted son of Joseph, Jesus was legally a descendant of David. The NT consistently understands Jesus as a son of David (vv. 32,69).

1:35 Some scholars have understood the conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit to be a late invention of the early church, especially since it appears explicitly in the NT only in Luke and Matthew. Most contemporary scholars dismiss as baseless, however, theories that the story was developed from or in response to pagan legends of supernatural conceptions, since suggested parallels bear little resemblance to the Gospel narratives. But there was no theological need to invent the virgin birth; other avenues for asserting the divinity of Christ (such as adoptionism, the view that Jesus the man became divine by adoption) were open and less fraught with the danger of inviting the charge that Jesus was illegitimate, which was in fact the pagan and Jewish response to the stories. In the end, the only real reason for rejecting the historicity of the virgin birth is a philosophical denial of the supernatural in general and of the incarnation in particular.