Luke's Narrative Agenda: The Use of Kyrios Within Luke-Acts To Proclaim The Identity Of Jesus

Abstract

This dissertation examines Luke's use of kyrios within his narratives of the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. Luke reached back into the common religious cultural context of the early Christians where he obtained his understanding of kyrios as Yahweh from the Greek Jewish Scriptures (Chapter 1). When Luke and his Jewish audience heard kyrios, they first understood it to mean Yahweh. Luke was also writing in the larger cultural context of the Greco-Roman world and the Roman Empire, which was pervasively informed by the imperial cult (Chapter 2). Luke and his Greco-Roman audience (including his Jewish audience) instinctively recognized that kyrios' most obvious Greco-Roman referent was the emperor. Based on these identities of kyrios, Luke used his Gospel as the narrative canvas on which to develop and progressively reveal the identity of Jesus as Yahweh because he is kyrios (Chapter 3). Luke then took this established identity and made an overt political claim that Jesus is superior to the emperor as a god because he is Lord of all (Chapter 4). Luke's narrative agenda not only embraced the Jewish roots from which Christianity was born, it also challenged the environment in which it would thrive and ultimately triumph. For Luke, the identity of Jesus was profoundly clear. Jesus was Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel, born a human being and as such he explicitly replaced Caesar as Lord of all.