Identity and Socio-Economic Relations in Luke’s Gospel : The Sermon on the Plain (Lk 6:20-49) and Greco-Roman Panegyrics

Abstract

This volume is a product of Nedekha's revised PhD thesis from the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, United Kingdom, completed and successfully defended before Prof. Louise Lawrence (University of Exeter) and Prof. Edward Adams (King's College London) on 16 June 2020 in the School of Education and Humanities. Professor Philip Esler, Chair of New Testament in the Department of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, supervised the thesis. The original thesis title was Luke's Gospel and Greco-Roman Panegyrics: The Sermon on the Plain (Lk 6:20-49) in its Social Context. The present book combines the original thesis's revision and new materials and insights that have risen from my further research in Luke's Gospel. Revising the significant aspects of the thesis and the additional chapter was meant to make the study accessible to a broader audience. The book presents a new reading of the Sermon on the Plain from the perspective of Greco-Roman panegyrics. This reading is against the background of the synoptic approach to Luke 6: 20-49 that has historically relegated it to an appendix to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount. The book's central argument is that the best way to interpret the Sermon is to read it as a Greco-Roman panegyric, whose function was the integration of new members and the inculcation of commonly held values. The early Christian communities comprised individuals from diverse social backgrounds. Sustaining such fictive communities required a new conception of social relations beyond the conventional Greco-Roman Romans based on kinship and reciprocity. The book demonstrates how underneath the Sermon's makarisms and woes and their juxtaposition of poverty and riches (vv. 20-26) and exhortation (vv. 27-49) is Luke's attempt to construct a new social-economic identity of Christ-followers. The Sermon achieves this aim by supplanting those values deemed honourable and shameful by the dominant culture with a new set of values adopted from the status of destitution. The adoption of the values associated with destitution for both the rich and poor would result in their common dependence, not on material wealth but on the Lord for their daily provisions. In turn, common reliance on the Lord would allow for the camaraderie and koinonia between the rich and the poor among the first-century Christ-followers. This socio-economic motif is replicated throughout the Third Gospel and typifies Luke's representation of salvation as a holistic phenomenon. The author is a lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Malawi. He has a PhD in New Testament Studies from the University of Gloucestershire in England and an MTh in Biblical Studies from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He currently holds Alexander von Humboldt's George Forster Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He is also a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria Department of New Testament and Other Related Literature. Beyond that, Louis is also an ordained minister in the Africa Evangelical Church in Malawi.