The Interpretation of the Gospel of Luke, Volume 1: From Apostolic Times through the Nineteenth Century. By SEAN P. KEALY. * The Interpretation of the Gospel of Luke in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2. By SEAN P. KEALY.

Abstract

With these two massive volumes, the product of enormous energy and labour, Séan Kealy completes his history of the interpretation of each of the four canonical Gospels. In his first book on Mark, published in 1982, Kealy covered the period from the first century to 1979 in 269 pages. His other three books, all published by the Edwin Mellen Press in two volumes each, are much longer. His treatment of Matthew (published in 1997) weighs in at 969 pages, and his history of the interpretation of John (published in 2002) reaches 971. The volumes on Luke, the subject of this review, have a combined length of 1251 pages. Many histories of interpretation, notes Kealy, cover the pre-modern period in no more than a few pages, or neglect it altogether. His approach is very different and is intended (to quote from his assessment of recent work by Luke Timothy Johnson) ‘to open up a conversation between pre-modern, modern and post-modern scholarship’. Thus we are 252 pages into his first volume before we reach the sixteenth century, and it is not until pages 326 and 368 respectively that we reach the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only in the second volume do we enter the world of twentieth-century scholarship and beyond.