Gospel According to Luke , livre ebook

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58 pages

English

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The Gospel According to Luke is the third, and longest, of the four gospels. It is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and details the story of his life, from the events of his birth, to his crucifixion and the Ascension.

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Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	01 janvier 1999
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780857860989
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0040€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Contents
Title Page a note about pocket canons introduction by richard holloway the gospel according to st luke 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 about the author Copyright
a note about pocket canons
The Authorised King James Version of the Bible, translated between 1603–11, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature. This version, more than any other, and possibly more than any other work in history, has had an influence in shaping the language we speak and write today. Presenting individual books from the Bible as separate volumes, as they were originally conceived, encourages the reader to approach them as literary works in their own right.
The first twelve books in this series encompass categories as diverse as history, fiction, philosophy, love poetry and law. Each Pocket Canon also has its own introduction, specially commissioned from an impressive range of writers, which provides a personal interpretation of the text and explores its contemporary relevance.
introduction by richard holloway
There is a lot to be said for attaching a health warning to religion. It can be a hazardous business, because it is often based on a seductive deceit. In its most dangerous form it claims to have found words that exactly express one of the great mysteries that obsess the imagination, the possibility of God. So words about God are treated as though they were equivalent to God, and religious authorities demand our assent to them. Our fidelity or infidelity is tested by our relationship to the official vocabulary that is supposed to express the divine mystery. Since there is no final way of either verifying or falsifying such claims, the opportunity religious language offers us for violence and discord is endless. This is why many of the sanest minds in history have been wary of religion and its explosive, but unsustainable claims.
Apart from the danger religion may pose to our physical health, it can also endanger us spiritually, because it can trap us in language about mysteries rather than open us to the mysteries themselves. One of our problems as humans is that our greatest gift, language, is also our greatest danger. We destroy ourselves by our words. The difficulty is that things are not what we say they are. The word ‘water’ is not itself drinkable. Words point to things, but they can never be the things they point to. This may seem too obvious to waste time on, but it is a truth that is often ignored in religious circles. All theology is a doomed but necessary attempt to express the inexpressible. God is the elusive mystery we try to capture and convey in language, but how can that ever be done? If the word ‘water’ is not itself drinkable, how can the words we use to express the mystery of God be themselves absolute? They are metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, yet religious people have slaughtered and condemned each other over these experimental uncertainties. Our glory and agony is that we long to find words that will no longer be words, mere signifiers, but the very experience they are trying to signify; and our tragedy is that we can never succeed. This is the anguish that lies at the heart of all religion, because, though our words can describe our thirst for the absolute, they can never satisfy it.
But there is something that comes close. There is a human experience that sometimes captures the mystery that haunts us. Music is usually held to be the experience that does this best. In music there is an almost perfect equivalence of form and content. Music evidences itself, is itself the experience we experience, and is not just a sign or symbol for something else. All great art does this. It breaks through the frustration of language and unites us with that which words only usually signify. I say, ‘only usually’, because there is a language that, like music and art, is also capable of this same perfect tautology, this mysterious equivalence between the longing and the thing longed for. I am, of course, talking about poetry. Art, particularly music and poetry, unites us with the thing beyond, places us in its midst, rather than talks unceasingly and ineffectively about it, which is what religion usually does.
One test of great art is the shiver factor, the prickle at the back of the neck, the involuntary twitch of muscle that shows that a connection has been made between us and the matter to which we are paying attention. By this standard, Luke’s gospel is a work of great art. In place after place it achieves that mysterious equivalence between the word spoken and the word felt, the situation described and the situation experienced. This is why it has influenced other artists who have translated Luke’s words into painting of equivalent power. One of these paintings hangs in the Royal Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. It was painted by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri for Cardinal Rocci in 1639 and it is called Peter the Penitent . It shows Peter crying bitterly, tormented by anguish and guilt, just after his third denial of Jesus. All the gospels recount the prediction of Jesus that Peter would deny him, and they all go on to describe Peter’s betrayal. Only in Luke , however, do we get the detail that makes dramatic sense of Peter’s desolation. After the third denial the cock crows, and Luke tells us: ‘And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, "Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice." And Peter went out, and wept bitterly’ (22:61–2). The words are few and simple, yet they have carried that look of grieving love through history. And they connect us to our own denials. Peter’s tragedy is not that he was a bad or cynical man, but that he was an ordinary man who could not live up to his own ideals. Luke does not use abstract language about human remorse and the nature of guilt, yet in a few brush-strokes he brings us right into the experience and we confront ourselves. Unlike much conventional religious teaching that alienates us by its hectoring abstractions, Luke connects with us again and again by the immediacy of his art.
But that way of putting it is misleading, because it suggests the self-conscious presence of a writer working away to put a perfect polish on the text. We do not know who Luke was, and it does not matter, because it is the very anonymity of this text that confirms its power. All great art is essentially anonymous in its impact. We do not need to know anything about its provenance for it to affect us. We do not really know who wrote Genesis or many of the other ancient writings and we need not care, because these great texts communicate truth to us at a level that goes beyond the artistry of any particular individual. They create archetypes that express the general condition of humanity, and its sorrow and loss, heroism and betrayal. This is also why the gospels go on touching us long after we have abandoned the orthodoxies that have been built on them. We do not know who wrote them or when, but they still have power to connect with our lives today, so that, reading them, we sometimes have to put them down and look into the distance as their words strike ancient chords within us.
If we fed the four gospels into a computer programmed to do literary detective work, we would make some interesting discoveries. The first thing we would notice is that John , the fourth gospel, is unlike the other three in voice and perspective. There are differences among the first three gospels as well, of course, but not only do they have a similar feel, they actually share a lot of material. For instance, it is quite obvious that Matthew and Luke simply repeat large chunks of Mark ; they each quote another another source, not found in Mark ; and there is a certain amount of material peculiar to each of them. And all these layers of text had their own history. The gospels were not written down the way a biographer would work today. The process would be more like that of a musical historian who goes round the highlands and islands of Scotland to record folk tales, poetry and songs that are in the memories of people, but have never been written down in hard form. Most of our ancient literature comes from a long-standing oral tradition before it was committed to ink on parchment. The gospel writers would have been engaged in a similar exercise. They would collect stories about Jesus, remembrances that were handed down and sermons or meditations that were the result of long contemplation on the meaning of his story. In time, these would be woven into a whole garment, but only whole in the sense that a patchwork quilt is whole, stitched together out of many pieces.
Some of the most attractive and colourful of the patches are found only in Luke . It is Luke who tells us that at his birth Jesus was laid in a manger, ‘because there was no room for them in the inn’. Luke brings more women, and more details about them, into his narrative than any of the other gospel writers. We have already noted the little thread of narrative that frames Peter’s grief at his denials of Jesus; even more vivid are the parables that have gone into the memory and vocabulary of the western world, such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. The message of Jesus, the good news, or gospel, as it was called, was expressed most memorably in the immediacy of stories rather than in religious abstractions. This is why the parables in Luke continue to connect with us today. They are about our experience of guilt, and our need for forgiveness; they are about the dangers of tribe and religion, and the way they insulate us against the needs of our neighbours. This is the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan in chapter 10. It is not about religious hypocrisy, and the way religion often says one thing and does another. The reason why