Originally prepared as the author's published dissertation (under Richard Hays, Duke University Divinity School), this volume serves to clear fresh ground on several fronts. While scholarly opinion has generally characterised Luke as holding to a ‘low christology’, envisaging Jesus as a prophetic agent on Yahweh's behalf, Rowe is prepared to argue that the evangelist finds himself quite at home with the kind of christological statements characteristic of Paul or John. Such appears to be the case, the author argues, on a narratological analysis of the word ‘lord’ (kyrios) in the Lucan story. While ‘word study’ approaches to Christology have – rightly by all counts – fallen into disfavour in the past several decades, Rowe conceives his own work as being of a different stripe as he attends ‘with sufficient sensitivity to the narrative sophistication with which Luke develops the meaning of kyrios’ (pp. 8–9). Since, per Ricoeur, identity can only finally be derived from narrative and since, too, Luke assigns an especial significance to kyrios (all the more striking given the evangelist's unique penchant for attaching the term to the earthly Jesus), such a project naturally commends itself.
Focusing on Luke 1–3, chapter 1 advances exegetical arguments which will prove determinative. When Jesus first appears in the narrative (Luke 1:43), he is ‘ho kyrios in the womb’ (p. 39): in ‘this crucial moment of Jesus’ introduction, Elizabeth's confession effects a duality in the referent of the word kyrios between the as yet unborn and human kyrios of Mary's womb and the kyrios of heaven’ (p. 40). This same duality is extended in other closely related texts within the birth narrative (1:16–17, 76; 2:11). The author also finds interesting evidence in 3:4–6 that Luke reworked his scriptural citation so to create ambiguity: the ‘paths of our God’ (LXX) are now ‘his paths’, referring not to either Yahweh or Jesus, but equivocally to both (pp. 70–6).
Chapter 2 focuses on pericopae occurring in Luke 4:14–9:50. At points, Rowe's exegesis simply builds on standard readings (e.g. in the Calling of Peter many commentators already find significance in the fact that the apostle first calls Jesus ‘master’ (5:5) and then ‘lord’ (5:8)); at other points, the author's readings are both clever and persuasive (e.g. the ambiguity of the Greek of 5:17 may indeed reflect Luke's consciously preserving Jesus’ dual identity). The same ambiguity is also meant to obtain for other Lucan phrasing found in Jesus’ mouth, including not least ‘the lord of the sabbath’ (6:5) and ‘lord, lord’ (6:46). Even in the case of the Healing of the Centurion's Servant, which affords ‘a locus classicus for this mundane reading of kyrie’ (i.e. ‘sir!’), the addressative term provides the evangelist with raw christological material – not just here, but throughout the Gospel.
Chapters 3 and 4 carry the thesis forward along similar lines. While the argument does seem repetitive, nonetheless patterns established earlier on begin to come into sharper focus. For example, Martha's innocently addressing Jesus as kyrie only reconfirms ‘that Luke composes his narrative, time and time again, so that the vocative and non-vocative are joined together by virtue of their immediate proximity’ (p. 150). There is even meaning in the term's absence: the conspicuous paucity of occurrences of kyrios in the passion account is no lapse on the evangelist's part, but a symbolic indication that the Lord has been rejected.
The author concludes in chapter 5 by affirming that kyrios is for Luke a Leitwort. The term represents neither a blending of human and divine concepts, nor a collapsing of Jesus with the Father, but a binding: ‘in a crucial sense heaven and earth are joined through the word’ (p. 202). Likewise, Luke's Christology is neither adoptionist nor Gnostic; for the third evangelist, Jesus is the ‘embodied revelation’ (p. 218) of the Lord God. Luke's storytelling is not an overwriting of history, but history theologically interpreted.
Rowe's published dissertation is in many respects a model of narrative criticism. Its argumentation is focused, clear and – in my mind – finally convincing. My only major criticism bears on the structure of the book which, apart from some structural consideration of Luke itself, appears somewhat arbitrary. Moreover, one wonders whether the author's largely synchronic approach to the narrative too easily precludes an exploration of how Luke employed plot as a means of developing the christological conception. All the same, Early Narrative Christology will undoubtedly be a lingering voice within some of the most pressing discussions within New Testament theology today.
