David Moessner proposes a new understanding of the relation of Luke's second volume to his
Gospel to open up a whole new reading of Luke's foundational contribution to the New Testament.
For postmodern readers who find Acts a 'generic outlier ' dangling tenuously somewhere between
the 'mainland' of the evangelists and the 'Peloponnese' of Paul-diffused and confused and
shunted to the backwaters of the New Testament by these signature corpora-Moessner plunges his
readers into the hermeneutical atmosphere of Greek narrative poetics and elaboration of
multi-volume works to inhale the rhetorical swells that animate Luke's first readers in their
engagement of his narrative. In this collection of twelve of his essays re-contextualized and
re-organized into five major topical movements Moessner showcases multiple Hellenistic texts
and rhetorical tropes to spotlight the various signals Luke provides his readers of the
multiple ways his Acts will follow all that Jesus began to do and to teach (Acts 1:1) and
consequently bring coherence to this dominant block of the New Testament that has long been
split apart. By collapsing the world of Jesus into the words and deeds of his followers Luke
re-configures the significance of Israel's Christ and the Reign of Israel's God for all peoples
and places to create a new account of 'Gospel Acts ' discrete and distinctively different than
the narrative of the many (Luke 1:1). Luke the Historian of Israel's Legacy combines what no
analysis of the Lukan writings has previously accomplished integrating seamlessly two
'generically-estranged' volumes into one new whole from the intent of the one composer. For
Luke is the Hellenistic historian and simultaneously 'biblical' theologian who arranges the one
plan of God read from the script of the Jewish scriptures-parts and whole severally and
together-as the saving 'script' for the whole world through Israel's suffering and raised up
Christ Jesus of Nazareth. In the introductions to each major theme of the essays this noted
scholar of the Lukan writings offers an epitome of the main features of Luke's theological
'thought ' and in a final Conclusions chapter weaves together a comprehensive synthesis of
this new reading of the whole.
