When examining the purposes of the Gospels, the spiritual one typically represents the least mystery, focusing primarily on the exploration of one’s journey to accepting Christian values. The historical purposes behind the Gospels, however, are much more difficult to locate, mostly due to the fact that the existence of the Gospels aligns with a vast range of sociocultural and sociopolitical factors. Although the historical purposes behind the writing of Luke’s Gospel, Acts of the Apostles, and John’s Gospel are excruciatingly numerous, they can be summarized as the analysis of Jesus’s legacy, genealogy, and divine origin.
The impact that Jesus left on society and its fundamental values as the main purpose of each of the three writings, and especially the Gospel of Luke, is the explanation that lies on the surface. In the grand scheme of events, questioning the power hierarchy within the Ancient Roman society was the essential purpose of Luke’s Gospel through the exploration of Jesus’s legacy (Stanton 116; Carroll and Balentine 31). As Carroll explains, “Because Rome’s is not the only power domain on display, it is necessary to ask how multiple powers – God’s reign, Satan’s dominion, and Roman imperial control – interact in the story Luke tells” (p. 400). Therefore, the narrative of Luke is vital to the understanding of the philosophy and legacy of Jesus as a challenge to the social hierarchy and the power structures that encourage further inequality.
In turn, the Gospel of John veers into the narrative of Jesus being the Son of God and, therefore, the herald of His message. Therefore, John’s Gospel can be viewed as the logical continuation of Luke’s Gospel. Specifically, the Apostles went from the analysis of Jesus’s legacy to the direct exploration of His origin as the means of supporting the legitimacy of His words. Consequently, the narrative of Jesus’s life comes full circle when viewed through the prism of the perspectives that the Gospels of John and Luke, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, provide. The Likewise, the “Acts of the Apostles” examines the life of Jesus by studying the influence that He had on the representatives of the Non-Jewish population. Representing an assessment of the effects that His teachings had on social perceptions, in general, the “Act of the Apostles” allow examining the path that He took in order to convince a vast number of people to follow His ideas an d accept Christian values as the core ethical and moral standards to follow. In fact, in his assessment of the identity of the followers of the Fourth Gospel, Hwang and van der Watt claim that there was a massive rift between the proponents of Jesus’s teachings and the Jewish believers of the time (p. 687). Specifically, the authors say that “The Jewish Christians, who confessed Jesus as Messiah, were cast out of the synagogues and were on occasion even killed” (Hwang and van der Watt, p. 686). Therefore, the purpose of the said sources seem to concern the teachings of Jesus and the path that He took in order to heal the rift between the congregations.
Since Luke’s Gospel, Acts of the Apostles, and John’s Gospel focus primarily on the study of the familial legacy of Jesus, their purpose revolves mainly around the provision of Jesus’s history and genealogy. By studying His lineage, scholars can understand how His ideas and values were slowly integrated into the Christian community. In addition, each of the three sources allow expanding the narrative that the rest provide in regard to the origin and life of Jesus. Thus, the Gospels in question along with the Acts of the Apostles help to understand what life Jesus led and how He managed to become the spiritual leader that He came to be.
Works Cited
- Carroll, John T. Luke (2012): A Commentary. Westminster John Knox Press, 2012.
- Carroll, John T., and Balentine, Samuel Eugene, eds. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology. Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Hwang, Won-Ha, and Jan Gabriel Van der Watt. “The Identity of the Recipients of the Fourth Gospel in the Light of the Purpose of the Gospel.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, vol. 63, no. 2, 2007, pp. 683-698.
- Stanton, Graham. The Gospels of Jesus. OUP Oxford, 2002.