Is it false methodology to apply Aristotle’s canons of literary criticism to Luke’s work?
The objection mentioned on p. 7 (n. 9) of my book According to Luke would certainly be valid if we were proposing to apply the whole of Aristotle's critical theory tout court to Luke's work. Needless to say, I am not proposing any such thing, but merely suggesting that some of Aristotle's observations on the importance of the careful selection, proportioning and arrangement of material, and on the desirability that a work should have a certain coherence, a beginning, a middle and an end, in other words a rational thought-flow, are applicable to all serious works, whether of literature or of history, in whatever period they are written. We are not for one moment implying that Luke has moulded his source material with the same kind of freedom as that with which the Greek playwrights reshaped the myths from which they made their tragedies. Judged by Aristotle's own distinction that the historian tells of things that actually happened, whereas the poet tells of things of a kind that could or would happen,1 Luke is unhesitatingly to be classed as a historian. On the other hand Aristotle himself points out2 that whereas generally speaking poetry is concerned with universal truths and history with the particular facts of what someone or other actually did, yet some of the things that have actually happened in history have been instances of universal truths. Now once more this observation cannot be applied without modification to Luke's work; but it may serve to remind us of an important feature of the gospel narratives. The evangelists' stories of, say, Christ's miracles are in the first place records of things that actually happened; but instinctively believers all down the centuries have read them as being in addition parables and paradigms conveying truth of universal applicability. This understanding of Christ's miracles is explicit in the Fourth Gospel in for example its treatment of the feeding of the five thousand (see John 6) and the giving of sight to the blind man (see especially John 9:39–41). It would be difficult to think therefore that when Luke recorded, say, the giving of sight to the blind man at Jericho (see Luke 18:35–43) he saw nothing more in it than a particular fact of history. Once admit, then, that Luke will have seen in such miracles truths and lessons of universal applicability, and one is automatically led on to ask whether in selecting and arranging the records of these miracles Luke intended the lessons he saw in them to stand in isolation as self-contained units, or whether he meant those lessons to chime in with the matters being discussed in the contexts in which he places them. We are back with the question of thought-flow.
