Are the structures in Luke’s Gospel real, or are they subjective impressions that might be different for each reader?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1990.

In regard to my book According to Luke, you ask whether the structures I see in Luke's Gospel have real objective existence, or whether they are the subjective impressions made upon a particular reader.

The answer, I suspect, might be half-and-half. When I find Luke placing in chapter 7 the story of the woman in Simon's house that no other Evangelist records; and when I further find that the message explicitly developed in that story—namely, where someone has been saved by faith that someone will show the genuineness of faith by love and good works—puts the other, balancing side to the message of salvation by faith and not by works or merit, explicitly stated in the earlier story of the healing of the centurion's servant; then I find it impossible to believe that the doctrinal balance thus achieved is simply my own subjective impression, and that Luke himself was unaware that his choice and arrangement of stories illustrate the same balance of doctrine that one finds expressly annunciated in Paul's epistles. And if in this instance we are to think that Luke has deliberately selected and ordered his stories for theological ends, then it seems reasonable to me to suppose that he may have done so elsewhere.

On the other hand, I cannot suppose that all the correspondences and structures which I myself see in the Gospel were necessarily in Luke's mind when he wrote; some of them—perhaps many of them—are simply my own subjective impressions. I have to leave my readers and my wiser brethren to decide the question.

Ever yours truly in the Lord,