What is it about?
One of the climactic passages of the third Gospel is that in which Jesus probes by his resurrection and bodily presence that his message has been confirmed. Consequently, Luke 24 has been of interest to many researchers, but it seems there remain still some exegetical puzzles such as the literary model of the pericope 24:36-49. This article tries to formulate a response to some open questions by considering the passage in the context of the stories of apparitions of the Imperial Greek and Roman literatures.
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Why is it important?
In my view, the analyses passage of Luke 24 is a good example of how Luke treats the sources available to him, be it Mark, Q, L, or oral fonts. Therefore, as Schubert remarks, Luke was able to combine the conventional and the original and to use existing traditional materials for his own “structural-literary propensities”. In the case of our text, it is fair to say that the author of the third Gospel followed the traditional ghost story only structurally, and modified what could be called literary clichés, ignoring any folkloric detail that could interfere with his intention of showing that Jesus’s was not just another anonymous ghost.
Perspectives
This article is the conclusion of a longer research, in which after taking into an account around fifty passages of post-classical Greek ghost stories, I concluded that behind them one might distinguish two basic types, to wit, traditional and oral accounts rooted in Greek folklore, and so-called ‘literary ghosts’. In the case of the Luke's text, It is the second category that provides some interesting parallels we dealt with.
Dr. Israel Muñoz Gallarte
University of Cordoba
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This page is a summary of: Luke 24 Reconsidered, Novum Testamentum, March 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15685365-12340003.
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