Theology Today - Vol 47, No. 2 - July 1990 - BOOK REVIEW - Lord of the Banquet: The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative

208 - Lord of the Banquet: The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative

Lord of the Banquet:
The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative
By David P. Moessner
Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 1989. 358 pp. $29.95.

David Moessner, who is a professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, begins his study of the "Travel Narrative" in Luke (Lk. 9:51-19:44) with a problem: the impression one gets of this section is not of a coherent travel account, but of a collection of the teachings of Jesus interspersed with periodic notices that Jesus is still on his journey. As Moessner puts it, what we have in this central section of Luke's Gospel is a dissonance between form (a journey) and content (sayings of Jesus). This is a dissonance which has proved to be highly resistant to explanation in scholarly investigation of the Gospel.

What Moessner undertakes in this study is a new attempt at resolving this dissonance between the form and the content of the Travel Narrative by means of a literary-critical analysis. Moessner's thesis is that the Deuteronomistic view of the mission and fate of the prophets (especially Moses) and the relation between the treatment of those prophets and the fate of Israel is the generative paradigm of the depiction of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem in the Travel Narrative.

The heart of Moessner's book is a demonstration of the presence in Luke's Travel Narrative of the tenets, derived from the work of O. H. Steck, concerning the role and fate of the prophets which are found in the writings of the Deuteronomist. In intensely argued fashion, Moessner goes over the ground of the Travel Narrative four times, once for each tenet, and in addition draws from elsewhere in the Lukan corpus for confirmation of his findings within the Travel Narrative itself. The conclusion of this intense exegesis is a portrait of Jesus as the "journeying-guest prophet" who is Lord of the Banquet of the Kingdom of God. The divided reaction to this "journeying-guest" by the present generation of Israel is found in the several meal scenes sprinkled throughout the Travel Section.

This portrait of the prophet as "journeying-guest" is also of significance with regard to the portrayal of Moses as the prophet par excellence in Deuteronomy. As he draws together the threads of his study, Moessner makes comparisons back and forth between the Jesus of Luke's Gospel and the Moses of Deuteronomy.

209 - Lord of the Banquet: The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative

Moessner concludes his work with an explication of the significance of the Travel Narrative in Luke-Acts, finding the same fourfold pattern of Jesus the Prophet like Moses in Deuteronomy in the remainder of Luke's two volumes as in the Travel Narrative, now understood as an account of the New Exodus salvation promised in Deuteronomy.

Moessner is breaking new ground here on at least two fronts. The first is the obvious one, that he has argued for a distinctive view of the "whys and wherefores" of Luke's reason for telling his story the way he does. The second is less obvious, but no less significant. Moessner has attempted in this study to argue for this distinctive view on literarycritical, or more precisely, on typological grounds. That is, Moessner has taken a typology or paradigm from the Deuteronomists and tried to show that this same typology or paradigm was in the mind of the author of Luke-Acts, indeed that this paradigm has generated the structure of that two-volume work.

Moessner is aware of the difficulty of such an argument, and attempts to anticipate and counter the objections of readers who might not be convinced at the outset that such a typological comparison is possible. One of these objections is that the compositional intention of the author of a work is notoriously hard to come by. How do we know that the author had this paradigm in mind and no other? This objection is countered by the great deal of evidence Moessner amasses on behalf of his central thesis.

Another objection is not as easily gotten rid of, namely how do we know that the author of Luke-Acts saw the same paradigm in the Deuteronomists' account of the career of Moses as we do? Moessner counters this objection by pointing to works roughly contemporary with Luke-Acts (Josephus and the writings of the Qumran Covenanters) which he says contain this same understanding of the role and fate of the prophet. Certainly this comparison to Luke's contemporaries can serve to counter such an objection, yet the comparison can be used to argue the opposite, too. If the four-fold paradigm of the role and fate of Israel's prophets is present outside of the Deuteronomists, writings, doesn't that mean that such a paradigm need not be distinctively Deuteronomistic? Stated in terms of Moessner's study of the Travel Narrative, might the portrait of Jesus as prophet, even as the prophet like Moses, be something Luke has picked up from the general milieu of his day and not necessarily from Deuteronomy alone? This is a logical impasse that cannot be circumvented easily and, in the end, one is convinced by the weight of argument and evidence establishing the uniqueness of connection between Deuteronomy and Luke-Acts or one is not. I feel that Moessner has the better of this argument, and that his study will be a standard in Lukan studies for some time to come.

Jeffries M. Hamilton
Westminster John Knox Press
Louisville, Kentucky