The Reception of Luke and Acts in the Period before Irenaeus: Looking for Luke in the Second Century

This is the first book-length discussion of the reception of Luke and of Acts in the period before Irenaeus. It therefore fills this lacuna. It consists of a comprehensive investigation both of apparent citations of Luke and of Acts and also of the earliest papyri and external testimony to Luke and to Acts. Andrew Gregory challenges the methodological basis on which accounts of the reception of other canonical Gospels are based, for he takes seriously the possibility that other sources of Jesus-tradition were still used in this period. Hence he argues that scholars should pay more attention to the likelihood that second-century Christians continued to use oral traditions as well as no longer extant written sources of Jesus traditions even after the canonical Gospels had been composed. This in turn raises challenges to simple solutions to the Synoptic Problem such as are currently in vogue among many New Testament scholars.