Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 73:1 (NA 2022)
Article: Expecting The Unexpected In Luke 7:1–10
Author: Bart B. Bruehler

TynBull 73:1 (2022) p. 71

Expecting The Unexpected In Luke 7:1–10

Bart B. Bruehler

Professor of New Testament
Indiana Wesleyan University
[email protected]

Abstract

Luke’s account of Jesus’s healing of the man enslaved to the centurion exhibits a number of unusual and unexpected features: a gentile centurion in a small Jewish village, an odd mixture of miracle and pronouncement stories, striking variations from the precedent story of Elisha, surprising twists in the plot, and others. Rhetoricians of Luke’s day discussed various effects that unexpected elements could have on an audience, and some of these are reflected in this account. Luke has used the multiple unexpected elements of this story to make it interesting to his audience, to intensify it alongside the raising of the dead, to re-engage his audience after the Sermon on the Plain, and to cement this episode in his audience’s memory as a precursor to Cornelius and the larger gentile mission in Acts.

1. Introduction

A good story, a convincing speech, an engaging drama. All of these depend on a single foundational factor – the audience’s attention. Without the attention of the audience, key pieces of the plot go unnoticed, main points of the speech get missed, and a character’s agony is ignored. Storytellers, dramatists, and rhetoricians have intuitively and sometimes explicitly reflected on ways to capture the attention of their audiences and keep them engaged. In particular, the rhetorical instructors of the Hellenistic-Roman world considered ‘the unexpected’ to be a means of capturing their audience’s interest. The argument of this article is that the author of the Third Gospel has employed several unexpected elements in his account of the healing of the centurion’s slave in 7:1–10 in order to get, keep, and direct the attention of his audience at this juncture of the Gospel narrative.

Most previous studies of this pericope have focused on issues of tradition history raised by the relationship of Luke 7:1–10 to John 4:46–54 and

TynBull 73:1 (2022) p. 72

Matthew 8:5–13.1 A wide range of theories have been put forward to explain the similarities and differences between Matthew and Luke, especially with reference to the form(s) of Q that either author might have had.2 While the investigation that follows deals with the final form of the text, it proceeds on the general assumption...