Kýrie Eleison :
V. On the Lukan side, the text claims that the return on the fortieth day ("καὶ ὡς ἐτέλεσαν πάντα τὰ κατὰ τὸν νόμον κυρίου, ἐπέστρεψαν εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν εἰς πόλιν ἑαυτῶν Ναζαρέτ" - "And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth") excludes the Matthean sequence of events. Here, however, the text imposes a requirement of precision on Luke which the genre rules of ancient narrative do not impose, and which Luke himself does not undertake. The Lukan summary transition is a characteristic structural tool: the author closes the narrated unit and leads the characters to the location of the next scene without stating anything about the intervening period. That this is not a defensive assumption, but a demonstrable authorial procedure in Luke, can be verified in a place where we have an independent control source: in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke summarizes the period following the events in Damascus in such a way that the stay in Arabia - which Paul himself reports in the Epistle to the Galatians (Gal 1:17-18) - is not featured in it at all, even though it involves years. Whoever labels Luke a liar or an incompetent narrator because of the omission in the birth story should say the same there, where the omission is demonstrably a mere summary. The text thus selectively applies a standard which, if applied consistently, would cause its own argument to collapse as well.
2026-09-03 20:58:12