History, Biography, and the Genre of Luke-Acts

Unlike contemporary literary-linguistic configurations of genre, current methodologies for the study of the Gospel genre are designed only to target genre similarities not genre differences. This basic oversight results in the convoluted discussion we witness in Lukan genre study today. Each recent treatment of the genre of Luke-Acts represents a distinct effort to draw parallels between Luke-Acts and a specific (or multiple) literary tradition(s). These studies all underestimate the role of literary divergence in genre analysis, leveraging much--if not, all--of their case on literary proximity. This monograph will show how attention to literary divergence from a number of angles may bring resolution to the increasingly complex discussions of the genre(s) of Luke-Acts.