Embedded in the First Century, Alive for Our Own: Recent Research on Luke's Gospel‪.‬

It is stimulating and provocative to have vast amounts of information readily at hand about every sort of topic. Yet, this information age in which we live can become downright daunting. How do we sort through that information to find its significance for the calling of preaching, teaching, and imagining God's dynamic presence among us? Even when we narrow our focus to preaching and teaching based on Luke's Gospel, we are confronted with an enormous amount of detailed analysis of everything from carob pods to the standard vocabulary of friendship in the ancient world. Japanese New Testament scholar Hisako Kinukawa has identified part of our task very well: "The social, cultural, political, economic, and religious reconstruction of the times when the texts were edited, when the stories were told, and when the incidents took place must be done carefully and continuously." (1) Given the massive size of this agenda and the equally massive information to be uncovered and analyzed in regard to each part of it, Kinukawa's next statement is painfully true: "It seems, however, that it is far beyond my capacity to do all the research on my own."