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This article attempts to raise questions on the basis of the early reception history of Luke and Acts about the relation between a literary-critical interpretation and an interpretation of Luke's work that asks after its meaning for an early Christian audience. That Luke-Acts can be read as a literary unity is not challenged. But the evidence that we have suggests that Luke and Acts were not read/heard together by the early Christians in the ancient world. We may thus ask whether our interpretations that depend in principle on the unity of Luke-Acts are in fact not as historical as we might suppose, at least in the sense that the texts would not have been heard together in the way we read them today. Conversely, we may also ask whether a historical interpretation that seeks to read Luke and Acts as they were most likely heard is of necessity estranged from the literary dynamics of Luke-Acts.

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This article points out the serious difficulties inherent in trying to relate Luke-Acts to the imperial cult. Having acknowledged such difficulties, the attempt is made nonetheless to relate concretely Luke-Acts to the cult on the basis of the significance of Acts 10.36 for Luke-Acts as a whole and its potential impact upon auditors in the ancient Mediterranean world. The implications of this impact are then addressed and a material connection to other early Christian evidence is tentatively suggested.

This essay argues that retrieving insights from the ancient Stoic philosophers for Christian ethics is much more difficult than is often assumed and, further, that the “ethics of retrieval” is itself something worth prolonged reflection. The central problem is that in their ancient sense both Christianity and Stoicism are practically dense patterns of reasoning and mutually incompatible forms of life. Coming to see this clearly requires the realization that the encounter between Stoicism and Christianity is a conflict of lived traditions. Precisely because we cannot simply extract Stoic insights from the lives in which they belong, the task of determining how Stoicism is useful for Christianity is exceptionally challenging. Indeed, doing justice to the Stoics has more to do with facing an alternative to Christianity than it does with appropriating insights for our own use. These points are developed in conversation with Elizabeth Agnew Cochran's recent article on the Stoic influence upon Jonathan Edwards.