Luke, Acts, and Their Generic Conversation Partners

This article offers a new way of thinking about the contested issue of Lukan genre. It outlines a dynamic conception of how genre functions, including attention to "generic enrichment" and "generic mobility", and argues that identification of appropriate generic conversation partners provides a proxy for contemporary readers of ancient texts to gain insight into that dynamic process among their texts' first readers. Applying these insights to Luke and Acts, the article then discusses two sets of generic conversation partners that illuminate Lukan interpretation. First, it explores the relevance of Hellenistic and early imperial period historiographies and biographies, alongside biblical historiography, with particular attention to Luke's infancy narratives. Second, it considers apocalypses, especially Daniel, as a source of generic enrichment in Luke's text. It concludes that early Christian audiences would find their reading of Luke's historiography enriched by previous familiarity with apocalypses, while noting the further generic mobility that will lead some readers of Acts to push into a new genre informed by Hellenistic novels, when they develop the apocryphal Acts tradition.

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