Off Topic: A Few Words on Luke

The Book of Luke is my favorite gospel, not surprising given his attention to detail. The author of Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, which also provides a lot of detail. Initially when planning an off topic post for this Easter weekend, I remembered that Luke had mentioned a Greek poet somewhere along the way and it was one of the few mentions of non-Biblical works that I had run across in the gospels. My plan was to track down the original poetry, read through it and post about it. Unfortunately, Luke does not mention the poet by name but in the notes for Acts 17:28 a citation is given for his quotation to the works of Epimenides (also mentioned in Titus 1:12). Epimenides is actually Cretan and his original writings are lost, only mentioned in secondary sources, like Acts and Titus. Not a lot has been written about Epimenides so there really wasn't enough there for a post.

Plan B was a post about one of the women mentioned in Luke. We find out a lot about the role of women in the early Christian ministry from Luke and he is good about naming names. He also notes (in Luke 8:3) that some women financially supported the work of Jesus and the disciples. Good to know. In the same verse he gives us the name of two women not mentioned elsewhere in scripture: Joanna and Susanna. They are listed as among those women who had been healed and now provided from "their substance." We know little else about Susanna but Joanna's name includes the description that she is the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward. Now that is an interesting tidbit. Imagine the conversations that went on in their household. Joanna is also listed among those who found the empty tomb on Easter morning. Again, there is very little other verifiable information on either Joanne or Chuza, though there are a number of theories. One of the more accepted is that Chuza was a Nabatean, a tribe of Arabic traders. The name Chuza appears in conjunction with the Nabateans in non-canonical writings and is not Jewish in origin. Interesting. There are some intriguing new thoughts on Joanna and whether or not she is the mysterious Junia in Romans 16:7 (now mentioned with someone named Andronicus), but that is still a matter of some discussion and by no means settled. So no post there either.

Thus we are left with the traditional Easter conundrum -- do you start with the ears or the feet or somewhere in between?