The Lukan writings as colonial counter-discourse: A postcolonial reading of Luke's ideological stance of duplicity, resistance, and survival

Throughout the history of Lukan studies, the imperial positivism of the historical-critical method has served to privilege and strengthen the now widespread conception of the Lukan writings as supportive of or, at least, uncritical toward Rome in particular and imperialism in general. This project acknowledges the Lukan writings as a politico-literary counter-discourse that illustrates Luke's ideological stance of resistance and struggle vis-a-vis Roman colonization and imperialism.; In this project Luke-Acts is understood as resistance literature. I propose that Luke-Acts embodies a peculiar kind of resistance literature that germinates from a project of first-century Rome. I argue that Luke-Acts does exhibit an overall strong and sustained anti-imperial reaction that is rhetorically expressed in a rather generalized congenial tonality towards Rome. I believe that simultaneous twofold position pro and against the imperial such colonial rhetoric of congeniality serves not as an endorsement of imperialism but as an ideological maneuver to ultimately undermine Rome and subvert the imperial value-system from within and as a mechanism of survival.; Postcolonial biblical criticism is the methodology employed to perform this investigation. After an examination on the tradition of scholarship concerning the topic, I performed an overall reading of Luke--Acts from a postcolonial perspective that enabled me to highlight the ideology of the Lukan document as a definite politico-literary response to the dynamics of Roman imperialism. A specific postcolonial textual analysis as a case-study is performed. Finally, some of research implications for Lukan scholarship are identified. This is a relevant contribution to Lukan hermeneutics insofar as it openly challenges traditional hermeneutics and its imperial sensibility and presents a new understanding of the nature of the Lukan corpus.