Philosophical Protreptic and the Preface to Luke’s Gospel

This article compares the preface of Luke’s Gospel to Philo’s preface to De Abrahamo and Arrian’s preface to his arrangement of the sayings of Epictetus. Scholars have usually sought ancient comparanda to Luke’s preface in order to identify the Gospel’s genre. This study moves beyond this traditional question of form (‘What ancient works bear the closest resemblance to the structure of Luke 1:1–4?’) and on to the question of function. The selected works of Philo and Arrian participate in different genres, but both belong to the rhetorical category of ‘philosophical protreptic’, a piece of writing intended to compel the reader towards a particular moral vision. I argue that Luke’s preface exhibits unexplored similarities with the prefaces of Arrian and Philo and can itself be fruitfully read as a kind of philosophical protreptic. This has implications for how we theorize about Luke’s audience and social situation.