Gospel of Luke Responds to Pope Clement

By: Suresh Shenoy

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Textual link between Luke’s Gospel and Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians was not a happenstance. Luke decided on it to confront Clement’s aggressive stance against the Church of Corinth. He wrote the Gospel to challenge the ‘original witnesses and the guardians of the word’ to allow Theóphilos, his generic reader, to weigh up the truth for certainty of what he has been taught.
In his Gospel, Luke repudiated Clement’s overbearing authority as ‘the guardian of the word’, and the claims that the bishops and deacons derived theirs from ‘the original witnesses’, namely, the Apostles. He also opposed the manner in which their authority was exercised.
Luke in his ironic Gospel sided with the Corinthian Sedition against the Church of Rome. In systematically refuting the bases on which Clement claimed the legitimacy for his authority, Luke allowed a close look into his understanding of Jesus as the Christ, the questionable apostolic succession and the oppressive demands of religious obedience. Most significantly, Luke repudiated the resurrection of Christ as the foundation of Christian Faith.
As a bonus, this study makes it possible to revise the traditionally held provenance of the Gospel of Luke.