Abraham, Ancestry, and Ethnicity in Luke’s Gospel

In Abraham, Ancestry, and Ethnicity in Luke's Gospel, Andrew Benko skillfully explores how Luke reimagines lineage and belonging, offering a fresh but needed perspective on the rhetoric of race within Luke's narrative. With keen attention to ancestry and lineage in antiquity, Benko unpacks how the genealogical connection to Abraham is destabilized and expanded. This is a very timely and rich exploration of race, lineage, and belonging in the ancient world. His rigorous scholarship invites readers to see Luke's Gospel and Acts as a story of radical inclusion, where God can also form a new people ""from these stones,"" that is, beyond the limitations of lineage. This is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of Abraham, race, and lineage in Luke's writings. --Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III, Vanguard University In this richly detailed, elegantly written, and thoughtful book, Andrew Benko explores Luke's ""racial reasoning"" using an ""ethnos-conscious approach"". Setting his analysis of Luke in the context of other Jewish, Greek and Roman writings, Benko explores the various ways in which Luke appeals to ancestry, and especially to Abraham, to construct the identity of Christ-believers as well as to configure their relationship to (other) Judeans. He also conducts this primarily historical enquiry with a sensitivity to its contemporary implications, and to the ambivalent legacy that such texts bequeath to us. --David G. Horrell, University of Exeter, UK The ancestor Abraham was frequently employed in the ethnic reasoning of Second Temple Judaism, and is mentioned considerably more often in Luke than in the other synoptic Gospels. Focusing on these ancient uses of Abraham, and building upon the best of recent scholarship on ethnicity, race and racialization in antiquity, Benko offers up an insightful reading of how Luke/Acts creates space for Gentiles as children of Abraham within the Roman empire. Importantly, Benko does this without sugar-coating passages which denigrate non-believing Jews. Instead, he asks readers hard questions about how Christian texts such as Luke/Acts have contributed to Christian anti-Semitism, while also offering pastoral insights into the way forward. I highly recommended this book. --Shelly Matthews, Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University With this deeply researched and timely book, Benko continues his interrogation of the complex way that race functions in the Gospels. He makes a compelling case that the competing interpretations of the figure of Abraham provides a critical window into how 2nd Temple writers, include Luke, constructed racial identity and established racial boundaries. Benko provides both a powerful model for exploring such challenging questions as well as a powerful reading of Luke's gospel. I recommend this book for readers of the Gospels as well as for those interested in the diverse ways that race functions in the ancient world. --Shawn Kelley, Daemen University