The Gospel of Luke: Setting expectations on its authors' terms

Happy New Year to all. With the Christmas season past, I'm continuing the series reviewing various documents both inside and outside the Bible with an eye to one thing: setting the expectation of the contents based on the actual content by studying the divisions and introductions given by the author(s). Here we'll consider the Gospel of Luke.

Analyzing a Document's Table of Contents : The Gospel of Luke

In the Gospel of Luke, we find many items that are narrated as events with the characteristic focus on who, where, when, and what. Some brief examples:

• In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron ...
• In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. 
• In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.  
• When the time of their purification according to the Law of Moses had been completed, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord"), and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: "a pair of doves or two young pigeons."
• In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene— during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert.  

As many people consider that Mark was a primary source for Luke, it makes sense to compare them. In Luke, we are more likely than in Mark to see the context tagged with a political reference: Herod was king of Judea, first Caesar Augustus and then Tiberius Caesar were emperors. The author is conscious of time, instinctively measures that by the reigns of kings and of the Roman emperors. The author is also conscious of place, and of Jewish law and scripture.

Luke often delves into what people have said, including people who are minor character or not even introduced in some other narratives. Luke records things being spoken by such people as Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, John the Baptist, and Simeon. He has material on the time before Jesus came into adulthood, as when Jesus visited the Temple in Jerusalem as a child.

The relationship between Luke's and Matthew's gospels is more complex, and I will not visit the controversies here about who had the earlier material, since (as interesting as that is to me) for present purposes that is out-of-scope. Suffice it to say here: as with Matthew, so also Luke considers it worthwhile to include a genealogy, and to record Jesus' teachings in enough detail that Luke's focus at times moves beyond the event and onto the contents of the teachings. At times Luke records similar material to that found in Matthew. At other times we have material that is known only from Luke, such as Jesus teaching the parable of the prodigal son or Jesus' meeting with two disciples on the road to Emmaus.

Based on the content, we see a narrative of people and events centering around Jesus, occurring against the background of first-century Judaism during the time of the Roman occupation.