Authorial data: seams and summaries
PATRICIA A. WALTERS · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2009
Of late we have seen an endeavour to apportion the Acts of the Apostles by source-criticism in such a way that very little remains for Luke, who yet was certainly no mere compiler …Yet the fact remains that often enough the documentary information used by Luke floats like croûtons in the soup …joints and seams are discernible at many points. Julius Wellhausen's croûtons -in-the-soup simile aptly describes the evidence and data paradigm needed to re-examine the single authorship of Luke and Acts. While “joints and seams” form the literary intersections that unite segments of written material, they simultaneously define the boundaries where those segments have been linked. That is to say, functionally they both unite and divide. As noted in the previous chapter, these literary junctures, called “seams and summaries,” represent by definition not only a stratum of text composed later than the material they connect but also neutral text, unaligned with the traditional forms of Luke and Acts. Whether re-worked or independently composed, seams and summaries represent the most fecund textual layer in which to “excavate” an author-editor's style.