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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2023
Although an increasing number of works are focusing on depictions of God in the New Testament, none so far specifically focus on how these depictions rely on anthropomorphic language in their presentation of God. This article attends to this oversight by turning to the Synoptic Gospels (and the book of Acts) as a test case. Not only do these narratives lack an explicit anti-anthropomorphic agenda, but they also rely on divine anthropomorphisms that are derived from Jewish Scripture. To demonstrate this claim, the article concentrates on how Matthew and Luke expand Mark's anthropomorphic presentation of God and how Luke's presentation emerges as the most anthropomorphic of all. It also discusses how Mark, Matthew, and Luke's respective narratives depict God's human, or human-like, characteristics according to the following four categories: (1) God's human roles and titles, (2) God's depiction as an acting subject who speaks and desires to be in relationship with humans, (3) God's concrete presence located in space, and finally, (4) God's description as a character with recognisable body parts and other markers of corporeality. In the end, we shall see that anthropomorphism is a central component of God's characterisation in the Synoptics and that this anthropomorphic characterisation better enables readers to see the Jewish, scriptural shape of God as a personal deity who desires to be in relationship with humans.
1 Dahl, Nils Alstrup, ‘The Neglected Factor in New Testament Theology’, Reflections 75 (1975) 5–8Google Scholar. Repr. in Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine (ed. Donald H. Juel; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 153–63.
2 See, e.g., the many citations throughout this article, as well as the following books: Das, A. Andrew and Matera, Frank J., eds., The Forgotten God: Perspectives in Biblical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002)Google Scholar; Neyrey, Jerome H., Render to God: New Testament Understandings of the Divine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004)Google Scholar; Zimmermann, Christiane, Die Namen des Vaters: Studien zu ausgewählten neutestamentlichen Gottesbezeichnungen vor ihrem frühjüdischen und paganen Sprachhorizont (AJEC 69; Leiden: Brill, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurtado, Larry W., God in New Testament Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010)Google Scholar; Carter, Warren, God in the New Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016)Google Scholar. In 2022, SNTS also began a seminar devoted to this topic entitled ‘God in the New Testament’.
3 Hurtado suggests that the belief that the New Testament effectively adopts a Jewish scriptural understanding of God—and does not contribute anything distinctive or new—is in fact one of the reasons why some scholars have not devoted more attention to God's portrayal in the New Testament in the first place (God in New Testament Theology, 3–4). The recognition that the Hebrew Bible contains divine anthropomorphisms extends back to at least the second century bce with the Jewish philosopher Aristobulus, who like Philo in the first century ce, argues that these anthropomorphisms do not actually reflect God's essence.
4 For recent discussions of divine anthropomorphisms in the Hebrew Bible, see, e.g., Hamori, Esther J., “When Gods Were Men”: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature (BZAW 384; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wagner, Andreas, Gottes Körper: Zur alttestamentlichen Vorstellung des Menschengestaltigkeit Gottes (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2010; ET 2019)Google Scholar; Knafl, Anne K., Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in the Pentateuch (Siphrut 12; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014)Google Scholar; Wagner, Andreas, ed., Göttliche Körper—Göttliche Gefühle: Was leisten anthropomorphe und anthropopathische Götterkonzepte im Alten Orient und im Alten Testament? (OBO 270; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark S., Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Stavrakopoulou, Francesca, God: An Anatomy (New York: Knopf, 2022)Google Scholar. To my knowledge, the only sustained discussion of divine anthropomorphisms in the New Testament is my article ‘Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in Luke-Acts’, JBL 140 (2021) 777–97.
5 Among New Testament interpreters, this phenomenon begins as early as the second century. See Sheridan, Mark, Language for God in Patristic Tradition: Wrestling with Biblical Anthropomorphism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
6 While some New Testament scholars state this position outright (see, for example, my discussion of John Donahue below), I suspect that this assumption concerning Hellinisation plays a much larger role in the tendency to overlook divine anthropomorphisms in New Testament studies. For a helpful complication of the term ‘Hellenisation’ itself, see classic, Martin Hengel's Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (trans. Bowden, John; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974)Google Scholar.
7 See, for example, Fritsch, Charles T.'s widely influential book: The Anti-Anthropomorphisms of the Greek Pentateuch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See, e.g., Olofsson, Steffan, God is My Rock: A Study of Translation Technique and Theological Exegesis in the Septuagint (ConBOT 31; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1990)Google Scholar; Klein, Michael L., Anthropomorphisms and Anthropopathisms in the Targumim of the Pentateuch: With Parallel Citations from the Septuagint (Jerusalem: Makor, 1982)Google Scholar; Meiser, Martin, ‘Die Septuaginta innerhalb der Literatur des antiken Judentums—Theologische Termini, Motive, Themen’, in Die Septuaginta—Geschichte, Wirkung, Relevanz (ed. Meiser, Martin, et al. ; WUNT 405; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 3–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 13–24; Meiser, Martin, ‘Annotations on Theology in Ancient Scholarship on Homer and the Concept of God in the Septuagint’, in The Septuagint and Its Reception: Collected Essays (ed. Martin Meiser; WUNT 482; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), 3–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 13–15.
9 See the discussion in Wilson, Brittany E., The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Although the literature on the Synoptic problem is of course vast, key representative works that respectively reflect the two-source hypothesis and a version of the Farrer hypothesis are Kloppenborg, John S., The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987)Google Scholar and Goodacre, Mark S., The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2002)Google Scholar.
11 To be clear, I do not believe that we can discern whether the evangelists were consciously promoting an anthropomorphic-looking deity through their incorporation of divine anthropomorphisms. In this article, I am instead interested in the potential effects of these divine anthropomorphisms with respect to how a reader may envision God. On this point of attending to the effect of divine anthropomorphisms, see David Stern, ‘Imitatio Hominis: Anthropomorphism and the Character(s) of God in Rabbinic Literature’, Prooftexts 12 (1992) 151–74.
12 For a critique of this tendency to identify Matthew as ‘Jewish’ and Luke as ‘Gentile’, see Isaac W. Oliver, Torah Praxis After 70 ce: Reading Matthew and Luke-Acts as Jewish Texts (WUNT 355; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), esp. 18–32.
13 This point, of course, becomes all the more striking if one adheres to the Farrer hypothesis.
14 In addition to Isaac Oliver's work, see also, for instance, Christopher Stroup, The Christians Who Became Jews: Acts of the Apostles and Ethnicity in the Roman City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) and the Enoch Seminar's forthcoming volume on the topic ‘Luke and Acts with(in) Second Temple Judaism’.
15 On the nature of God's indirect characterisation in the New Testament, see, e.g., Ling Cheng, The Characterisation of God in Acts: The Indirect Portrayal of an Invisible Character (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2011).
16 Robert L. Brawley, Centering on God: Method and Message in Luke-Acts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 111.
17 On this point of God emerging as a person via anthropomorphic language, see Mark S. Smith, How Human is God? Seven Questions about God and Humanity in the Bible (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2014), esp. 25–41.
18 Knafl, Forming God.
19 Knafl, Forming God, 35. Entire definition originally in italics.
20 Since Philo, interpreters have tended to treat anthropopathism as a separate category from anthropomorphism, but like Knafl, I will treat God's emotions under the wider umbrella term of anthropomorphism since emotions are bodily phenomena.
21 Again, see, e.g., Sheridan, Language for God in Patristic Tradition.
22 John Donahue argues that Mark speaks about God in a ‘sober and reserved way’ (‘A Neglected Factor in the Theology of Mark’, JBL 101 (1982) 563–94, here 569). Paul L. Danove, however, identifies no less than 314 direct and indirect references to God in Mark, despite the paucity of references when compared to Matthew and Luke (Theology of the Gospel of Mark: A Semantic, Narrative, and Rhetorical Study of the Characterization of God (London: T&T Clark, 2019)). For other studies that specifically attend to the role of God in Mark's Gospel, see François Vouga, ‘Habt Glauben an Gott. Der Theozentrismus der Verkündigung des Evangeliums und des christlichen Glaubens im Markusevangelium’, in Texts and Contexts: Biblical Texts in Their Textual and Situational Contexts: Essays in Honor of Lars Hartman (ed. Tord Fornberg and David Hellholm; Oslo: Scandinavian Universities Press, 1995), 93–109; Klaus Scholtissek, ‘Er is nicht ein Gott der Toten, sondern der Lebenden (Mk 12,27). Grundzuge markinischer Theologie’, in Der lebendige Gott. Studien zur Theologie des Neuen Testaments: Festschrift fur Wilhelm Thusing zum 75 (ed. Thomas Soding; Munster: Aschendorf, 1996), 71–100; Paul Danove, ‘The Narrative Function of Mark's Characterization of God’, NovT 43 (2001) 12–30; Jack Dean Kingsbury, ‘“God” within the Narrative World of Mark’, in The Forgotten God: Perspectives in Biblical Theology. Essays in Honor of Paul J. Achtemeier on the Occasion of His Seventy-fifth Birthday (ed. A. Andrew Das and Frank J. Matera; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 75–89; Gudrun Guttenberger, Die Gottesvorstellung im Markusevangelium (BZNW 123; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004); Neyrey, Render to God (2004), 1–43; Laura C. Sweat, The Theological Role of Paradox in the Gospel of Mark (LNTS 492; London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Paul Danove, ‘The “History” of God's Actions in the Gospel of Mark’, RB 127 (2020) 518–43.
23 Donahue, ‘A Neglected Factor’, 567, 569. Donahue also claims that the Markan Jesus ‘speaks with reserve of a transcendent God with virtually no anthropomorphisms’ (593) and that Mark's emphasis on God's transcendence and avoidance of anthropomorphisms serves a missional, or apologetic, function (594).
24 Parables, by virtue of their generic form, resist exact, one-to-one correlations, as when the sower in Mark's parable of the sower could refer to God, Jesus, and/or the Christian preacher (see, e.g., Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 311). As instances of figurative speech, parables also do not fully equate God with human figures. Nonetheless, they still encourage the hearer to think of God in terms of human figures (such as a sower, vineyard owner, and so forth), and they invite further reflection on how God is like these humans.
25 On God as ‘Father’ in the New Testament, Jewish Scripture, and the Greco-Roman world, see Marianne Meye Thompson, The Promise of the Father: Jesus and God in the New Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000); Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 41–166.
26 On God as Father in Mark, see also Danove, Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 202–4. On God's other epithets in Mark, see Donahue, ‘A Neglected Factor’, 565–6; Neyrey, Render to God, 2–8. The two most common names for God in Mark include θɛός (‘God’) (48x) and κύριος (‘Lord’) (9x [cf. 12.9]) (cf. ɛὐλογητός [‘Blessed One’] in 14.61). Note, though, that Mark also applies the title κύριος to Jesus (2.28; 7.28; 11.3; 12.37 [cf. 12.36]; 13.35; 16.[19], [20]) and that the title can sometimes apply to both God and Jesus (e.g., 1.3; 5.19; 11.9).
27 Although most commentators today agree that Abba does not mean ‘Daddy’, it may still connote a sense of intimacy between a child and father (see, e.g., Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 27A; New York: Doubleday, 2009), 977–8). Cf. Thompson, The Promise of the Father, 21–34, 90; Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 76–83.
28 On how statements about God in the New Testament, as in the Hebrew Bible, focus largely on God's actions toward humans, see Hurtado, God in New Testament Theology, 35–7. He writes: ‘the God of the NT is not presented primarily as an object of intellectual reflection but instead is an acting subject, the knowledge of whom is gained by this deity acting toward people and establishing with them a subject-subject relationship’ (37).
29 Knafl, Forming God, 261–4.
30 Note, though, that hearers may also have associated God's act of creating (through Mark's usage of the verb κτίζω in 13.19 [cf. Mark 10.6; Matt 19.4]) with the action of human kings founding a city. See Barbara Schmitz, ‘Does κτίστης Mean “Creator”?: The Lexeme κτι- and Its Implications in the Greek-Hellenistic Context’, in Cosmos and Creation: Second Temple Perspectives (ed. Michael W. Duggan, Renate Egger-Wenzel, and Stefan C. Reif; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 35–54.
31 Mark, as in other texts of the New Testament, also at times refers to God's action more indirectly through the use of passive verbs and the like (e.g., Mark 10.37–40). Beniamin Pascut, however, cautions that God should not always be identified as the subject of passive verbs (‘The So-Called Passivum Divinum in Mark's Gospel’, NovT 54 (2012) 313–333). Peter-Ben Smit and Toon Renssen further caution that there is no evidence to suggest that agentless passives function as a circumlocution, or a way to avoid naming God (‘The passivum divinum: The Rise and Future Fall of an Imaginary Linguistic Phenomenon’, Filología Neotestamentaria 27 (2014) 3–24).
32 For a fuller account of the range of God's actions, see Danove, Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 101–25.
33 For a fuller discussion of God's descriptors, or attributes, see Danove, Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 127–66. See also Guttenberger, Die Gottesvorstellung. Matthew and Luke also highlight the singularity of God's power, knowledge, and goodness. See, e.g., Matt 19.17; 24.36; Luke 1.37; 18.19.
34 Note that while some witnesses leave θέλɛις implied (‘but what you want’), a number of other manuscripts (such as Codex Bezae) include θέλɛις.
35 In 7.6, one can assume that God wants human hearts to be near the divine self since Mark quotes Isaiah, who speaks for God and says the following: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’ (cf. Isa 29.13 LXX).
36 On God as the one who experiences these various actions, see Danove, Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 185–99. See also pp. 167–84.
37 See also the vineyard owner's direct discourse in 12.6.
38 On God's voice, see also Danove, Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 129–30.
39 On this point, see Brawley, Centering on God, 122–3.
40 See also Danove, Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 191–2, 196–8.
41 Brawley, Centering on God, 110–11.
42 Cf. Job 22.26; Ps 121.1; Luke 18.13; John 11.41.
43 E.g., Matt 22.44; 26.64; Mark 16.[19]; Luke 20.42–3; 22.69; Acts 2.34–5; Rom 8.34; 1 Cor 15.25; Eph 1.20; Col 3.1; Heb 1.3, 13; 8.1; 10.12.
44 In the longer ending of Mark, we also find that Jesus’ exaltation to God's right occurs directly after he is ‘taken up into heaven’ (16.19), a detail that firmly situates God as a king ruling in heaven alongside Jesus.
45 For specific treatments of God in Matthew and Luke's respective accounts, see François Bovon, ‘Le Dieu de Luc’, RSR 69 (1981) 279–300; Robert L. Mowery, ‘God, Lord and Father: The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew’, BR 33 (1988) 24–36; Brawley, Centering on God (1990) 111–24; Robert L. Mowery, ‘Direct Statements Concerning God's Activity in Luke-Acts’, in Society of Biblical Literature 1990 Seminar Papers (ed. David J. Lull; SBLSP 29; Atlanta: Scholars, 1990), 196–211; Robert L. Mowery, ‘Lord, God, and Father: Theological Language in Luke-Acts’, in Society of Biblical Literature 1995 Seminar Papers (ed. Eugene H. Lovering Jr.; SBLSP 34; Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), 82–101; Daniel Marguerat, The First Christian Historian: Writing the “Acts of the Apostles” (SNTSMS 121; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 85–108; John T. Carroll, ‘The God of Israel and the Salvation of the Nations: The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles’, in The Forgotten God: Perspectives in Biblical Theology. Essays in Honor of Paul J. Achtemeier on the Occasion of His Seventy-fifth Birthday (ed. A. Andrew Das and Frank J. Matera; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 91–106; Neyrey, Render to God (2004), 44–106; Diane G. Chen, God as Father in Luke-Acts (StBibLit 92; New York: Lang, 2006); Cheng, The Characterisation of God in Acts (2011); Scott Shauf, The Divine in Acts and in Ancient Historiography (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); Christine H. Aarflot, God (in) Acts: The Characterization of God in the Acts of the Apostles (Eugene: Pickwick, 2020); Wilson, The Embodied God (2021), 23–148; Steve Walton, Reading Acts Theologically (LNTS 661; London: T&T Clark, 2022), 15–30. (Note that when compared to Mark and Luke, there are the fewest studies on God in Matthew.)
46 Scholars often identify Matthew's ‘kingdom of heaven’ language as a circumlocution and thus a way to avoid saying God's name, but this argument does not seem entirely plausible since Matthew refers to ‘God’ (θɛός) a total of 51 times in his narrative. On Matthew and Luke's portrayal of God as a heavenly king, see the discussion below.
47 Luke applies the title κύριος to God approximately 55 times in his two-volume work. (Cf. Mark 9x; Matt 18x.) For a discussion of Luke's use of this title, along with the titles ‘God’ and ‘Father’, see Mowery, ‘Lord, God, and Father’. For other images that potentially convey God's martial ability, see Luke 1.51–2; Acts 13.11; 23.3. Note too that Luke is the only evangelist to refer to God as ‘Saviour’ (σωτήρ) (Luke 1.47; cf. 1 Tim 1.1), a title that has military connotations in a Roman imperial context.
48 For a discussion of Matthew's application of the title ‘Father’ to God, along with the titles ‘God’ and ‘Lord’, see Mowery, ‘God, Lord and Father’. For an in-depth discussion of Luke's depiction of God as ‘Father’, see Chen, God as Father in Luke-Acts. See also Thompson, Promise of the Father, 87–115; Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 84–107.
49 Like Mark, Matthew and Luke primarily place this epithet on the lips of Jesus. Luke refers to God as ‘Father’ 17 times (or 16 times, depending on the textual tradition) in his Gospel and three times in Acts (Luke 2.49; 6.36; 9.26; 10.21 [2x], 22 [3x]; 11.2, 13; 12.30, 32; 22.29, 42; 23.[34], 46; 24.49; Acts 1.4, 7; 2.33).
50 On God as ‘Father’ in John, see Thompson, Promise of the Father, 133–54; Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 57–100. On how Luke includes intimations of God as ‘Mother’, see Wilson, ‘Forming God’, 784–85.
51 See Matt 6.24; 18.23–35; 21.33–44; 22.1–14; Luke 14.15–24; 16.1–13; 20.9–19. (Note that some of these parables also portray God as a king or a property owner. Note too that Matthew and Luke likewise associate Jesus with a slave master in a number of their parables. See, e.g., Matt 13.24–30, 36–43; 24.45–51; 25.14–30; Luke 12.35–48; 17.7–10; 19.11–27.) For a discussion of these sayings and parables, see Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 102–29.
52 On the identification of God's followers as ‘slaves’ in Jewish Scripture, see, e.g., Deut 34.5; Josh 24.29; Isa 48.20; Ps 78.70; John Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity: A Traditio-Historical and Exegetical Examination (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), esp. 47–59. On master/slave language in apocalyptic rhetoric, see Beverly Roberts Gaventa, ‘The Rhetoric of Violence and the God of Peace in Paul's Letter to the Romans’, in Paul, John, and Apocalyptic Eschatology: Studies in Honour of Martinus C. de Boer (ed. Jan Krans, et al.; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 61–75, esp. 66–7, 69–75. On the problematic ways in which such slavery language can reinscribe lived realities, see Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (New York: Routledge, 2018).
53 For more in-depth discussions of God's actions in Luke-Acts, see Walton, ‘Acts of—God?’, Reading Acts Theologically, Brill: Leiden, esp. 16–20, 28–30; Robert L. Mowery, ‘Direct Statements Concerning God's Activity in Luke-Acts’ (SBL Seminar Papers; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990); Aarflot, God (in) Acts; Wilson, ‘Forming God’, 787–8. While Mowery and Walton highlight the number of times that God appears as a proper noun and the subject of verbs in Luke's narrative, Aarflot's extensive study principally focuses on ‘how God is characterized through God's actions in the narrative of Acts’ (God (in) Acts, 4 [italics original]).
54 On God as creator, see Matt 19.4; Acts 4.24; 14.15; 17.24–8 (cf. Mark 10.6). (See also Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 345–83; Schmitz, ‘Does κτίστης Mean “Creator”?’.) On God forgiving, see Matt 6.12, 14–15 [cf. 18.23–35]; Luke 5.21; 11.4; 23.[34]; Acts 8.22 [cf. Luke 4.18; Acts 5.31; 26.18] (cf. Mark 2.7; 11.25). On God's direct speech, see Matt 3.17; 17.5; Luke 3.22; 9.35 (cf. Mark 1.11; 9.7). (Luke may also recount an additional instance of God's direct speech in Acts 10 [see 10.13, 15; cf. 11.7, 9], although in this instance, I believe that Jesus is more likely the speaker. See Wilson, Embodied God, 87–8.) On God sending and commanding angels, see Matt 4.6; 26.53; Luke 1.19, 26; 4.10. On God giving the Holy Spirit, see Luke 11.13; Acts 2.17–18, 33; 5.32; 15.8; cf. 10.45, 47.
55 On how God provides for humans (and other creatures), see esp. Matt 6.19–33; 7.7–11; Luke 11.9–13; 12.22–31. On how God's personal attention extends to knowing every hair on a human's head, see Matt 10.29–30; Luke 12.6–7.
56 In Luke 6.36, note that Jesus urges his listeners to be ‘merciful as your Father is merciful’ and not to be ‘perfect as your Father is perfect’ as in Matt 5.48. On God's mercy, see also Carroll, ‘The God of Israel’, 104–5.
57 On how God and Jesus know human hearts in Luke's narrative, see Collin Blake Bullard, Jesus and the Thoughts of Many Hearts: Implicit Christology and Jesus’ Knowledge in the Gospel of Luke (LNTS 530; London: T&T Clark, 2015).
58 E.g. Acts 2.14–36; 3.15, 22–6; 4.10; 5.30–2; 10.40; 44–8; 11.15–18; 13.30–7, 46–9; 14.27; 15.7–21; 17.31.
59 As Brawley puts it: ‘[I]n Luke-Acts God does have a biography . . .—not literally but equivalently. There is no biography from birth to death, but God does have a past, present, and future’ (Centering on God, 110).
60 Indeed, Luke identifies God as the God of the people Israel (Luke 1.16, 68; Acts 13.17; cf. Matt 15.31), the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Luke 20.37; Acts 3.13; 7.32; cf. Matt 22.32), and the God of ‘our fathers’ (Acts 3.13; 22.14; 24.14). Brawley, Centering on God, 116. See also Carroll, ‘The God of Israel’, 97–100.
61 Of course, there are elements of God's past, present, and future in all three Synoptics. See, e.g., Danove, Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 118–25. Luke, though, is the one who elaborates the most on the past, present, and future scope of God's actions. See Aarflot, God (in) Acts, 229–38.
62 For Matthew's association of God with heaven, see Matt 3.17; 5.16, 34, 45, 48; 6.1, 9–10, 14, 26, 32; 7.11, 21; 10.32, 33; 11.25; 12.50; 15.13; 16.17; 18.10, 14, 19, 35; 23.9, 22. For Luke's association of God with heaven, see Luke 2.13–14 (cf. 19.38); 3.22; 9.16; 10.21; 11.[2], 13; 18.13; Acts 7.49, 55–6.
63 Matt 22.41–6; 26.64; Luke 20.41–4; 22.69.
64 For a summary of the different interpretive options as to why Jesus is standing and not sitting next to God in Acts 7.55–6, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 31; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 392–3.
65 Note, though, that Stephen is reticent to speak of what he sees. In 7.56, he does not report that he saw God's glory; he only relates that he sees the Son of Man standing to the right of God.
66 Codex Bezae does not include the phrase ‘coming from the mouth’ (ἐκπορɛυομένῳ διὰ στόματος), perhaps in an effort to eliminate the corporeal anthropomorphism.
67 Note, though, that a number of textual witnesses do include the extended Deut 8.3 citation, presumably in an effort to correlate Jesus' words with his words in Matt 4.4. Note also that Luke may refer to God's ‘mouth’ (στόμα) in Acts 22.14, although the antecedent in this case is more likely the ascended Jesus.
68 English translations often omit the reference to God's ‘feet’ in these Isaiah citations, perhaps as a way to avoid mentioning this divine body part.
69 Although commentators often interpret Jesus' saying about the pure in heart seeing God as a metaphor or as a ‘spiritual’ seeing, this tendency to identify such language as ‘figurative’ or ‘metaphorical’ should not obscure the fact that some Jews in antiquity may very well have expected to see God in a bodily sense.
70 In both these references, it may be better to translate πρόσωπον as ‘presence’. See the discussion below. If πρόσωπον communicates God's presence, it could be functioning as an instance of synecdoche, or a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole.
71 On the potential scriptural intertexts of Luke's phrase, see Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G., ‘A Note on Matthew XII. 28 Par. Luke XI. 20’, NTS 11 (1965) 167–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wall, Robert W., ‘“The Finger of God”: Deuteronomy 9.10 and Luke 11.20’, NTS 33 (1987) 144–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 On this argument (to which none of the following authors subscribe since Matthew has no problem using anthropomorphisms elsewhere in his narrative), see Hamerton-Kelly, ‘A Note on Matthew XII. 28 Par. Luke XI. 20’, 167–9; Wall, ‘“The Finger of God”’, 144–5; Ross, C. S., ‘Spirit or Finger’, ExpTim 72 (1960–1) 157–8Google Scholar.
73 See Mitchell, Christine, ‘Heart and Mind in the Hebrew Scriptures’, Touchstone 23 (2005) 5–13Google Scholar.
74 On how these (and other) body parts can function idiomatically, see Knafl, Forming God, 257–8; Smith, How Human is God?, 25–41. See also Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli, Body Symbolism in the Bible (trans. Linda M. Maloney; Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2001).
75 On this latter point, see Wall, ‘The Finger of God’.
76 Elliot R. Wolfson, ‘Judaism and Incarnation: The Imaginal Body of God’, in Christianity in Jewish Terms (ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky; Boulder: Westview Press, 2000) 239–54.
77 On the depictions of God (including God's hands) at Dura Europos, see Christoph Markschies, God's Body: Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Images of God (trans. Alexander Johannes Edmonds; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019) 93–99.
78 For a discussion of why divine anthropomorphisms in scriptural texts may not always function as metaphors, see Halton, Charles, A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2021) 39–51Google Scholar.
79 Once again, on the importance of attending to the effect of divine anthropomorphisms and how it explores the character of God (in this instance, with respect to rabbinic literature), see Stern, ‘Imitatio Hominis’ 151–74.
80 On God knowing about the eschaton, see Matt 24.36 (cf. Mark 13.32). (On God's knowledge in Luke, see below.) On God having a will, see Matt 26.39; Luke 22.42 (cf. Mark 14.36); and the references in the footnote below. On God being well pleased, see Matt 3.17; 12.18; 17.5; Luke 3.22; 12.32 (cf. Mark 1.11).
81 On God knowing what humans need, see Matt 6.8; 6.32; 24.36; Luke 12.30. (On God knowing the Son, see Matt 11.27; Luke 10.22.) On God's will and desires, see Matt 6.10; 7.21; 12.50; 18.14; 26.39; 27.43; Luke 11.[2]; 22.42; Acts 13.22 (cf. Mark 14.36).
82 On God remembering, see Luke 1.54, 72; cf. Luke 12.6; Acts 10.31. On God knowing human hearts, see Luke 16.15; Acts 1.24; 15.8. (Cf. Luke 2.35; 5.22; 6.8; 9.46–7; 24.38.) On God's plan, or ‘purpose’ and ‘will’ (βουλή), see Luke 7.30; Acts 2.23; 4.28; 13.36; 20.27. On God's foreknowledge, see Acts 2.23. (Cf. Luke 22.22; Acts 4.28.) On the theme of God's plan in Luke's narrative, see Charles H. Cosgrove: ‘The Divine ΔΕΙ in Luke-Acts: Investigations into the Lukan Understanding of God's Providence’, NovT 26 (1984) 168–90; John T. Squires, The Plan of God in Luke-Acts (SNTSMS 76; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
83 Luke may also imply that God smells when he mentions that the priest Zechariah offers incense to God (Luke 1.9–11) and that the Gentile Cornelius's prayers ascend as a ‘memorial offering’ before God (Acts 10.4). On how God's speech may also function as a sense, see Yael Avrahami's discussion of the sensorium in the Hebrew Bible in The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible (LHBOTS 545; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012).
84 On the verb ἐπισκέπτομαι and its cognates, see Hermann W. Beyer, ‘ἐπισκέπτομαι κτλ.’, TDNT 2:599–622.
85 As Scott Shauf puts it: ‘Luke couples a firm sense of the particularity of God—God as the God of Israel—with an expanding sense of divine partiality. God is still partial to his people, but inclusion in the people of God is now open to all’ (Divine in Acts, 264).
86 Brawley identifies a total of three instances of God's interior emotions in Luke-Acts: Luke 3.22; Acts 7.34; 13.22 (Centering on God, 122–23).
87 Luke, to be clear, adapts his portrayal of God to a more philosophical narrative audience in scenes such as Paul's Areopagus speech (Acts 17:16–34). My point is that Luke does not reflect an overarching anti-anthropomorphic tendency. On the phrase ‘living God’ in the LXX and the ancient world, see Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 385–426. On references to the ‘living God’ in the New Testament, see Matt 16.16; 26.63; Acts 14.15; Rom 9.26; 2 Cor 3.3; 6.16; 1 Thess 1.9; 1 Tim 3.15; 4.10; Heb 3.12; 9.14; 10.31; 12.22; Rev 7.2; cf. John 6.57; Rom 14.11; Rev 4.9; 10.6; 15.7.
