5 - Δίκαιος as a christological descriptor: Acts

Summary

In the previous chapter, most of Luke's uses of δíκαιος were examined, but there remain four occasions when he used this word to refer specifically to Jesus. Of these one, Luke 23.47, is that verse whose ‘meaning’ is the focus of this whole enquiry, consequently it will not be analysed in this section. The others are found in Acts 3.14; 7.52 and 22.14. Their distribution is of interest in that they belong to what Conzelmann wrote of as the period of the Church. Luke assigns these uses of δíκαιος to Peter, Stephen and Paul, and always in a Jewish context.

These occurrences of δíκαιος have been thoroughly explored by commentators, but the present approach – seeking a pool of meaning on which the evangelist drew – allows further comment, largely because it differs from what has frequently been the case: there seems to be wide agreement that δíκαιος is explained best as a title or quality of the messiah, a term drawn from Deutero-Isaiah's 'ebed Yahweh and (or) from 1 Enoch. This study's approach differs from the apparent consensus in that it proceeds on the principle that there are no synonyms:

The first principle of semantic analysis of lexical items is that there are ‘no synonyms,’ in the sense that no lexical items ever have completely the same meanings in all of the contexts in which they might occur. Even if two lexical items seem not to be distinguishable in their designative or denotative meanings, they do differ in terms of their connotative or associative meanings. This principle of ‘no synonyms’ may also be stated in terms of the fact that no two closely related meanings ever occur with exactly the same range of referents, much less the same set of connotative or associative features.

(Louw and Nida, p. xv)