No canonical Gospel is more concerned with wealth and poverty than Luke. A centuries-long debate rages over just how revolutionary Luke’s message is. This book seeks to recover Luke’s radical economic message, to place it in its ancient context, and to tease out its prophetic implications for today. Luke has a radical message of good news for the poor and resistance to wealth. God is shown to favor the poor, championing their struggle for justice while condemning the rich and recommending a sweeping disposal of wealth for the benefit of the poor. This represents a distinct break from the ethics of the Roman Empire and a profound challenge to modern economic systems. Generations of interpreters have worked to file down Luke’s sharp edges, from scribes copying ancient manuscripts, to early Christian authors, to contemporary scholars. Such domestication disfigures the gospel, silencing its critique of an economic system whose unremitting drive for profit and economic growth continues to widen the gap between rich and poor while threatening life-altering, environmental change. It is time to reclaim the bracing, prophetic call of Luke’s economic message that warns against the destructive power of wealth and insists on justice for the poor and marginalized.

The goals of Management and the Gospel: Luke's Radical Message for the First and Twenty-First Centuries may appear to be simple: it describes what management theory and practice looked like in the first century, uses this as a lens to examine what the Gospel of Luke says about management, and draws out implications for today. However, the book is quite profound in finding that management is a dominant theme in the Gospel, that its message is consistently counter-cultural, and that Luke contains a four-phase 'how to' process model to help readers to implement change. Readers will acquire a new way to understand the Gospel as well as the moral foundations of modern management.

This social-scientific study of the Lukan text in its original context provides an embracing framework for appreciating both the initial and the contemporary significance of its radical social message - a vision of reordered relationships in the 'economy of the kingdom of God.' A fresh approach to Luke with many new points which future Lukan research will have to consider. John Elliott, Professor Emeritus, University of San Francisco

This study uses Wolfgang Iser's theories about how reading the Luke-Acts affects the reader's understanding and behaviour relating to the issues of wealth and poverty.

While several recent studies have suggested that the Gospel of Luke recommends generous almsgiving or a relatively benign sharing ethic that mimics existing redistibutive measures in early Roman Palestine, this book argues that a much more subversive reading of the Gospel's wealth and possessions traditions is defensible.

How does the proclamation of good news to the poor in Luke's Gospel relate to wealth and poverty? What does Luke-Acts mean to affluent Christians and churches in our time? In a fresh, systematic way, Professor Pilgrim surveys Old Testament tradition on the poor and describes the Jesus movement as background for understanding Luke-Acts.