Saving Cross of the Suffering Christ : The Death of Jesus in Lukan Soteriology

Through an exegetical analysis of the passion references in Luke and Acts, this book shows how Luke presents the death of Jesus both as a mechanism of atonement within God's plan of salvation and as a marker of Jesus' identity as the messiah.

What is the place of the cross in the thought of the third evangelist? This book seeks to show the central significance of the death of Jesus for Luke''s understanding of (1) how salvation is accomplished and (2) what it means for Jesus to be the messiah. Whereas previous authors have helpfully attended to individual motifs within Luke''s account of the passion, this book takes more of a wide-angle approach to the topic, moving from the very first allusions to Jesus'' rejection at the beginning of Luke''s gospel all the way through to the retrospective references to Jesus'' death that occur throughout the speeches of Acts. By focusing on the inter-relationship of the various parts that form the whole of the Lukan portrayal of Jesus'' death, Wilson proposes fresh solutions to several of the intractable exegetical disputes related to the place of the cross in Lukan theology, thereby helping to situate Lukan soteriology within the broader context of Jewish and Christian belief and practice in the first century.

"[...] Benjamin Wilson offers a fresh contribution to a crowded field of studies on the death of Jesus in Luke-Acts. [...] Wilson’s monograph is commendable for its masterful engagement with the voluminous corpus of secondary literature, its patient attentiveness to Luke’s narrative and theological concerns, and its original and convincing argumentation. [...] Wilson’s monograph is a model of outstanding NT scholarship. This represents perhaps the new standard treatment of the saving significance of the cross in Lukan theology, a work with which future studies must reckon."
Brian J. Tabb in: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 59/1, 2016, pp. 639-642