“I Will Also Ask You a Question” (Luke 20:3): The Social and Rhetorical Function of Opposing-Turn Questions in the Gospel of Luke

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Jesus’s mastery of the use of questions as a method of public argumentation is a key component of his characterization in the Gospel of Luke. As Douglas Estes has argued convincingly, a bias against questions exists within the Western intellectual tradition, which tends to favor declarative propositions for the negotiation of truth claims. This bias has resulted in the general neglect of the logical, rhetorical, literary, and philosophical role that interrogatives play in agonistic discourse (Estes, 2–9). Reading the questions of Jesus in Luke through a socio-rhetorical lens, I argue that a proper understanding of the social function of questions in the first century reveals a key insight underlying Luke’s theology of the crucifixion, suffering, and death of Jesus that has until recently gone unnoticed: namely, that within an honor/shame social matrix, Jesus’s failure to respond to the questions of his interrogators constitutes a willful submission to the violent principalities and powers of this world.