At New Hope, our pastor does an excellent job teaching the Word as he preaches. For more than a year, he preached through Luke’s treatise that the King James crew called “The ACTS of the Apostles.”
What is a treatise? The Greek is logos which should sound familiar to everyone. The concordance calls it “word” or “discourse.”
The dictionary defines discourse as “communication of thought by words.” In John 1:1, the Apostle John under inspiration of the Holy Ghost called Jesus Christ the Word, logos.
Jesus Christ was the living communication between God and mankind. Wow! Such a deep thought.
The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach,
Acts 1:1
The only place logos is translated into treatise is in Acts 1:1. Why is that? Do you ever wonder what spurred the translators to make the word choices they did?
I do. But I tend to ask a ton of questions. It’s part of the curse of being a creative writer. Or maybe it’s a blessing. After all, asking “what if?” lends to excellent plot twists in my fiction writing.
What’s interesting to me is that Luke tells Theophilus to remember the “former treatise” that he’d written. What is he referring to? The Gospel of Luke!
Our pastor has been teaching from Luke’s “former treatise” through the month of December and will continue for the foreseeable future. I’m stoked to learn about Jesus Christ from this Gospel, the longest according to the number of words written in it.
Luke’s content, while similar to the other two synoptic Gospels, is fifty percent unique only to his writings. Wow!
I’m so thankful for the truth of God’s Word and the various men he used to write down His message. Thank You, Lord for the treatise of Luke preserved in the Holy Bible for all of us.
A Pew Perspective 