The Wirkungsgeschichte of Henry Joel Cadbury as an Objective Historian: An Exploration of America’s Premiere Luke–Acts Scholar

Henry Joel Cadbury, despite having written in the early to mid-20th century, remains one of the giants in the field of Luke–Acts. His conclusions are still influential to this day. This article argues that one of the reasons Cadbury is still so influential—apart from the fact that he produced lexical and philological work of the first rate—is that his work is viewed as purely historical, not “tainted” by theological aims or influences. The argument in this article is that a careful reading of The Making of Luke–Acts in combination with Cadbury’s paper “The Quaker Approach to History” demonstrates that the scope of The Making of Luke–Acts was governed by a theological approach to the Bible. While this in itself is not negative, it should warn us away from accepting Cadbury’s historical conclusions on Acts as more objective than confessing scholars, because the latter work within a theological confession and Cadbury supposedly does not.