In chapter 3 my discovery of a chiastic pattern in Luke 9.1–50 was shown to have several important consequences for the interpretation of 9.37–43a in particular. That same discovery also has significant implications for my reading of the story in Acts 16.16–18. Most notably, the subordination of exorcism as a theme to Luke's interest in the death of Jesus and its implications for discipleship (Luke 9.18–27) creates an expectation that subsequent references to exorcism in Luke's volumes may likewise be part of some larger schematic structure whose primary emphasis falls on non-exorcistic concerns. But just as significant, when Luke 9.1–50 and its constituent units are read not only as part of the Lucan Gospel but also as integral components of the larger macrotextual unity of Luke–Acts, that section's concluding element – the interchange about the strange exorcist who is not associated with the twelve but none the less performs exorcisms in Jesus' name (9.49–50) – offers strong clues regarding the identity of the particular schematic structure that gives the Acts 16 story its specific rhetorical weight in Luke's argument. For reasons discussed fully below, that structure is best understood as consisting of the Jesus–Paul parallels, which, though increasingly recognised for their role in tying Luke's two volumes together into a single story, have specific features that are often overlooked.

In order to derive maximum insight from the method described in chapter 1, each of the analyses above has approached its particular story in a deliberately schematising fashion, breaking the text down into several different levels of style (e.g., transitivity and intertextuality) and context (e.g., co-text and culture). In chapter 4, however, my treatments of co-text, implied situation, and context of culture began to pull together the main discoveries from the various levels of analysis and lay out the contours of an interpretative synthesis. My aim here is to finish what I began to do there.

In the interest of producing a synthesis, the relationship between my genre-critical inquiry into the Acts 16 narrative's silence about the fate of the slave-girl and my prior sketch of the four stories' implied situation has special importance. More specifically, by demonstrating how that particular instance of silence helps to foreground an image of Paul as an ideal Jew who embodies the antithesis of paganism and nobly endures the Judeophobic machinations of greedy charlatans and gullible magistrates, my cultural analysis of Acts 16.16–18 and its immediate co-text confirms a central thesis in my prior reconstruction of the exorcism stories' context of situation: namely, as the implied audience of these episodes needed reassurance that both Paul and the Jesus he preached were loyal to Jewish ancestral custom and legitimate heirs to the heritage of Israel, that audience itself must have been either partly Jewish, or partly composed of the sorts of Gentiles represented by Lydia in Acts 16 (i.e., those who to one degree or another had sympathised with Judaism before joining the Christ cult), or constituted chiefly by a combination of those two socioreligious types.

A wide selection of critical commentaries on the Gospel of Luke has been available for several decades; and although the Lucan Gospel's companion volume, the Acts of the Apostles, is not covered by a comparable range and depth of exegetical comment, it cannot seriously claim to be a victim of neglect. As the attention these commentaries give in particular to the Lucan exorcism stories differs in no obvious way from the care they bestow on other kinds of materials in Luke's writings, potential readers of the present study may wonder what could possibly be provided here that is not already available in the best commentaries. This question deserves a considered reply. It also leads very naturally into other matters – the precise topic and aims of the present study, for instance, and how it is similar to and different from other works of scholarship on related subjects – which likewise ought to be addressed in an introduction to this sort of work.

Like modern critical commentaries on other writings of the New Testament, those devoted to the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles prove on close inspection to be richly interdiscursive events; for they not only tend to fulfil their obligation to engage with the ancient text in its original language but also either assume or explicitly interact with an impressive range of other discourses, for the most part modern scholarly ones, including but not limited to other commentaries on the same text.

Like the tradition of the Gerasene demoniac, the story of Jesus' encounter with a man and his demonically afflicted son is found in all three Synoptics (Matt. 17.14–21; Mark 9.14–29; Luke 9.37–43a). In all three the man discloses that some of Jesus' disciples had already proved themselves incapable of correcting the boy's condition; in all three Jesus responds with a lament over the faithlessness of his generation; and in all three Jesus himself ultimately succeeds against the demon and liberates the boy. Not without reason, therefore, the three accounts are normally read by scholars of the Gospels as variant renderings of a single unit of tradition.

Yet, like many other units in the triple tradition, this one has been shaped into three markedly different performances. Indeed, as detailed at several points below, the particular configuration of agreements and disagreements between the three accounts is sufficiently tangled to cause serious headaches for anyone bent on having a tidy solution to the Synoptic problem. Even more than the stories analysed in the last two chapters, therefore, Luke 9.37–43a welcomes a reading that is released from the bonds of the source-critical yoke. By taking full advantage of the methodological jubilee, and more specifically by shifting critical focus away from the elusive interaction between tradition and redaction to the interplay between story and co-text, the reading below has implications that ripple powerfully throughout the remainder of this study, impacting my understanding of everything from the structure of Luke 9.1–50 as a whole and the relative prominence of exorcism in it to the macrostructural function of the story in Acts 16.16–18 and the implied situation of all four Lucan narratives of exorcism.

To a degree which many interpreters have underestimated at their peril, the Synoptic tradition of the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8.26–39; par. Matt. 8.28–34; Mark 5.1–20) is an interpretative mine-field. The multiplicity of demonic powers that possess the man from Gerasa (Luke 8.27, 30–33), for instance, has been taken by some interpreters as evidence that the man was suffering from multiple personality disorder, a diagnosis that imposes a modern medical category on the ancient Mediterranean world-view of the text and requires Jesus to heal an illness which comparable folk healers probably never heal. The same feature, moreover, in conjunction with the demons' disclosure of their collective name as ‘Legion’ (Luke 8.30), has enticed several other analysts into interpreting the story as a repudiation of ‘the Roman military garrison’, a reading which overlooks the ultimately intertextual function of the story's military lexis and underestimates the importance of Jewish systems of impurity in the assumed context of culture. And the request by Jesus for the demonic power's name (Luke 8.30) has led still other interpreters to worry about how Jesus' method of exorcism can escape being viewed as less ‘Christian’ than ‘magical’, a problem that dissolves as soon as the distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘Christianity’ (or religion) is recognised as less substantive than perspectival.

But more importantly, these kinds of difficulties and the desire to solve them have become so distracting in scholarly commentary on this story that several important aspects of the text's style and cultural context have suffered neglect.

Recent efforts by linguists and literary theorists to build an interface between their respective disciplines have produced analytical methods that have much to offer anyone interested in the relations between texts and their extratextual contexts of production. As these methods not only contribute to the type of discourse analysis used in the present study but also differ in various ways from most other forms of critical practice in biblical studies, their distinctive vocabulary and position in contemporary theoretical discussion ought to be clarified at the outset. However, in order to keep this part of the work close to my primary interest (i.e., to apply the methods to the exorcism stories of Luke–Acts), the illustration of critical concepts in the present chapter focuses as much as possible on the exorcism in Luke 4.33–37; thus, while a few essential matters of terminology and theory are treated on their own in the immediately ensuing sections, the method and its application are tightly integrated throughout the rest of the chapter.

Sociostylistic theory

Like most varieties of stylistics, the critical practice of sociostylistics consists primarily of the analysis of linguistic style. However, as the phrase ‘linguistic style’ can convey several different meanings, it too needs to be defined if the method and object of the present study are to be understood clearly. In this connection, the definition offered by the Finnish linguist N. Enkvist is particularly helpful. In Enkvist's view, linguistic style is situationally conditioned choice.