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conventions of friendship. It was a cultural assumption in Mediterranean antiquity that "friends own everything in common."34 When the host-friend goes to his sleeping-friend, the sleeping-friend is obligated to give the host-friend the bread he needs for his guest-friend. At this point, the result of the reasoning about hospitality becomes the case in the reasoning about friendship. The intersection of the reasoning creates a double-column of reasoning in the story that intersects where the host-friend asks his sleeping-friend for bread. The argument in Luke 11:5-7 introduces an analogy between the acts of hospitality within friendship and the acts of Father God to humans. The argument is similar to Hermogenes' introduction of farmers' toil over the land and the crops as an analogy for teachers' education of their students. These verses, then, have an intriguing relation to the fifth step in Hermogenean elaboration: argument from analogy.35 Their basic function is the assertion that just as no one has a friend who will refuse to give something needed, even under extreme circumstances, so no one has a heavenly Father who will refuse one's requests, even under extreme circumstances. Thus, verses 5-7 present what host-friends do as an analogy to what God the Father does.36 Luke 11:8 appends a rationale in the form of an objection37 to the argument from analogy in Luke 11:5-7. Since verse 7 uses the verb didomi (give) once, verse 8 uses it twice, and the subject is asking, giving, and receiving bread, the argument from analogy and the objection clearly elaborate the first petition for communal benefaction in the Lordis Prayer (11:3: "Give us this day our daily bread."). The analogy intertwines hospitality with friendship, but the objection delimits the focus to an issue of friendship: "Why does one friend, when asked, give bread to another friend, even when it is a severe imposition?" Social convention would suggest the rationale: "Because the one asked is a friend of the one who asks." Jesus' statement subverts customary social reasoning by emphatically replacing this rationale with: "Because of his shamelessness" (anaideia). Thus Jesus' statement presents an ideological recon- 34Koina gar ta ton philon: Epictetus, Oresteia 735; Plutarch, How to Tell a Flatterer 65A. See Scott, Hear Then the Parable, 90-91, for more examples. Back 35Hock and O'Neil, The Progymnasmata, 177. Back 36Some interpreters (e.g., Talbert Reading Luke, 132-33) consider vv. 5-7 to be an argument from lesser (friend) to greater (heavenly Father), but this imposes 11:13 and 18:1-8 on these verses. Back 37antilegein: Hock and O'Neil, The Progymnasmata, 100-101. Back |