None of this is to imply that the parallel with 1 Samuel is the only, or even necessarily the main, key to Luke’s gospel. But the close similarity so far suggests strongly (against classical form-criticism) that Luke is not simply collecting bits of tradition and stringing them together at random; and it suggests, too (against the main forms of redaction-criticism) that the arrangement which Luke is adopting is not simply in pursuit of a home-made scheme of theology invented against a background of events at the start of the second Christian generation, but that he is telling his story in a
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