John Kilgallen, «Jesus’ First Trial: Messiah and Son of God (Luke 22,66-71)», Vol. 80 (1999) 401-414

Luke, according to the Two-Source Theory, read Mark. At the first trial of Jesus, that before the Sanhedrin, Mark has together, "Messiah, Son of God". Luke has intentionally separated the two titles. The present essay finds the explanation for separating Son of God from Messiah in the Annunciation scene of the Gospel. It is Luke’s intention that the reader understand Son of God in a way that admittedly the Sanhedrin did not. The laws of narratology indicate that Luke 1,35, a part of the Lucan introduction, be used by the reader to interpret Son of God at Luke 22,70.

over centuries had developed. The Messiah, when in the Third Gospel called Son of God, is for Luke engendered in the womb of a woman by a mysterious action of God’s Holy Spirit and power²⁴. The non-sexual, creative intervention of God accounts for what is born of the woman, and leaves one with the logical conclusion that Jesus, her son and David’s progeny, is Son of God. Generated non-sexually by God, Jesus has no other cause of his physical being than the God who acts upon the womb of the woman so that a child be produced²⁵.

        Because of this intervention, the woman can describe herself as virgin. Because of this intervention one can explain the peculiar, mysterious, unique relationship occasionally glimpsed in the adult life of Jesus, a relationship expressed by Jesus in Father-Son terminology. Such a remarkable relationship it was that would lead him to say that only he, and those to whom he revealed his knowledge, knew the Father (Luke 10,22). This relationship, Luke insists through his Annunciation story, makes clear that the Father-Son terminology of Jesus’ adult life cannot refer to adoptive kinship: Messiah in the Tradition would mean that, but, for Luke, it no longer means that.

        Thus, when one reads a description of the opening "trial" of Jesus in Luke, one can be and should be very clear, with the help