212 Kenneth D. Litwak understand Paul’s speech generically. Having established that Luke uses the Scriptures of Israel, through framing in discourse, to lead his audience to expect Paul’s speech to be an instance of prophetic anti- idol polemic, the next question is, Why would Luke do this? a) Scriptural Echoes and Continuity through Framing in Discourse Luke takes this approach in order to show continuity between Paul’s message and the message of the prophets. The oracles of the prophets against idolatry teach that idols are false gods. Paul argues that idols are not the true God, but that the Athenians are ignorant of the true God. The prophets assert that God created everything, and therefore cannot dwell in a temple. Paul argues that God created everything and cannot therefore dwell in a temple. The prophets predict a coming judgment by God against those who seek idols. Paul promises a day when God will judge those who seek idols. These points of similarity, and the characterization of Paul’s speech as the anti-idol polemic of Israelite prophets, means that Paul’s speech stands in the same stream of scriptural tradition as the prophetic critiques made by Isaiah, Jeremiah and other prophets concerning idols. These connections between Paul’s speech and that of Israel’s prophets of old show a continuity in message and emphases between Israel’s prophetic oracles and Paul’s speech. Also arguing that Luke was concerned with continuity between Israel in the past and Christians in his day, G.W. Trompf has shown that Luke, like Polybius and other Hellenistic historiographers, built “recurrence” and “reenactment” into his narrative. Luke crafted his narrative to present events in Luke-Acts as reenactments of events in the Scriptures of Israel. According to Trompf, Luke was not simply interested in fleeting allusions to past parallels, or making orderly pesharim on long sequences in the Scriptures, or using “prophecy fulfillment” to authenticate Jesus. Rather, “Luke was fundamentally interested in...directly historical connections as an historian of the Hellenistic period”. Luke wrote as though historical events, which he saw as divinely guided, had their own interconnections “between events amounting to the virtual reenactment of special happenings or the repetition of an earlier stage of history in a later one” (34). Trompf demonstrates that this same notion of recurrence may be found in historians in the Scriptures of Israel. The Deuteronomist, for example, (34) G.W. TROMPF, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought. From Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley 1979) 129.