Clivedurdle

Is this a real name or a generic term "lover of God", so could be a term for xians?

Toto

Yes.

You know as much as any expert.

Chris Weimer

It was a real name - the name Theophilus is an actual Greek name. There isn't any way of telling whether it was to a pagan, a Christian, or to a type of person. (i.e. "Friend of God")

Clivedurdle

But my allegedly respectable New Bible Commentary Revised Guthrie Motyer Stibbs Wiseman asserts that "Most Excellent" means it is a clear person in Luke!

Who am I to believe?

Chris Weimer

Yeah, probably. That's my working assumption as well. Perhaps even an official of some sort, maybe someone sympathetic to the Christian cause. It's not definite though.

Toto

No Theophilus from the expected time period has been identified, so there has always been speculation that the name was a stand-in for a God-loving Christian. But there have been attempts to identify this Theo: This blogger tries to identify him as Theophilus the high priest of 37-41AD, the son of Annas, high priest from 8-15AD, who might have known Jesus at the Temple when he was an allegedly precocious 12 year old. This seems pretty dubious, as other evidence indicates that Luke was not written until the second century (although the writer might have picked a historical name in line with other inserted historical figures in Luke-Acts.)

At the other extreme of dating, Theophilus might have been this Theo: Theophilus apparently was converted to Christianity by reading the Jewish scriptures, and seems to have had only a vague familiarity with NT writings.

Chris Weimer

There's absolutely no way to be certain, Toto. For all we know, the person may not have ever had anything written on it. He didn't have to be prominent at all. The two Theophili you mentioned are too far outside the range for Luke to be plausibly considered, in my opinion.

mikem

I recently finished reading a book called "Josephus and the New Tesatament" by Steve Mason. Towards the end he writes a chapter about some striking simiarities between Josephus and Luke, although he does not go as far as suggesting that there was any dependence of one upon the other. One of the things he mentions is the similarities between the prefaces to "Wars" and "Antiquities", and Luke's prefaces. Particularly in "Antiquities", Josephus refers to his earlier work, as Luke refers to his earleir work in Acts. They both compare their own works favourably in comparison with other histories, and both Luke and Josephus dedicate their works to a patron - in Josephus case it is Epaphroditus (although I have to admit that having looked, I can only find Epaphroditus in the preface to Antiquities (para 2 in the Whiston translation) . Mason points out that the names of both patrons are theophoric, that is, they contain the name or title of a god.

It would appear then, that whether Luke's Theophilus (friend of God), was real or not, Luke was conforming to what appears to be a recognizable convention. I would go further and suggest that based on the comparison with Josephus, Luke wants us as his readers to believe that he is writing history for a patron.