an orderly, connected account of past events: a narrative that leads the reader through a subject from beginning to end
This word appears exactly once in the whole Bible, in the opening sentence of Luke's Gospel. Luke says that many people had already undertaken to draw up one of these about the events that had been brought to fulfillment among the first believers. Because it occurs only here in the New Testament, its exact flavor has to be filled in from how Greek writers outside the Bible used it.
At its root the word pictures leading someone through a subject, carrying a telling all the way from start to finish. So it does not mean a stray anecdote or a loose bundle of separate stories. It means a single, connected account that holds together as one whole. Luke could have chosen a word for a brief episode or for light entertainment; instead he picked the word for a full, joined-up narrative.
Educated readers in Luke's day would have met this word in more than one setting, and each colors his use of it.
- Teachers of composition used it for extended, connected narration, as opposed to a single episode.
- Public speakers used it for the part of a speech that lays out the facts of a case.
- Historians used it as their ordinary term for the orderly narratives they wrote about real events.
By choosing it, Luke tells his reader that his Gospel is meant to be taken as one continuous, careful account of things that actually happened.
Because it can lean toward any of those settings, English Bibles render it in different ways: "narrative," "account," or the older word "declaration." Each catches part of it. What they share, and what Luke is claiming, is a report that is full, ordered, and faithful to what took place.
Disputed
How much generic weight Luke loads onto the word: whether by choosing διήγησις he presents his work as formal Hellenistic historiography (in the tradition of Polybius and Josephus) or simply as an orderly narrative in a genre-neutral, middle-brow prose register. The debate is over the word's generic connotation in Luke 1:1, not over its lexical sense, which is agreed.
- majorityA historiographical self-designation: the word aligns Luke's work with the connected, orderly narrative that Hellenistic historians wrote of their own compositions, as in 2 Maccabees 2:32, Polybius, and Josephus. Most who hold this now grant that the historiographic and technical-prose registers overlapped rather than being sealed off.; David E. Aune, 'Luke 1.1-4: Historical or Scientific Prooimion?', in Paul, Luke and the Graeco-Roman World (JSNTSup 217), 2002; Sean A. Adams, 'Luke's Preface and Its Relationship to Greek Historiography,' Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 3, 2006; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed., 2017, 116-124; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (Anchor Bible), 1981, 292-93
- minorityAn ordinary, genre-neutral Greek word for a narrative work that does not by itself signal historiography; Luke's short, dedicated, first-person preface resembles the prefaces of Hellenistic technical and scientific handbooks (medical writers, engineers) more than elite historical prefaces, and whatever sense of order the preface conveys comes from its adverbs, not from this noun.; Loveday Alexander, The Preface to Luke's Gospel (SNTSMS 78), Cambridge, 1993, 111