us by the church’s tradition as the distinctive and irreplaceable testimony to events in which God has acted for our salvation. That is to say, theological exegesis regards these texts as Scripture, not merely as a collection of ancient writings whose content is of historical interest. A bare description of the ideational content of biblical writings (“the theology of Luke” or the like) is therefore not yet theological in the sense meant here. Theological exegesis, as Meeks rightly but disapprovingly