Scholarship has commonly treated the sayings in the Lukan Last Supper discourse (22.14–38) more or less as pearls on a string; it is their poignancy as separate elements rather than any significant unifying features to which attention has typically been drawn. This is especially apparent when one surveys research on Luke 22.24–30. Until recently it has been usual for scholarly work on this text to be heavily influenced (sometimes unconsciously) by tradition-historical concerns, with the result that 22.24–7 and 22.28–30 are analyzed as independent sayings. Consequently, the lack of a parallel in Luke 22.24–7 to the ransom saying in Mark 10.41–5 is a common point of scholarly interest, as are possible developments from a ‘Q’ form behind Luke 22.28–30 and Matt 19.28. This type of approach, with its primary focus on layers of tradition, however, has often prevented scholarship from exploring or even observing the unifying features of Luke's finished work in 22.24–30.

There has been much discussion in recent articles on the significance of the Spirit's ‘groaning’ in Rom 8.26. What has not been adequately treated is the OT background to v. 22. That verse reads as follows: οΪδαμεν γ⋯ρ ἵτι π⋯σα ⋯ κτ⋯στε σƲσΤεƲάζει κα⋯ συνωδ⋯νει ἄχρι το⋯ ν⋯ν and can be translated literally as follows:

We know that the whole creation groans together and travails together until now.

In his History of Dogma, Adolph Harnack wrote that the ‘Pseudo-Clementines contribute absolutely nothing to our knowledge of the origin of the Catholic Church and doctrine.’ Hans Lietzmann, Harnack's successor in Berlin, concluded similarly in his assessment of these writings. He wrote that the Clementines are ‘fictions without historical basis, and valueless for the study of the early Christian and Judaistic period’.