Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke
Polyeleos. Kept with the Polyeleos at Matins.
Commemorated today
- Holy Apostle and Evangelist St LukeApostle life on this site
The life we have written
Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke
A Greek doctor who joined Paul somewhere on the road, kept the only record of the Nativity we have, and stayed when everyone else had gone.
- Era
- First century
- Region
- Antioch, the eastern Mediterranean, Rome, and — by tradition — Boeotia in Greece
- Category
- Evangelist, physician, and by tradition the first iconographer
- Principal feast for this profile
- October 18
- Marinos the MartyrMartyr
What is known
A martyr died rather than deny Christ. The word is Greek for witness, and the Church uses it in that sense: the death is testimony, not merely a fate. Most of these deaths fall in the Roman persecutions before 313, though the title is not restricted to them.
Kept in the Greek tradition.
Beyond this, no life of them survives that could be checked — which is true of most of the saints kept on any given day. The commemoration is the record.
Appointed readings
- 1 John 1:1–7
- James 1:1–12
- Jude 1–7, 17–25
- John 21:15–25
- Colossians 4:5–9, 14, 18
- Luke 10:16–21
About this page. This is the Menaion date — the fixed calendar. Parishes on the New Calendar keep it on October 18 by the civil calendar. On the Julian calendar this same commemoration is kept on October 31 by the civil calendar. The movable cycle, which turns on the date of Pascha and changes every year, is on the calendar page. Where a life has been written on this site the name links to it; where it has not, only what the commemoration itself attests is shown, and nothing is added to it.