Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke

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

About 6 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to Three Mentions and a Pronoun What He Actually Gave Us Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

Three Mentions and a Pronoun

Luke is named three times in the New Testament, always by Paul, and never as the author of anything.

Colossians greets the church from Luke, the beloved physician. Philemon lists him among Paul’s fellow workers. And 2 Timothy, written from a cell with execution close, says: only Luke is with me.

There is a fourth kind of evidence, and it is stranger. Four times in the Book of Acts the narration slips, without explanation or announcement, from they to we. It happens at Troas and continues to Philippi; it resumes years later on the road to Jerusalem; it carries through the arrest, the appeal to Caesar, the shipwreck off Malta and the arrival at Rome. Then it slips back. The traditional reading is the obvious one: the writer is telling you, quietly, when he was there.

The Gentile question turns on a list. In Colossians, Paul names Aristarchus, Mark and Jesus called Justus, and adds that these are the only ones of the circumcision among his fellow workers. Then, after Epaphras, he names Luke and Demas — outside that note. Read as a deliberate grouping, it makes Luke the only Gentile writer in the New Testament. It rests on the shape of a list rather than a statement, which is worth saying, but it is the natural reading and the ancient Church read it that way.

What He Actually Gave Us

Nearly everything the world pictures at Christmas comes from Luke and from nowhere else. Gabriel and Zechariah in the temple. The Annunciation. The Visitation and the Magnificat. The census, the manger, the shepherds and the angels, and the old man Simeon in the temple saying he can depart in peace. Take Luke out of the New Testament and Christmas loses its furniture.

The same is true of a good deal else: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the thief on the cross who is promised paradise, the two on the road to Emmaus who did not recognise Him until He broke the bread. And then the second volume — Acts — which is the only narrative history of the early Church that exists, without which we would know almost nothing about how the thing spread.

Where the Record Comes From

The “we” passages. Real and undisputed as a feature of the text; what they prove is argued. Conservative and moderate scholars read them as an eyewitness dropping into first person. A substantial critical literature argues that first-person plural was a recognised convention in ancient sea-voyage writing, used for immediacy — and notes that ancient historians who really were present usually named themselves, which the author of Acts never does. Both readings are held by serious people.

The ancient testimony. Irenaeus, around 180, gives the earliest surviving ascription: Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. The Muratorian Fragment, usually dated to the late second century, calls him Luke, the well-known physician, and says he wrote without having seen the Lord in the flesh. The anti-Marcionite prologue adds the details that have travelled with him ever since: an Antiochene Syrian, a doctor, never married, no children, died at eighty-four in Boeotia. Both of those last two documents have contested dates — some scholars put the Muratorian Fragment and the Lukan prologue considerably later than the traditional dating — so they should be cited with that noted.

The physician’s vocabulary argument, which is still repeated and should not be. In 1882 W. K. Hobart published a catalogue of some four hundred words in Luke and Acts that he judged distinctively medical, arguing this proved a doctor wrote them; Harnack endorsed it. In 1920 Henry Cadbury took it apart, showing that roughly nine tenths of Hobart’s “medical” vocabulary also occurs in Josephus, or in Plutarch and Lucian — writers with no medical training whatever. The words are the ordinary vocabulary of an educated Greek writer. Cadbury’s conclusion has been the mainstream position for a century, and you will still find Hobart’s argument presented in sermons and study Bibles as though it settled the matter. It does not. Colossians is the evidence that Luke was a physician; the vocabulary is not.

Luke the icon painter. The Orthodox Church holds that Luke painted the first icon of the Theotokos from life. It is worth being exact about when this tradition appears, because it is later than most people assume. The earliest written source is Theodore the Lector, a church historian of the sixth century, who records that the Empress Eudocia sent from Jerusalem to Constantinople an icon of the Mother of God painted by the Apostle Luke. That is a sixth-century writer reporting a fifth-century event, five hundred years after Luke. No earlier source — not Eusebius, not anyone in the first four centuries — mentions Luke painting anything. The famous icons attributed to him, the Hodegetria and the Vladimir and the Częstochowa, are dated by art historians to the Byzantine period.

What the tradition is doing is theological rather than forensic: it asserts that the Church’s way of depicting the Mother of God goes back to someone who saw her, and that the icon and the Gospel are two forms of the same witness. That is a serious claim and it is held for serious reasons. It is not a claim that an authenticated first-century painting survives, and this site would rather say so than let a reader discover it later and wonder what else was smoothed over.

The martyrdom. That he was hanged from an olive tree by idolaters at Thebes in Boeotia, at the age of eighty-four, is not in the New Testament and is not attested in the second century. It appears in the late-antique layer and is elaborated afterwards.

The relics. Venerated at Constantinople and then at Padua, where the sarcophagus in the Basilica of Santa Giustina is claimed as his tomb. In 1998, at the request of the Metropolitan of Thebes, a multi-university team examined the remains, with independent radiocarbon work at Arizona and Oxford. Mitochondrial DNA indicated an individual most likely of Syrian origin — which fits the tradition of an Antiochene. Radiocarbon dating of teeth produced a range for the death somewhere between roughly AD 72 and 416 — consistent with a first-century death, and nowhere near proof of one. The researchers said plainly that they could not rule out a substitution during the centuries at Constantinople. The skeleton showed the osteoporosis of considerable age. In 2000 the Bishop of Padua gave the rib closest to the heart to the Metropolitan of Thebes, for the traditional tomb. It is often reported that the tests proved the relics authentic. They did not; they produced results consistent with authenticity, which is a different and smaller thing.

The ox. From the four living creatures, assigned to Luke because his Gospel opens in the temple with a priest at the hour of incense, and the ox is the sacrificial animal.

Why the Church Remembers Him

For two volumes that between them contain the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Magnificat, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, Emmaus, Pentecost and the whole missionary journey of the Church — and for the temperament behind them. He says at the outset that he has followed everything carefully from the first, having investigated; he dates events by emperors and governors; he names the ports.

And for the sentence in 2 Timothy. Whatever the arguments about the “we” passages, the tradition that has always mattered most about Luke is that he was there at the end, when the prison had emptied of everybody else.

What His Life Asks of Us

That careful work is a form of love. Luke’s Gospel is the product of someone tracking down witnesses and getting the details straight, and the Church has been living off that diligence for two thousand years. Not every service to Christ is dramatic. Some of it is asking people what they remember and writing it down accurately.

And: only Luke is with me. Staying is a ministry. It does not look like one at the time.

Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke, pray to Christ our God that we may work carefully, tell the truth exactly, and stay with those whom others have left.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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